Bias Incidents Against Arabs Increase

Police guard local mosques

By Ron Howell and Rocco Parascandola | STAFF WRITERS

September 15, 2001

A police officer keeps watch near a mosque of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Several bias incidents against Arabs have been reported. (Newsday Photo/ Mayita Mendez.)

Police report increasing numbers of bias incidents against Arabs in the city, including a couple involving firebombs, as local Muslim leaders try to show they love America as much as anyone else.

Friday morning at the Brooklyn Islamic Center in the Bensonhurst section, a man carrying a bottle with a "smoking wet cloth on top" approached the mosque but dropped the firebomb when he saw police nearby, police said.

The man ran away and was not caught.

Later Friday, just before the Jumah, or holy Friday, services, the spiritual leader of the Bensonhurst mosque said an entire ethnic group is being unfairly linked to the extremists on a suicide mission who flew planes into the World Trade Center Tuesday, killing thousands.

"We are saying to the Americans, we are living here, we have our families and our kids," said Samy Massoud, the imam.

"We want to be like the Chinese here or the Irish who came before, and we can't establish that with the horrible conditions like this. We cannot do it."

Since Tuesday, police have been guarding a number of mosques around the city, including the one in Bensonhurst, 24 hours a day.

On Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, Abderhamne Tafa, the spiritual leader of the Al-Farooq mosque, said mosque members are conducting a blood drive to show they love America as much as other New Yorkers.

The Al-Farooq mosque is where Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric convicted in various terrorist attacks, used to meet along with other radicals in the 1990s.

Outside the mosque yesterday, fliers were posted quoting the Koran: "And kill not life that Allah has made sacred."

Several miles away in Bay Ridge, tensions were high as Arabs hailing from countries all over the Middle East gathered for their Jumah services. No police officer was visible there Friday afternoon.

After the services, a man driving past the mosque - the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge - stopped and yelled obscenities at the Muslim men. The men stared silently at the man, who was waving an American flag.

About an hour before that incident, said mosque official Ibrahim Qunbar, a man claiming to be an off-duty firefighter came to the front door and began cursing at the Muslims, saying they were responsible for the deaths of 12 of his firefighter friends who died at the World Trade Center.

Some non-Muslims in the neighborhood expressed hostility.

Samuel Colin, a construction worker from Mexico, said he saw Arab men late Tuesday on Fourth Avenue, about 10 blocks south of the mosque, laughing and clapping over the Trade Center deaths.

But most of those who were interviewed in the area, including non-Muslims, denied that any such celebrating took place, or that Muslims were anti-American.

"People celebrating because of the World Trade Center? It never happened," said Bassam Elnaboulsi, 28, who immigrated from Lebanon eight years ago. "We would never backstab the country that gave us opportunities. We would never separate ourselves from American society. We are part of it."

Elnaboulsi said members of his mosque, the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, were collecting money and various items to donate to the recovery and rescue effort in lower Manhattan.