And another.
Mosque Leader's Past Returns to Haunt Him
Jews Describe Overtures as 'Trojan Horse'
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 29, 2001; Page A03
CLEVELAND -- Fawaz Damra, imam of the Cleveland Islamic Center, takes as his informal title "ambassador for Islam in America." He invites Jews to celebrate the end of Ramadan and kibitzes with them. After a man crazed over the Sept. 11 attacks rammed his car into Damra's mosque, the local paper featured a half-page photo spread of Damra hugging the local Catholic bishop.
Damra also stood before a crowd of fellow Palestinians in Chicago to raise money for the Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group dedicated to holy war against Israel. "The Jihad stabs Jews," he said in a 1991 meeting that was videotaped. "Twelve Jews. . . . Who will give $500?" His fellow warriors, he said, should direct "a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews."
"It makes you think, 'Who is this guy, really?' " said Rabbi Richard A. Block of Temple-Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, one of the many Jewish leaders who decided to boycott Damra's recent Islamic Day dinner after a local TV station aired the videotape. "Maybe this is a Trojan horse. Maybe under the guise of peaceful, friendly Islam there is a whole other radical thing going on under the surface."
Who is this guy, really? Since Sept. 11, the question has shadowed some suddenly prominent Muslim leaders. Publicly, mosque leaders stay on message: Islam is peace, and we are Americans. They cling to distinctions as neat as the one President Bush draws in the war he is waging -- not a crusade or a clash of cultures, he maintains, but a campaign of civilized nations, Christian and Muslim together, against a band of radical terrorists.
But contradictory statements have leaked out and blurred the distinctions. What if peaceful and radical co-exist within the same community? Or within the same mosque? Or within the same person?
In NorthernVirginia, a prominent cleric has expressed regret for having praised radical Muslim causes. In New York, an imam delivered a post-Sept. 11 sermon on interfaith healing and love; on Oct. 4, he was quoted on an Arabic Web site as saying that Jewish doctors were poisoning Muslim children and that Zionist air-traffic controllers guided the hijackers of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He has resigned from his mosque.
At least two of the Muslim leaders invited to the White House to support the president's contention that the United States is not waging war on Islam also have said incendiary things about America in the past. "To be honest, it's been difficult finding someone who is -- how should I put it? -- totally clean, or who qualifies as a through-and-through moderate," said a White House staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Damra, 39, has apologized many times for the "deplorable" things he has said in the past. But it's not just the past he has to contend with. In the houses and shops of Lorain Avenue, where his followers work and live, it's a rare person who doesn't include in his prayers Hamas and Hezbollah, both groups on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
Now Jewish leaders in Cleveland have issued an informal ultimatum: Purge your mosque of radicals -- anyone who supports what they and the United States consider a terrorist organization -- or no more interfaith meetings. Or Passover dinners. Or photo ops on the mosque steps.
Damra could ignore the Jewish leaders. But their cooperation is his ticket to mainstream America, to his imagined ambassadorship, maybe to a White House meeting of religious leaders.
Or he could reject those Palestinian "radicals." Except that they are some of his best friends, the people who welcomed him to Cleveland and taught him to sound less like a foreigner even while joking with him about a certain kebab vendor they all knew back home in Nablus.
So what does Damra do?
'I Had No Clue'
In Damra's mind, he has already chosen America. When he said those things about Jews, he said in an interview, he was here but not here, fresh from an Arab ghetto in Brooklyn, imam of an Atlantic Avenue mosque. "I had no clue how to talk to Jews," he said in now-perfected slang. "I barely spoke English. I didn't realize what extraordinary people they are, as I now do."
In Cleveland, he said, America opened up to him. Here there was no ghetto, just a few scattered Arabic stores you could miss if you drove too quickly. Here there was the chance to build a grand mosque, patterned after the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, where Palestinians and Pakistanis and blacks, Shiites and Sunnis could worship together.
Here he has a wife who does what she pleases, who goes to the mosque or, more often, not, who goes out covered in her jilbab, sure, but wears plenty of makeup and a trendy dress underneath she bought on sale at Kaufman's.
Here he gets quoted in the paper alongside any bishop or rabbi.
So how to explain the tape?
Somebody said "this is a moderate voice for Islam, and he is getting too much powerful. He will make America see the real Islam," Damra said in his mosque library. "And they decided, no!"
"This" -- the release of the tape -- "is a plot to show we are exotic, to keep us completely marginalized."
In the weeks after Sept. 11, Martin Plax, head of the local American Jewish Committee, was on those mosque steps several times. But by the end, he was losing patience.
