A tale of two unlikely buddies

Irving Roth, a 91-year old Holocaust survivor, and 36-year old Kasim Hafeez, a recovered radical Islamist and Jew-hater, are close friends.After Hafeez noticed the concentration camp number on Roth’s forearm, he had it imprinted on his own arm as a sign of solidarity.The story of the two men as told against a background of historical and current global antisemitism is the focus of the documentary film titled 'Never Again?' It was produced and financed by Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which counts nine million adherents and bills itself as the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States.'Never Again?' is scheduled for screening at some 800 theaters across the United States on the evenings of October 13 and 15.At first blush, the opening storyline sounds a bit too pat, too utopian, to be readily believable. But after talking to Hafeez at some length and with Dick Eldridge, the director of the film starring the two unlikely buddies, the story holds up.Hafeez was born in Nottingham in England’s East Midlands region, which has a large population of Muslim immigrants, including his father, who emigrated from Pakistan.As a youngster, Hafeez was formally taught the Koran and informally instructed that Jews, especially Israeli Jews, were evil and his permanent enemies.However, the boy was born with a restless curiosity and inquiring mind, and he decided to learn more about these loathsome Jews at first hand. To that end, he got a copy of The Case for Israel by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.He was sufficiently intrigued to decide on visiting Israel in person, and in 2007 landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, where the local security officers questioned him for eight hours before admitting him to the country.Subsequently, Hafeez has visited Israel “15 to 20 times” and by now has become a familiar figure at the airport.He has not become a blind admirer of the Jewish state. “Israel is not a utopian country,” he said, but he believes in its future, an attitude that has led to fractured relations with his family and former friends.“I had to make a choice and do what is right. When people attack a synagogue, you have to condemn it,” he said.When skeptics ask Hafeez how much the Israeli propaganda ministry pays him for his new attitude, he responds drily, “Not enough.”Eventually, he was approached by CUFI, started addressing its membership and other civic groups, and on one occasion was introduced to Roth, who came from a world so different from that of Hafeez’s, they could have been born on different planets.Roth was born in a small Slovakian town whose conquest by Hitler’s army he witnessed as a young boy, and at 14 he was transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Toward the end of the war, weighing 75 pounds, he survived a death march in which his brother died.Whatever their biographical differences, Roth and Hafeez started bonding and appearing as joint speakers, with Roth embodying the constant warning that if men and women of all faiths do not stand against unbridled antisemitism, the end result could be another Auschwitz.The message is reinforced in a series of meetings, arranged by CUFI, in which Hafeez interviews a lineup of Jewish luminaries, among them Britain’s former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks; Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, an authority on the Holocaust; radio host Dennis Prager; and Israeli diplomats Michael Oren and Ron Dermer.The third principal in filming 'Never Again?' was Rick Eldridge, the creative producer and co-writer of the film and a devout American Protestant.Initially, he too had a hard time accepting that Hafeez, raised to believe that all Jews were evil and had to be wiped off the face of the Earth, could self-convert into a friend and admirer of the Jews.While shooting the film over a six-month period in six countries, “I saw the genuine relationship between the two men, and became firmly convinced of Hafeez’s incredible transformation,” Eldridge observed in a phone interview.On its website, CUFI lists Hafeez as the organization’s Middle East analyst. He told The Jerusalem Post that he is happily married to a Christian woman and has converted to Christianity.