Holy War in Brooklyn

At One End of a block in Brooklyn, where the elevated train casts diamond-shaped shadows on the intersection of Foster Avenue and MacDonald Avenue, an Arabic chant blares over a loudspeaker every Friday, sounding the call to prayer at the Abu Bakr Siddique mosque. Except for its fortress-like entryway, the building doesn't look much different from the other brownstones and wood-frame houses in the neighborhood. But it was here that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman called for the destruction of "the edifices of capitalism." It was here, federal prosecutors will argue in a sedition trial in September, that the blind Egyptian cleric inspired his followers to "levy a war of urban terrorism against the U.S." That war's first offensive was the bombing of the World Trade Centerin February 1993.

At the other end of the block, just a few hundred yards from the mosque, is a simple red-brick house on the corner of Ocean Parkway and Foster. You can't tell from the outside that it is the local headquarters of Kahane Chai, the militant Jewish group devoted to the teachings of the murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane. The rabbi preached a type of unrepentant racism that attracted followers in the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Among them was a young doctor named Baruch Goldstein, the former Brooklyn resident who last February gunned down 29 Arabs at a mosque in Hebron, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River.

It is just one block in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, but the trip from one end to the other is a journey beyond the rooftops of brownstones, past the church spires and the gray smudges of factory smoke to a distant desert horizon shimmering with the ancient passions, religious hatred and violent rhetoric of the Middle East. On both ends of Foster Avenue, the militants, the peacemakers and the cops agree that Brooklyn has emerged as a new theater of the Middle East conflict. The echoes of violence from Hebron reverberate all the way to Coney Island and Flatbush.

Just days after the Goldstein shooting came a chilling example of this. On a morning when newspaper headlines were filled with news of the "massacre in Hebron," a Brooklyn cab driver who had emigrated from Lebanon allegedly unleashed a hail of bullets on a van filled with rabbinical students traveling across the Brooklyn Bridge, killing one of the young men and injuring five others.

"There is no difference between Goldstein and the shooter on the bridge," says Arthur Hertzberg, a visiting professor of humanities at New York University, and, incidentally, a cousin of the 16-year-old rabbinical student who was killed in the incident. "They both represent groups in Brooklyn that feel victimized. They see religion as a way to define the enemy--and, by extension, as a way to define themselves. That definition, plugged into the West Bank or Brooklyn or Bosnia or Belfast, is what generates hatred. It is the definition of terrorism."

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Outside the Abu Bakr Siddique mosque, three boys kick a soccer ball against the building on a sunny spring morning. Orthodox Jews in black felt hats and dark suits pass by with their wives and children on their way to Saturday services at a local synagogue. Mohamad Abdou, 38, leans against the wrought-iron railing in front of the mosque and talks about life in Brooklyn. Several times a week his neighbors from Kahane Chai, Hebrew for "Kahane lives," stop in front of the mosque and shout, "Death to Muslims."

"Other than that, we don't say much to one another," says Abdou, a heavyset man with a thick black beard and large hands calloused from his work as an electrician. He emigrated from the poor town near Alexandria, Egypt that was also the home of his friend Mahmud Abouhalima, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing.

Like his friend, Abdou says he has been a target of FBI investigators, who have repeatedly broken into his van and searched through his tools and equipment. Abdou insists he is merely an electrician and a devout Muslim, not a terrorist. He slides open the door of his van and laughs as he displays the coils of electrical wiring and the stacks of fuses and circuitry that he uses in his work.

"They actually thought this was for terrorism," says Abdou. He adds that men who he is sure are FBI agents followed him for weeks and then posed as reporters and asked him questions about his friendship with Abouhalima.

"We all live side by side. But most of the people are here to get away from the violence of the Middle East. There is hatred, but it is different," he says.

The difference is apparent up and down the block. Across from the mosque is the Shomer Shabbus Fruit and Grocery. It is a kosher food store owned by an Orthodox Jew, but it also serves Muslims, whose dietary laws, called halal, are similar to those practiced by Jews. Next door, the widow of an Orthodox Jew has rented restaurant space to a Muslim, who plans to sell Italian food to the neighborhood. Next door to the mosque, a doorframe carries a mezuzah, the scriptural scroll Jews place in their doorways.

Ari Bodenstein came to this block from Jerusalem ten years ago and is raising his family here. An Orthodox Jew, he works as a wholesale supplier to drugstore chains. He is holding the hands of his two daughters. He complains about the Friday call to prayer at the mosque.

"It's like the West Bank," he says. "The Jews pave the way for the Arabs. For 2000 years the Palestinians didn't develop the land. Now they come here after we have made the neighborhood safe and comfortable."