"I was starting to see Damra in more places, and my kirschka" -- that's "instinct" in Yiddish -- "said to me: 'This is too much. More prayer services and more prayer services and poor Muslims, poor Muslims.'
"I said to myself, if all this love-in stuff continues, I bet you I know what will happen. I bet you they're going to start relativizing terror. It's okay to blow up bombs in Israel because, poor Palestinians."
Then came the tape. And then a series of apologies Plax considered insufficient at best.
At first, when he was ambushed on the TV show with the video clip of his younger, angrier self, Damra said, "This statement is referring to some minority among the Jews who are killing children and bulldozing homes, the same as those terrorist acts in New York and Washington."
To which Plax said: "Crap" and, "He is not a real Muslim."
Then Damra published an apology in the local paper, expressing his "overwhelming regret and sadness for the horrific statements I made a decade ago about my Jewish brothers." Hearing the words now, he wrote, "in my heart I am sickened, too."
To which Plax said: "I know his language. I've known him for 10 years. He didn't write this . . . thing. The English is too good."
Now, there is a stalemate. Plax believes he knows what Damra wants: "The Muslims want legitimacy in America so bad they can taste it. And I'm not unsympathetic to that."
But Plax has his conditions. "I'm willing to open up the door, but there are radical elements in that mosque. And those people need to be flushed."
Plax is not the only one who feels that way. After the tape was aired, the mosque board decided to meet and discuss what to do about Damra. But on the afternoon of their meeting, Damra gathered about 400 of his supporters and blocked the meeting room.
"A constitutional crisis," said mosque president Badr Ghumrawi, who later resigned with three other members. None of those who left are Palestinian, and most of the protesters are.
Board members have since found out more about Damra -- that he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and was followed by the FBI for four years for his association with Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric sentenced to life in a U.S. prison in connection with a plot to bomb Manhattan's Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
"We've let a small group of Palestinians define Islam for the rest of the world," concluded another board member who resigned.
Damra said that the protest by his supporters was spontaneous and that he would like to see the departed board members return. About his past, he says, "I have never associated with any of the bombers" the FBI asked him about. "I never met any one of those guys."
The remaining board members have dropped the issue, and Damra's position seems safe.
In 'Little Arabia'
Out on Lorain Avenue, where Palestinians own many of the shops and the social club, this is the only acceptable outcome. Here, Damra is seen as a victim of the same people who trash the name of Hamas, of Hezbollah, even of Osama bin Laden. Those people, they refer to as "they" or "the Zionists."
Damra likes to brush off this particular brand of support as unwelcome, the superstitions of "Little Arabia," of "the uneducated Palestinians who came here two years ago and watch only Arab television." But the view runs deeper, to Arabs here 30 years, to Arabs born here.
Haider Alawan is a former mentor to Damra and unofficial mouthpiece of his mosque. A Detroit native, an Army veteran, Alawan stood up at a televised town meeting in September and defended Hezbollah as freedom fighters who saved his people in South Lebanon.
"America has to know there are interests controlling them, controlling the media, the banking system," he said. "But I better stop. My wife is afraid the Zionists will come and get me."
Sam Ali, a Palestinian, has spent 32 years in the United States. "Why do they want to say the imam is a terrorist?" he said, leaning against crates of Pepsi in his store. "Why do they say Jihad, Hezbollah are terrorists? They are not terrorists. It is Israel and the ones who support Israel who are the terrorists."
Two blocks behind the store is a family that fits Damra's description perfectly. The Al-Salehs came here two years ago from Palestine. Their one-bedroom apartment is a jumble of cultures: Turkish pillows on plastic lawn chairs, family portraits hung low on the wall, Middle Eastern style, including one of his nephew Masud.
"Moto-Foto," said Faiser Al-Saleh about one of the pictures. "They do an excellent job with the blowup."
The picture was taken at a demonstration in Ramallah last year. Behind the jubilant 13-year-old boy, a crowd is burning pictures of former president Bill Clinton and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. A month later, Al-Saleh said, Masud was killed by an Israeli soldier. That explains the bloody sock pinned to the photo.
"Relics, you say in English?" Al-Saleh asked.
"Mo, what are you doing on that computer, your homework?" he yelled to his son, Mohammed, who is also 13.
"Yes," yelled Mohammed, although he was playing a game called Combat. Practicing, Mohammed said, to be like his cousin, "a martyr for Palestine."
But being a martyr means he will have to die.
"But I don't want to die," he said. "We just got here," he said, meaning Cleveland.
How about something having to do with computers instead? His dad said he was good at that.
"But I must be a hero for Palestine," he said. And after a pause, his eyes lit up, because he had thought of a solution.
"Maybe I can be like our imam. He is a hero for Palestine, no?"
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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