Posted on 08/14/2002 6:04:47 AM PDT by E Rocc
Coexistence is easy when `there are no tanks and no curfews'
Thousands of religious Muslims are moving to New York's Haredi neighborhoods. The reason - both communities are religious, family-oriented, modest and shun pork
By Shlomo Shamir
The Jews of Boro Park and Flatbush in Brooklyn are proud of their neighborhood reputations as right-wing strongholds of Jewish America. Unlike the openly anti-Zionist Satmars of Williamsburg, the religious Jews of Flatbush and Boro Park are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel - and of its right wing. "The Likud and Ariel Sharon would win 98 percent of the vote here," said one community activist, "and the other 2 percent would be disqualified."
But Brooklyn, considered the world's largest center of Haredi Jews, is also home to a burgeoning community of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Palestinian, and in recent years Palestinian families have been moving into Boro Park and the heart of Flatbush. On 13th Avenue, the main street in Boro Park, veiled women can be seen shopping for clothes and appliances in shops that are nearly all Jewish-owned and Jews in Haredi garb pick through the fruits and vegetables at shops owned by Middle Eastern countries. A renovated building at a main intersection between Boro Park and Flatbush houses both the Jewish For Boys and Girls service, and a Muslim school. Friday afternoons in a neighborhood on the edge of Boro Park finds Muslims dressed in white returning home from their prayers as Jews bustle with last-minute preparations for Shabbat. Just as many shops have Yiddish, if not Hebrew, on their windows, many others have Arabic.
"I don't remember a single serious incident between Jews and Arabs here," says Dov Hikind, the Boro Park assemblyman in the New York state legislature. Hikind, who began his political career in Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League is proud of his political connections in Israel from the Likud rightward. He calls the coexistence between the two communities in his district "simply amazing." Others refer to it as "a restrained idyll."
"Jews and Palestinians live together in Brooklyn and with more physical proximity than in East Jerusalem," says Hikind. "There are areas in Brooklyn, like Bay Ridge, where all the shops are owned by Arab immigrants, mostly Palestinian." Hikind's explanation for the coexistence has to do with the American experience. "When you live in America, it doesn't matter where you come from. You taste the freedom around you and very quickly become part of the local culture."
Yet Hikind admits that he doesn't have contact with the Arab immigrants in his district. "They don't come to me and don't ask for my help," he says - and he doesn't have an answer when he's asked why he hasn't made contact with activists in the Arab community of Brooklyn. But he is proud of the close contacts he has with the Pakistani immigrant community leaders.
Taking politics out of the relationship
Emira Habiby Browne runs her Arab-American Family Support center from an office in a colorful building in downtown Brooklyn. She says the two communities share a lot more than it appears at first glance. "People are religious, modest, keep kosher, and the family is the center of their lives," she explains.
In the long hall outside her office, veiled women wait for their turn to meet a member of the staff, who will tell them how to get medical aid as part of the social services provided by the city to large families. In the next room, a young woman, also veiled, is explaining to a woman with a crying boy clutching her dress hem, how to fill in the forms to get welfare. "Politics killed the similarities between the two peoples," says Browne. "If you take out the political element, the two people can live in peace along side each other and be good neighbors."
She was born in Haifa to a wealthy Palestinian family. Her father, Jamil Habiby, was a judge in the days of the British Mandate, popular among Jews as well as Arabs in the city. When the state was declared, the family was in Egypt. When they tried to return in 1949, they were deined entry. All their property was confiscated. Emira Habiby went to America for studies, and ended up married to a banker. Her son, she says proudly, is an officer on a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine.
The New York Times interviewed her this spring about her experiences in East Jerusalem, where she visited her mother in hospital. After her mother's death, Habiby wanted to bury her mother in Ramallah, beside her husband, but there was no way to get to Ramallah. So her mother is buried in East Jerusalem.
She is well aware of the political views of most of the Jews of Boro Park and Flatbush. But during a conversation with her she tries to steer clear of any comments that might be interpreted as criticism of her neighbors. "The vast majority of Arab immigrants came to the U.S. to find work and improve their quality of life. This wasn't religious immigration, but economic immigration, and they integrate very quickly, on their way to reaching for the American dream." She emphasizes, "Coexistence can flourish under conditions of equality and circumstances that grant everyone practically the same opportunity."
Her chief assistant is Emily Jacir, a Christian Palestinian artist. This week an art gallery opened an exhibit of her work with some Israeli artists. She recently visited Bethlehem, where she was born, and she can't hide how difficult an experience it was for her. She says the good relations between the two communities is possible because "there are no tanks, no curfews, and they don't demolish houses."
Habiby, who has been running the center since 1994, does not have authoritative data on the number of Arab (including Palestinian) immigrants who have settled in Brooklyn in the last decade. She estimates it's on the order of 200,000 to 300,000. Jewish community leaders believe that number is inflated. She says that lately there has been an upsurge in the numbers of immigrants from Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, and the Palestinian Authority. It is difficult to identify Palestinians because many come from Syria and Lebanon.
