There Are None So Blind...

A National Post reader explains that, pace Tarek Fateh, there was "anti-Semitism" in Pakistan:

Re: Islam's Jewish Problem, Barbara Kay, Oct. 13.

The reason Tarek Fatah does not recall any anti-Semitism in his youth in Pakistan may be that he was born after most Jews, including my mother, were forced to leave Karachi. For all the ills associated with colonalism, it was under the British Raj that Karachi's Magen Shalom Synagogue was established in 1893 and a community of Jews, the Bene Israel, flourished in Pakistan. It was just prior to partition and the founding of the state of Israel in the late 1940s that Jewhatred spread from the Middle East to Pakistan and the Pakistani Jewish community became refugees fleeing persecution or they assimilated.

The majority of these refugees settled in India, Israel and Canada. Interestingly, shortly after members of the Bene Israel community in Israel petitioned General Zia-ul-Haq in the early 1980s to protect their synagogue or turn it into a historic or cultural centre, it was demolished to make way for a shopping centre.

I understand that a Jewish cemetery remains within Cutchi Memon Graveyard at the end of Barnes Street in Karachi -- with no Jews remaining to tend to its graves.

Levi M. Sankar, Thornhill, Ont.

To recap: According to Fatah, there's no anti-Semitism--no, not a shred--in the Koran, nor was there any in the Pakistan of his youth. Oh, not because it isn't (wasn't) there; because, for whatever reason, he does not (did not) care to see any.