CPL presents Kasim Hafeez virtually on Jan. 27

by Maxine Fischbein

(AJNews) – Encountering someone like Kasim Hafeez is, for most people, a once-in-a-lifetime event, so organizers are expecting a virtual crowd when he speaks on January 27—International Holocaust Remembrance Day— in an online program presented by the Calgary Public Library.

After all, how often does one meet a former Muslim who has embraced Zionism and made it his mission to debunk the hatred and lies that led to his radicalization and very nearly transformed him into a murderous Jihadist?

When AJNews spoke with Hafeez last month, he recalled that he was maybe seven or eight years old when he first became aware of the Holocaust.

“I would hear my father make reference to it…. He would talk about how Hitler was a great man and that his one mistake or failing was that he only killed six million Jews [when] he should have killed them all,” said Hafeez who understood that the Nazis were Britain’s enemies during World War II, but was raised at the same time to believe that Nazis were doing a “good thing” when they murdered Jews.

The British education system did little to mitigate the lessons Hafeez learned from his father and others in the tightly-knit community where he was raised.

“We studied the Holocaust, but very, very minimally,” recalled Hafeez who says that watching the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List during his mid-teens opened his eyes for the first time to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Still, the narrative he learned from his own increasingly-radicalized community persisted, Hafeez recalled.

“I had no reason to not believe these people. Simply, they were people I grew up around. They were people in the same mosque as me.”

Hafeez learned to hate, and eventually disseminated antizionist and antisemitic propaganda while mentally preparing himself to die for the cause.

By chance, though, his life took an unexpected turn after he happened upon the Alan Dershowitz book The Case for Israel in a bookstore near his college campus.

At first dismissing the work as propaganda, Hafeez said to himself:

“I am going to use this [book] to understand the lies that the Zionists are telling so I can be a better advocate for my cause.”

But things did not go according to plan.

“The idea that the Jewish people had a presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years seemed alien to me. The idea that Israel was a democracy or the idea that Arabs lived in Israel and served in the judiciary and in the government seemed absolutely nonsensical, just complete fantasy.”

The book, says, Hafeez, was “the starting point…that would take me, eventually, to Israel.”

In 2007, on the first of his 20 visits to Israel (and counting), Hafeez visited Yad Vashem.

“It was deeply moving for me,” Hafeez said, adding that he visits the World Holocaust Remembrance Center every time he returns to the Holy Land.

“I think what’s incredible about Yad Vashem is that it tells the story from pre-Holocaust, including the Nazi use of propaganda as a tool in delegitimizing the Jewish people,” Hafeez said.

“It was very eye-opening to see the parallel, for me, who had come with this idea of seeing the real Israel from a negative perspective,” recalled Hafeez, adding, “I was looking to validate my own bigotry.”

In one of the last rooms he visited at Yad Vashem, Hafeez was confronted by a screen featuring quotes from Holocaust survivors.

“It had a massive impact on me,” Hafeez recalled.

“Oh my God, I was part of this story repeating itself. I don’t say this lightly. I was the Nazi. I was the one spreading the anti-Jewish propaganda. I was the one consuming the anti-Jewish propaganda and rebranding it to make it seem relevant and not evil, but something righteous.”

These survivors’ testimonies…made me realize the importance of a Jewish state, why Israel is so important, and why education is so important. It was also a major part of why I made the choice, when I came back to England, to speak out about what I had seen.”

Hafeez would not be a perpetrator, and he chose not to be a bystander either.

“The large group that remains silent allows, whether intentionally or unintentionally, for these terrible things to happen,” Hafeez said.

Some two days earlier, he had had an aha moment that foretold his future as an ardent Zionist.

“I had spent the day in Jerusalem and then I ended up at the Western Wall not really understanding anything, but it was a moment when I connected all the dots,” Hafeez recalled.

“My journey to Israel could have gone one of two ways. I could have gone there and created a narrative and disregarded everything I had seen and simply said, ‘I was right. These people are evil. This state is evil. All these awful things I had propagated are actually accurate.”

At the Western Wall, said Hafeez, “I was able to step back from all my own thoughts and the noise and [realize] I’ve gotten this all wrong. This is an incredible place. I don’t fully understand it, but I’ve gotten this wrong. All my activism is wrong and I understand…why this nation exists.”

“That was the moment, at a very bare bones level, that I became a Zionist, even if I didn’t understand it.  It was the rest of that trip where I went to efforts to understand Israel and to learn more about Jewish culture and the Jewish people—what it means to be Jewish…what the land of Israel means to the Jewish people, and all these much deeper ideas.”

It took some three years but Hafeez did, indeed, speak out. It was not long before he was tapped to speak to audiences in the UK and North America, the latter in the company of Holocaust survivor Irving Roth who had made it his mission to share his personal testimony far and wide.

“We developed a very deep friendship, and a couple of years before Irving passed, we had a conversation,” recalled Hafeez, adding that Roth expressed the fear that people who are not Jewish can always walk away, “that they haven’t any skin in the game.”

