In his letter, Why not an ex-Hamas commander as MAS consultant?, Abdar Rahman Koya said he takes "... the risk of being branded an anti-Semite and racist" but I won't do that as that implies his letter had a malicious intent. I'll choose instead to use the words 'misguided' or 'misinformed'.

Abdar Rahman makes some assumptions and statements which are not necessarily valid. He questions the character and motivations of the former Israeli intelligence officer without referring to the detailed security background check he clearly must have done in order to impugn him thus. He assumes that all Israeli officers must have a diabolical nature and, in fact he accuses all Zionist Jews (which really includes all Jews who support the existence of the state of Israel) of impure motivations. He assumes and so implies that all such Jews desire the elimination of Palestine and the death of all Palestinians which is far from the truth.

However, he says that a Hamas commander, who belongs to an organisation whose charter clearly calls for the elimination of a state and death of its occupants, is somehow just as suitable. What a preposterous conclusion. Belonging to the Israeli armed forces, a compulsory service in a country constantly besieged, does not necessarily imply that one is in favour of the most extreme views whereas belonging to Hamas does.

Being of the Israeli armed forces does, however, make that ex-officer imminently qualified in the area of security. And I would remind Abdar Rahman that Israel was carved out of Israeli blood, too, when the Arab armies launched the initial attacks that started the cycle of violence in the first place and kept it going for 60 years.

Yet, after all that, I'm not sure what point the author was trying to make in commenting about the republication of Ford's The International Jew. It was clearly a bad business decision. That book was inspired by another book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is well-known outside the Muslim world as a fraud, written by Czarist forces trying to legitimise the pogroms against Russian Jews in the 1880s.

Henry Ford later apologised for his work and closed the Dearborn Independent newspaper in which it was first printed even though many doubted his sincerity. Later in life, during World War II, when he was convinced of the Protocols fraudulence and seeing the Nazi's own use of that document to justify their own pogroms, he destroyed all the copies of The International Jew he possessed and refused to give "permission or sanction to anyone to use my name as sponsoring such publication, or being the accredited author thereof."

His descendants and successors at the Ford Motor Company respected those wishes. So by reprinting this publication Koya's company went against the wishes of the Ford family and in all likelihood, of Henry Ford himself. Is that something of which to be proud?