Bob Kaplan, a senior official at the Jewish Community Relations Council, in charge of relations with the Arab-American community, adjusts the rosy picture, slightly. He says that two years ago, as soon as the intifada broke out, there were some clashes between Jews and Arabs in Brooklyn. Jews were physically attacked, and verbally assaulted. An emergency meeting was called at city hall, chaired by then-mayor Rudolf Giuliani, and with community leaders from both sides. The decision was made to calm things down.
He also notes that one of the Muslim terrorists from the first bombing of the World Trade Center came from Flatbush, and Sheikh Omar Rahman, serving a life sentence for organizing that bombing, put together his underground terrorist cells from Brooklyn.
But he praises the close professional ties he has developed with Habiby. "Coexistence works because both sides decided that what happens there - meaning the Middle East - cannot be allowed to happen here."
Kaplan, like Habiby, thinks the Muslim immigrants chose the Jewish neighborhoods because the life styles are so similar. Until the Muslims developed their own system for religious slaughter, they used kosher butchers, for example. He also cites relatively inexpensive housing.
The first telephone call he got after the WTC terror attack on September 11 came from Habiby, he says. "She asked for advice about what she should do, what she should tell people who contacted her." Habiby confirms that the Palestinian immigrants are in a state of crisis since September 11. "Since then it has not been easy to be a Palestinian in America," she says, particularly those who have not finalized their immigration process or are in the country illegally.
Since September 11, her office has run a hotline for immigrants who feel they have suffered hostility from the authorities, whether city, state or federal. She says that judging from the phone calls, "every Palestinian in New York has been suspected of being a terrorist." She has received calls about FBI agents banging on doors in the middle of the night to conduct searches of Palestinian apartments. Arrests have been made. The Palestinian immigrants don't complain to the police because they have lost confidence in the authorities .
-Eric
. . . and maybe it really is the intifada which is causing the occupation. . . and maybe that was caused by something
. . . which in turn was caused by something else . . .
Or maybe it's the billionaire mass-murdering thief Yassar Arafat and the mad-dog Hamas that pays $25,000 to the families of homicide bombers? Who can tell?
Yeah, the occupation by the Palestinians. I would hazard a guess that if the Palestinians weren't indiscriminately killing civilians like the street gangs have been doing in our big cities, there wouldn't be any curfews. I seem to recall that the solution our police forces used to curb violence included setting up curfews, and yes, occupation by the police forces - in numbers - in those violent areas.
Israel is not doing anything the rest of the world doesn't do when confronted with such actions by thugs. And that's all the violent Palestinians are is thugs.
Yes, absent Arafat, and Hamas, and the Jihadis, and Saudi money.
As I have pointed out on other occasions, normal people cannot live in an area ruled by outlaws. They leave. Consequently, you will find Palestinians living, and working, and raising their families all over the middle east, and europe, and the United States.
These are the ones who will not live under the rule of pschotics.
The ones who remain behind, living off EU money, under the authority of Arafat and his minions, selling their children to the monsters for money, are complicit in their own misery.
Since September 11, her office has run a hotline for immigrants who feel they have suffered hostility from the authorities, whether city, state or federal. She says that judging from the phone calls, "every Palestinian in New York has been suspected of being a terrorist." She has received calls about FBI agents banging on doors in the middle of the night to conduct searches of Palestinian apartments. Arrests have been made. The Palestinian immigrants don't complain to the police because they have lost confidence in the authorities .
Sound like immigration from Mexico, only more so. Let's face it, today Palestine is a great place to be from. We had enormous numbers of German and Italian immigrants and children thereof in America during WWI and WWII.'course back then journalism wasn't necessarily antiamericanism as it is today . . .
Not counting terrorist sleepers, of course . . .
Well, give or take a few...
'zaktly!
"Coexistence is easy when there are no suicide bombers trying to kill as many Jewish women and children as possible."
Could that be for two reasons?...
1. Brooklyn Muslims have not yet declared a jihad to push the Brooklyn Jews into Long Island Sound.
2. This is America, and our laws are based on the US Constitution, not Sharia Law.
Yeah, the problem is always Jews moving to what Muslims consider "their" turf. You will observe that this article is all about Muslims crowding into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. Nothing about Jewish families moving to, for example, Dearborn, Michigan.
Maybe it really is the occupation causing the problems on the West Bank and in Gaza.
It couldn't have anything to do with the Islam culture of hatred that is encouraged over there, could it? Those toddler programs where 5 year old Habib Jr. is praised for his choice to be a homocide bomber and kill Jews when he grows up, could it? And it couldn't have anything to do with the way Arafaat has kept people in refugee camps for 40 years so that he could manipulate them, could it?
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