“Months later, I asked Irving if I could get his Auschwitz tattoo number on my arm in the same spot, as a statement that…this is me putting skin in the game, that I am here to fight against antisemitism no matter what,” Hafeez said.

Roth’s number—A1049—remains a permanent call to action on Hafeez’s left forearm.

The organization that brought Hafeez and Roth together was Christians United for Israel (CUFI) which eventually produced Never Again!, a documentary featuring the unlikely duo. Sadly, Roth, who lived near New York City, passed away a few years back, just after the documentary was made.

Hafeez is no stranger to Alberta audiences having spoken to Hillel students in both Calgary and Edmonton in 2011 and to members of Calgary’s Temple B’nai Tikvah in 2014.

Hafeez lived in Winnipeg between 2013 and 2018. He had previously been invited by the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg to speak there when he happened to be visiting friends in Ontario.

“The timing worked out perfectly,” recalled Hafeez, adding that up to that point he had never even heard of Winnipeg.

It happened to be the year that the Winnipeg Jets returned to the city.

“I loved the energy of the city. I loved the Jewish community there. I fell in love with Winnipeg and when I had the opportunity to move to Canada, I chose Winnipeg.”

Hafeez was hired by CUFI in 2014 as an outreach coordinator. He spoke on college campuses, often referring to his own background and experiences and, in his words, “debunking some of the lies and myths and also helping students strategize about BDS on campus.”

Today Hafeez—who is now deputy director for messaging at CUFI— lives in Florida. He hosts two podcasts for the organization, CUFI Weekly and CUFI Minute. He and his wife, who also works for a pro-Zionist organization, have been married for more than six years.

Although he left the UK more than a decade ago, Hafeez says he still has “complicated feelings” about his British identity.

“I find it very difficult as a British citizen and a British passport holder to identify with being British, simply because of the racism and bigotry I had to deal with and my family dealt with, “Hafeez told AJNews, adding, “Discrimination and bigotry were, essentially, what started and what fueled the Holocaust.”

“Sadly, it is very easy and we see that right now in the United States with social media, people being brainwashed [and] antisemitism becoming mainstream.”

Kasim Hafeez’s journey eventually led him to Christianity.

“It was a long road and one that I didn’t really expect,” he told AJNews.

“When I came back from Israel, I abandoned religion altogether,” recalled Hafeez. “I felt very lied to and deceived…. There were many years where I was very angry at the Muslim community, and that’s something that I had to work through and move past because, you know,  I realized that I was taking out my own personal frustrations on the community, and almost fomenting more bigotry, which is not something I ever wanted to do.”

At first, Hafeez opted for atheism but eventually realized that he “could not reconcile with the idea that there was no God at all.”

Hafeez says that organizations like Christians United for Israel—which boasts a membership of more than 10 million—have their work cut out for them.

“Christian antisemitism is still a problem,” says Hafeez. “Historically, it has been a huge problem. Sadly, Christianity has been a driving force for Jew hatred for many centuries…. Antisemitism still has its claws in so many churches and so many denominations.”

“You know, we constantly talk about how the German churches during Nazi Germany fell in line, how the Vatican looked the other way and, unfortunately, gave legitimacy to the Nazi regime,” Hafeez said, adding, “I and my colleagues speak to churches all over, fighting replacement theology, which played an integral part in the antisemitism that would lead to the Holocaust.”

According to Hafeez, CUFI is “one hundred percent non-proselytising,” a fact that has caused some Christian groups to eschew the organization because of the belief that if they do not proselytize they are not “real Christians.”

He jokes with colleagues today about how their lack of effort to convert him to Christianity when he was first hired by CUFI left him “kind of offended.”

As one might imagine, it has proven difficult—impossible in most cases—for Hafeez to maintain relationships with family and friends in the community that raised him.

That is hard, acknowledges Hafeez, “…especially when you come from a community which is very tight-knit and, for all its faults was still, overall a very positive experience.”

“It’s not easy because so much of who you are is rooted in that community in terms of your identity and your culture…. It is very difficult to be so far-removed, to not be a part of it,” Hafeez adds.

“Even here in the United States, the Pakistani communities that I’ve seen, sadly, do have an anti-Israel lean to them. It makes it very challenging to feel part of that and engage in an authentic way.”

More than anything else, Hafeez wants to use his personal experiences to explore with his audience whether the hate and brainwashing that led to the Holocaust is still happening today and if it is possible to escape it.

Kasim Hafeez will speak virtually to Albertans on January 27—International Holocaust Remembrance Day—in a program hosted by the Calgary Public Library and organized by Marnie Bondar and Dahlia Libin, who co-chair the Calgary Jewish Federation Holocaust and Human Rights: Remembrance and Education departmentHol. For more information and to register, go to International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Overcoming Hate Tickets, Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite

 Maxine Fischbein is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter