A Bloody Crime in New Jersey Divides Egyptians Once Again (Copts: "Wake up America!")

JERSEY CITY, Jan. 20 - Muslim and Christian students of Egyptian descent suddenly no longer sit together during lunch at Dickinson High School on Palisade Avenue. At Halal butcher shops and Christian-owned grocery stores, sales clerks speak in equally hushed tones about the unsolved murder last week of a Christian Egyptian family, wary of who may be listening.

And friendships that were once free of religious division are now strained, in ways subtle and blunt, as speculation that four members of the family were killed because of their religion has run rampant, even though there has been no official findings by the authorities.

For years, Mohsen Elesawi, a Muslim Egyptian, shared shisha pipes and games of chess with Christian Egyptians at the Christian-owned El Saraya cafe on Vroom Street. Now, when he walks into the room, he often hears a quiet pause, "like a subject change," he said.

"Now there is no trust between Muslims and Christians and there is a lot of anger," said Mr. Elesawi, 52, a limousine driver who immigrated to Jersey City 21 years ago. "It's changed dramatically."

In the words of Fakher Fahmy, 53, a Christian Egyptian who owns a construction company in Jersey City, Muslims and Christians "spoke as friends" before the murders. "Now everybody is scared of everybody," he said.

For decades, Jersey City has been an experiment in peace between Muslims and Christians from Egypt. At odds in their homeland, the two groups had bonded as immigrants, mingling at the same cafes, schools and taxi stands, glued by one language and national identity. They shared eagerly in forging a new, American life.

But in the week since four family members, including an 8-year-old girl, were found in their home here with their throats slit, a centuries-old rift has come to the surface.

To the outsider, the extent of vitriol and near-paranoia provoked by the slayings seems hard to fathom: the police have yet to make an arrest and believe that robbery was a motive. Still, in the days after the four victims were found bound, gagged and stabbed to death, the scant known facts of the case have been supplanted by a swirl of rumor and innuendo that the victims were the targets of Muslims, leading to scenes of chaos at the funeral, with mourners shoving each other and threatening to beat a sheik who attended.

The murder case, while tragic on its own, has opened a wound and produced an outpouring of emotion that even Egyptian Christians and Muslims struggle to explain. The answer is layered: there are old-world grievances, a largely unspoken anger toward Egyptian Muslims after 9/11, and a newfound immigrant power that has left the Egyptian Christians - a repressed minority in Egypt - unafraid to assert their voice here.

The murder victims - Hossam Armanious, 47, Amal Garas, 37, and their daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8 - were Copts, or members of the Coptic Orthodox church. In Egypt, Muslims are the majority and Copts, who are roughly 10 percent of the population, live with varying degrees of social, political and religious discrimination, according to the United States State Department and human rights groups.

But in Jersey City, which has the largest Coptic Egyptian community in the United States, Copts are estimated to outnumber Muslims, and the balance of power between them is more equal.

Many Copts, along with Muslims, have enjoyed financial success. Fred Ayad, a Copt who left Cairo for Jersey City 35 years ago, rose to become deputy mayor. And Copts from all walks of life, from surgeons to cab drivers, will attest that in America, they have found a new social comfort. They no longer live on the margins of society: they are among the religious majority.

But if anything altered that newfound comfort, and helped stoke the recent friction over the murder case, it was Sept. 11.

Muslims in the United States were not alone in suffering a social backlash. Arabs of other religions have also been subjected to hate crimes, searches at airports, loss of jobs and other problems experienced by Muslims after the attacks. But that shared distress has wrought some hard and painful realities within the Arab community, with non-Muslims wishing to distance themselves from Muslims.

"Here in the United States, they think all Egyptians are alike," said a 51-year-old Copt from Jersey City who identified himself only as A. Iskander. "We have nothing to do with 9/11. It makes me angry."

That anger strikes many Muslim Americans as deeply unfair - they often make a point of saying that they, too, had nothing to do with 9/11. But it may explain the rather startling scene that unfolded on the steps of the slain family's church on Bergen Avenue last Sunday. Hundreds of Copts stood watching as members of the American Coptic Association gathered before television cameras and declared the family's murder a religious "execution," drawing comparisons to slayings by terrorists in Iraq and Egypt.