At the end of the block, Mike Guzofsky, 29, associate director of Kahane Chai, works out of the group's small headquarters at 729 Ocean Parkway. He says Kahane Chai is "devoted to Jewish identity and Jewish self-defense." The Israeli government has its own definition. In March it classified Kahane Chai as a terrorist organization and outlawed it in Israel.

Rather than discuss his group's infamous reputation, Guzofsky prefers to turn the conversation to Meir Kahane, who was gunned down in a midtown Manhattan hotel in November 1990 as he addressed a group of followers. Guzofsky believes that the murder was a conspiracy among the associates of El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian convicted on weapons charges associated with the shooting.

Federal law enforcement officials believe a terrorist cell, revolving around Nosair, Sheikh Abdel Rahman and Abouhalima, may have bombed the World Trade Center and planned other blasts to spring Nosair from prison.

"There could be a need to put these groups down with violence," says Guzofsky, who recruits for Kahane Chai's paramilitary camps in upstate New York. "Violence is not a good thing and violence is not a bad thing. It's sometimes a necessary thing. So be it."

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Ron Kuby may be the only person in Brooklyn who knows both ends of Foster Avenue. He is a former member of the Jewish Defense League and is now the law partner of William Kunstler, the fabled defender of political prisoners and pariahs. This September, Kuby and Kunstler will represent several of the Muslim defendants in the conspiracy trial.

Kuby, like Baruch Goldstein, came of age in the Sixties and joined Kahane's Jewish Defense League. It "was cool to be tough and Jewish," he says. Young kids saw the JDL as the Jewish counter part to the Black Panthers. He still has his application--now yellowing--to the paramilitary camps in the Catskills.

"Kahane was encouraging his followers to emigrate to Israel," says Kuby. "When I got there I found a bunch of misfits, malcontents and thugs. I remember watching an Israeli soldier shoving an old Arab man down the street at gunpoint. It was the same dehumanization that I saw in white racists at home." Altered by the experience, he quit the JDL and returned home.

Says Kuby: "The media portray the Arabs as the terrorists, but few realize the racism of the militant Jewish fringe. There are a lot of Jews who believe their own people don't talk like Guzofsky, but they are out there."

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Atlantic Avenue is the heart of New York's Arab community, and the Masjid Al Farooq mosque is its largest house of worship. The second-floor sanctuary, where services are held, is bathed in a soothing light, tinted green from the jade-colored walls and emerald carpeting. Worshipers align themselves along stripes in the carpet, face Mecca and pray. There is a sweet smell from incense sticks that rest in cracks in the plaster walls.

Racks on the back wall hold a collection of workingmen's footwear: the (continued on page 147) Holy War (continued from page 66) plaster-spattered construction boots, Nike hightops, worn-out wing tips, the black, thick-soled shoes of civil servants. Among the crowd of émigrés are many African Americans, mostly young men with knitted skullcaps or baseball hats turned backward.

The imam, or clerical leader of the mosque, wears a brown robe and stands at a lectern reciting the teachings of the Koran. "Imagine if you are out on a dark, windy night, and there is thunder," says Nidal Abuasi, a director of the mosque who is translating the imam's Arabic to English. "The hypocrites put their hands to their ears so they don't hear the thunder. They live in fear. But the believers understand the storm."

As the imam speaks, sirens wail on the street below. There is the clatter of street merchants and the braying of car horns--the sounds of the storm from which they seek shelter. It is an insular community, seeking a deeper faith that will guide it through the godless, materialistic canyons of New York City.

Many of the worshipers--young men from Algeria, Yemen, Egypt, the West Bank and Jordan--gather in the hallways after the service. They banter about job openings at cab companies and construction sites, and share information on cheap apartments and used cars. There is heated debate about the Middle East peace plan and the revolutionary movements toward Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria and the Sudan.

Ahmed, 30, who arrived from Yemen ten months ago, has just landed a job as a doorman at an apartment building in Manhattan. He has brought his wife and seven children to Brooklyn but, like most of the immigrants, he dreams of returning home.

"You see the life here where people have two dogs and two cars. They pay more for their dogs than people in my country can pay to support their children," he says. "Americans do not know the world. They are educated, but they are ignorant."

Ezzat El Sheemy, who emigrated from Egypt 15 years ago, is an accountant for the city government and a leader in the Muslim community. In the past few years, he has been caught up in a battle with the militant new arrivals for control of Brooklyn's largest mosques.

The younger militants do not share El Sheemy's goals or values. "They are still living in the Middle East," he says, "and they are more passionate about what is happening there. Many see religion as a vehicle to express their rage. That is wrong, that is not Islam."

The battle is in many ways a microcosm of the worldwide struggle within Islam, pitting moderate Muslims in favor of secular law against militant fundamentalists. In Brooklyn, the battle began when Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman arrived in the U.S. on a visa from the Sudan in May 1990.

In his homeland, Abdel Rahman had a reputation as a popular and respected theologian. He had also been charged by Egyptian authorities with giving religious sanction to the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. He was later acquitted. By the mid-Eighties he had become an important spiritual leader among the international brigades that supported the mujahideen, the CIA-backed freedom fighters in Afghanistan.

By 1991 these same militant Muslims--including Mahmud Abouhalima and other defendants in the World Trade Center bombing and the forth-coming conspiracy case--became enraged by U.S. involvement in the Gulf War and turned their anger against their former American allies.

Despite his history of involvement with violent fringe groups, Rahman was welcomed at the Abu Bakr Siddique and Al Farooq mosques when he arrived in Brooklyn. Moderates such as Ezzat El Sheemy were taken aback by Rahman's fiery sermons about the evils of America and his talk of a holy war involving all Muslims in the U.S. The threats were vague, but to the young militant immigrants who were still living the passions of the Middle East, they were a stirring call to action.

Eventually Rahman was barred from the pulpit at Al Farooq. But at Abu Bakr Siddique a coterie of fundamentalists flocked to him. Rahman and Abouhalima took control of the mosque. The fundamentalists also insinuated themselves into the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, an organization that raised millions of dollars to aid refugees and help fund the rebels in Afghanistan. Worshipers said the radicals even took over the mosque's school, teaching students the theology of jihad, the battle cry for holy war against the enemies of Islam. It was a remarkable change for the mosque, which for more than 20 years had offered spiritual guidance and social services for immigrants adjusting to Western ways.

Members say that as Sheikh Rahman's power grew, he sought control of the fund-raising apparatus of Alkifah Refugee Center and the mosques. Many in the community say privately that Rahman tried to turn his followers against Alkifah director Mustafa Shalabi. Apparendy Shalabi believed that he was in danger and sent his wife and children back to Egypt in the fall of 1992. Three days after their departure, Shalabi was found knifed and shot to death in his apartment. Members of Abu Bakr Siddique say that the radicals played on the notoriety from the murder to bolster their strength in the community.

Ezzat El Sheemy says that he was threatened when he tried to fight against the militancy taking hold in Abu Bakr's school, which his children attended. "They told me to do what they said or I'd end up like Mustafa Shalabi," says El Sheemy.

Two years ago, the mosque's annual election was marred by shouting matches and a fistfight so violent that the police had to be called in.

"The violence in the mosque is very sad to most Muslims," sighs El Sheemy. "But our people are from the Middle East. Unfortunately, they do not have experience with democracy. The young peopleare very militant. There was no way to stop them."

Some of the young militants gather at the Fertile Crescent Grocery on Atlantic Avenue. The aisles are stacked with boxes of sugar-coated pastries and rows of nuts and dried fruits. A butcher cuts meat prepared in accordance with halal. There are bumper stickers that say I ISLAM and stacks of videos of Islamic theologians and militant leaders with such tides as Should Rushdie Die? and Israel: Set Up for Destruction.

A video called Revolution of the Mosques was playing on a television in the corner of the Fertile Crescent, watched by a knot of sullen young men, their arms folded across their chests. On-screen, a leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, which has claimed responsibility for car bombings and other terrorist attacks in Israel, pounds his fist in rage. While the video's narrator rails against Israel, pictures flash on the screen of West Bank teenagers throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. A phone number is given with a plea for donations.

"I have many customers who are with Hamas, but I have many suppliers who are Orthodox Jews," says Hamed Nabwy, owner of the Fertile Crescent. "That's the difference between Brooklyn and the West Bank. Here business is first and religion is second. There, religion is first and everything else is second."

Nabwy came to the U.S. in 1980 from Egypt, where he received a college degree in accounting. He found work as a dishwasher and has since built a small empire that includes his grocery, a car service and a new restaurant next door.

To many of the young people who come into his store after services at the nearby Al Farooq mosque, Nabwy is a role model. They revere him as a man who made it but who never slighted his faith or his fierce political beliefs. His anger surfaces as he talks about the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia, and about overthrowing what he thinks of as the corrupt Egyptian government.

"The young people coming here see this country as corrupt, as fallen," he says. "They become more religious when they arrive, and more political."

He points to a collection of militant videos, cassettes, articles and pamphlets on Jewish control of American media, politics and foreign policy. "These books are banned in their country, but here the young people see the truth," says Nabwy. "Does that make them militant? What do you think?"

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Last March, a van packed with more than a dozen rabbinical students was approaching the Brooklyn Bridge, where dramatic views of the city's shimmering towers, the bay and the sky all come together. It is one of the city's great vistas. Henceforth, it will also carry the unfortunate image of the gunfire that brought death and bloodshed to the passengers in the van. After the first round of bullets, the driver of a blue Caprice maintained his pursuit while the van careened across the bridge. Two more bursts of gunfire from the Caprice ripped through the van, leaving the asphalt sparkling with shattered glass.