"Wake up America!" yelled Dr. Monir Dawoud, the president of the group. If newcomers to the Arab community found the image of Arabs denouncing other Arabs as terrorists surprising, it was not unusual for Dr. Dawoud, whom some have criticized as using the murder case to advance Coptic rights in Egypt.

Almost immediately, rumors flew: Mr. Armanious had engaged in fiery debates about Christianity and Islam in Internet chat rooms, and may have been threatened with murder, his friends said. The police would not confirm or deny that, but discounted newspaper reports that a tattoo of a cross on Sylvia Armanious's wrist had been stabbed.

Muslim leaders responded by condemning the killings, but also decrying the recriminations against their religion, at a news conference on Wednesday. They invited a representative of the Coptic church to speak, but no one came.

"It's not the time for us to speak about anything now," said the Rev. David Bebawi, a priest at the slain family's church, St. George and St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church. The press conference was "appropriate for them," he said. "It's not appropriate for me. We are grieved."

It is impossible to know what permanence, if any, the friction in Jersey City will have. There are still moments of harmony - Copts and Muslims continue to share tables at El Saraya, for instance, and Copts still shop at King M & M Halal Meat on West Side Avenue. But many Muslims and Copts agree that, for the time being, a shift has occurred. It is both subtle and nakedly obvious, if perhaps short-lived.

"I'm not going to be friends with Muslims anymore - their parents killed my best friend," said a 17-year-old boy who attends Dickinson High School, his eyes welling with tears.

Sylvia Armanious was a star student at Dickinson, where fights between Muslims and Copts have been brewing since news of the murders hit, students and school officials said. One girl's headscarf was pulled off, according to several students, though school officials said they did not know about the incident.

"Why are they blaming the Muslims?" asked a 15-year-old student from Pakistan, cloaked in a black hijab, as she briskly walked home from school Wednesday afternoon. "I feel scared."

School officials said that counselors at the school have been enlisted to address the tension and grief. Of the roughly 3,000 students who attend Dickinson, about 150 are Egyptian.

"The superintendent is trying to do everything possible to make sure that nothing happens in the school," said Dr. Sharon Bartley-Monos, executive assistant to Jersey City's public schools superintendent, Charles T. Epps, Jr.

The city's first Egyptians, both Copts and Muslims, began noticeably arriving here in the 1960's. Today, both groups number in the tens of thousands. (The census does not track religious affiliation, but both Coptic organizations and the Jersey City chapter of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations estimate the number of Copts to be above 30,000 and Muslims to total about 25,000, out of the city's population of 239,000.)The city's oldest mosque and its oldest Coptic church - the pillars of the Egyptian community - stand five blocks apart. Both were built in the 1970's, and are filled with hundreds of congregants every week. But when they are not worshipping apart, Muslims and Copts are working, shopping, walking and studying in many of the same places. And until this week, they seemed yet another example of how immigration to a new world can breed peaceful plurality.

For many children of Egyptian immigrants, the anguish surrounding the murders has brought to life a division they only heard about at the dinner table. Some have made their parents' grievance their own. Others have worked hard, despite the intensity of emotions over the last week, not to.

"We never talk about religion," said Moustafa Ahmed, 18, a Muslim of Egyptian descent, as he sat with his three best friends - a Muslim and two Copts - after school one day. The four young men, all of whom are students at Dickinson, began their lives together in Jersey City as neighbors in the same building, when their families first moved here, and have remained friends ever since.

"We don't put religion in our friendship at all," said Mario Gerges, 17, who is a Copt.

Nonetheless, young Copts like Mr. Gerges grew up hearing the stories of repression: how Copts in Egypt do not, for the most part, hold high-ranking positions in the government, the army or in universities; how the government appoints and pays the salaries of imams in mosques, but does not help finance or repair Christian churches.

"In my country, I can't have one tenth of this," said Mr. Ayad, the Copt who served as deputy mayor in Jersey City for nine years, until 2001. Mr. Ayad, who is also a Coptic deacon and a real estate investor, said he dreamed of being a politician in Egypt but never had the chance given his religious affiliation. And then there are the clashes between the groups, which date back more than 1,300 years, to when Islam took over as Egypt's leading religion. The most recent large-scale strife, in the upper Egyptian town of El Kusheh in 2000, left 20 Christians and one Muslim dead.

In June, the country's highest court upheld the acquittal of 94 suspects who were charged in the incident, leaving public prosecutors and human rights activists with no further legal redress, according to the State Department's International Religious Freedom Report.

The rage felt by many Jersey City Copts in the murder of the Armanious family was tethered, in part, to resentment over the Kusheh massacre, many Copts who were interviewed said.

"Why did so many people go into the streets, expressing their anger and belief that this is terrorism?" asked Dr. Dawoud. "Because the same things happened in Egypt."

Egyptian Muslims often provide a different portrait of life in their homeland, characterizing the complaints of Copts as far-fetched or exaggerated.

"If you go there, you wouldn't see what you hear here," said Hamed Elshanawany, the vice president of the Egyptian American Group, a nondenominational organization based in Jersey City.

Despite the lack of confirmation by the police, numerous Copts interviewed, from entrepreneurs to blue-collar workers, said they were sure the slaying was an act of religious hatred, given the way in which the victims were killed.

But that notion does not sit well with Muslims, who have grown weary of seeing their faith tainted by extremists.

"I don't know what being slaughtered the Muslim way means," said Mr. Elesawi, the Muslim limousine driver. "The person who does such an act does not belong to any religion."

To the outsider, the extent of vitriol and near-paranoia provoked by the slayings seems hard to fathom: the police have yet to make an arrest and believe that robbery was a motive.

Hard to fathom? This writer's got to be kidding! And the police have to be kidding about the robbery motive. Sheesh!

Well, by that logic, most 'Arabs' as conventionally defined are not Arab. Unless they purely descended from the original tribe that spoke Arabic.

The culture and shared modern history are the same. The point is that the American Arab community should be above the crap that we see in Europe and large pockets of the Arab world.

If what you say is true, throw all of the Muslims out of the ecountry, let them take their fued back to their homeland. We have always respected each other Christian beliefs, but if Muslims are working together to touch off problems in the US, they must ALL Leave!

24 posted on 01/20/2005 8:09:21 PM PST by 26lemoncharlie (Sit nomen Dómini benedíctum,Ex hoc nunc, et usque in sæculum! per ómnia saecula saeculórum)

You are wrong, in an interview with his lawyer he claimed to be muslim. You can calim what you want, I have seen the transcript.

He claimed he was a follower of Islam.

But that notion does not sit well with Muslims, who have grown weary of seeing their faith tainted by extremists.

Uh, I'm an extremist?

We need to kick up the arab muslims. What they are doing in Europe they will do here. Some liberals will scream -- they can leave too.

I do not want to see a war in this country -- we had one in the 1860's that was bad enough.

If there were no arab muslims in the USA 9/11 would never have taken place. NO one can prove I am wrong about that fact!

shoving each other and threatening to beat a sheik who attended.

The only thing Arabs understand is strength which they freely admit.Saddam was an expert at this. The sooner they stop threatening and start showing these Imams and Mullahs in the US to respect they countries they reside in then and only then will we have their respect. Arabs think we are weak and in some way's they are right. Like a bear is weak when it is asleep.

Or maybe the American Muslim community can stay, but it must ruthlessly fight extremism and murderous ideology. It's in their interest as current and potential Americans after all.

Actually if the US had no Arabs and Muslims, our intelligence would be so weak we would probably have a 911 every day.

I'm getting really tired of this junk on Free Republic. I understand the source of the anger, but we need to be reasonable. Arabs are a great people, and the best enrich this country greatly.

So we have imported this:

Seeds of Hate

Kerry and his friends believe that this is nothing more than nuisance crime.

These idiots need to vent.

The cops will investigate and unravel this nonsense. Hopefully justice will be done.

(This map was publised in 2002 and I have been told that more Mosque's have sprung up across the US since. I am trying to get an updated map).

"This is an amazing book. Brilliantly argued and meticulously documented, this book contains a devastating expose of the murderous deceit behind contemporary apologists for militant Islam--in the media, political arena, academia and "mainstream" radical Islamic groups. Read this book to learn why Islamic extremism is dangerously entrenched within the institutional Islamic leadership in Saudi Arabia and the United States."
-- Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us and Director of the Investigative Project

"I'm getting really tired of this junk on Free Republic. I understand the source of the anger, but we need to be reasonable. Arabs are a great people,

I, for one, don't really give a damn what you're tired of.

You can claim that Arabs are great people if you want; Muslim Arabs are NOT great people!

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