Hours later, two Lubavitchers used white towels to wipe up the victims' blood, adhering to the ancient tenets of religious law which require that the blood of a Jew killed by violence be collected and buried with the deceased. In all, four young men had been wounded, and one of them, 16-year-old Aaron Hal-berstam, died several days later.

The students in the van were members of the Lubavitcher Hasidic community of Crown Heights, home of Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, whom the Lubavitchers believe to be their Messiah. They were returning from a Manhattan hospital where they had been praying for Schneerson, who had undergone surgery after a stroke.

The day after the shooting, police arrested 28-year-old Rashid Baz, a Brooklyn cabdriver who emigrated from Lebanon in 1984. Immediately, the shooting was interpreted by many Jews as retaliation for the massacre at Hebron. Police, however, have been reluctant to assign a motive.

The manager of Fourth Avenue Pizza in Brooklyn calls himself Baz' "only friend in the world." Baz used to come into his shop nearly every day to have coffee and discuss Middle East politics andlife in America.

"Yes, he was talking about the shooting in Hebron," says Oscar, who refused to give his last name. "Every Muslim was hurt and angry. But he was no angrier than anyone else I know. The truth is, he was not a follower of Islam. He did not really know how to pray. And, if he did this shooting, he definitely did not understand Islam. Islam is about peace, not violence, not killing innocent people."

The Lubavitchers didn't need a police report to know that once again the violence of the Middle East was turning back toward Brooklyn. "What happened at Hebron may as well have happened next door," says Joseph Printsky, 68, a butcher who prepares kosher meats and poultry. "The world is so small now with faxes and telephones and satellites. All the news is instantaneous, so the repercussions are also instantaneous."

Among other Orthodox communities there is a growing number of hard-liners who see the peace plan as a threat to the state of Israel. Many Jews, like their Muslim counterparts down the street, feel that there will be more violence, here and in the Middle East, over the Is-raeli-PLO proposal calling for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank.

"You have to look at how the shooting in Hebron and the [alleged] shooting by this man Baz are related and come back to Brooklyn," says Dr. M.T. Mehdi, president of the New York-based Arab American Relation Committee. "Goldstein came from Brooklyn and felt he had the right to go to the West Bank and take the land. To go to the mosque and shoot those innocent people as a message was horrifying. So the question is, do the Arabs have the right to resist that? I believe they do. It was just a question of time before an Arab snapped over what happened in Hebron. And this time it was just a nobody, a cabdriver from Brooklyn, who will be known only for his violence."

The reaction against the nascent peace movement in the Middle East has been extreme among conservative Jews. In the past six months, the Lubavitcher world headquarters in Brooklyn has spent millions of dollars to deliver the message that Israel is in danger. With their ability to provide 200 buses and turn out some 100,000 activists instantly on any given day, the Lubavitchers have played a key role in shifting public opinion against the peace plan in Israel and, to some extent, in America as well. Says Ben Kaspit, the New York correspondent for Ma'ariv, a major Israeli newspaper: "The Lubavitchers are very right-wing and they are loaded with money."

Kaspit sees Kahane Chai as an extremist group on the far right edge of an increasingly conservative American Jewry. This broader political realignment began in Brooklyn, says Kaspit, where the majority of America's militant Jews reside. In Brooklyn, he says, there are children of Holocaust survivors, and of those who fell victim to it. "The second generation is aware of that history and is very militant, maybe even a little unbalanced that way," he adds.

Driven by a history that haunts them, many of these Brooklyn-born men and women in their 30s and 40s have gone to settlements near Hebron, where Goldstein lived. "There are a lot of thick Brooklyn accents in the settlements," says Kaspit. "Guys with the beards and crazy eyes stood alongside Goldstein. There are many who see him as a hero."

Others aren't so sure. Ron Kuby, of William Kunstler's law firm, does not believe what he calls "the hype" that terrorism--whether Arab or Jewish--is coming to American shores. He sees it as a way for America to define a new "enemy within." And he believes that Brooklyn, which survives and thrives on the chaos of so many different nationalities, is in its own way a remarkable homage to peaceful coexistence.

"Brooklyn is amazing," says Kuby, sitting in his law office in the basement of a Greenwich Village brownstone. "You cross the bridge and you're transplanted to 18th century Poland on one street, and a few blocks down you're in 17th century Yemen. But I disagree that Brooklyn has the same violence as the Middle East."

"The most militant Jews in Borough Park and the most militant Arabs along Atlantic Avenue hate each other, and their colleagues are slaughtering each other halfway around the world. But here they can live within a few blocks and basically get along. The Middle East is too small for these two groups of people, but so far hundreds of thousands of them have found a way to survive and coexist in Brooklyn. Not bad, right?"