Is Riverdale A Settlement?: Synagogue attack puts Israel and Arabs on trial in the Bronx

Synagogue attack puts Israel and Arabs on trial in the Bronx. Jonathan Mark Associate Editor The intifada is on trial this week in Bronx County Court House. It’s a case, defense attorney Stanley Cohen tells the jury in his summation, that began more than 50 years ago with the creation of the State of Israel, ...

The intifada is on trial this week in Bronx County Court House. It’s a case, defense attorney Stanley Cohen tells the jury in his summation, that began more than 50 years ago with the creation of the State of Israel, when Palestinians were thrown out of their homes producing a “Palestinian diaspora” that produced this young man, Mazen Assi, born in America, raised here and in Jordan, who was so “fixated” by the televised war in Israel that two years ago, just days after the war began, on the eve of Yom Kippur, he threw Molotov cocktails that shattered a synagogue’s glass in Riverdale.

The defense wants to put Israel on trial. The State of New York has another trial in mind, charging Assi, 23, and Mohammed Alfaqih, 21, with attempted arson and criminal mischief. They are charged with “hate crimes” under a law that went into effect just hours before Alfaqih allegedly drove Assi to the Conservative Synagogue of Riverdale with vodka bottles filled with fuel and a wick.

In his confession to police, Assi told the police all about the “the f—-ing rich Jews” in Riverdale, a neighborhood not that far from the Arab-owned Madaba deli in South Yonkers.

What this trial testifies to is that the war against the Jews didn’t move beyond Israel’s borders only with the recent bombing of the Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya. It has been a violent war without borders for some time now, fought on French boulevards and in Berlin alleys and in the most rustic corner of the Bronx. The Anti-Defamation League has files on at least a dozen other crimes in 2002 in which Arabs attacked or intimidated Jews, not in West Bank settlements but in the City of New York

Everyone says Assi and Alfaqih acted alone. In America, we prefer that our madmen act alone, like El Sayid Nosair, the assassin of Rabbi Meir Kahane, back in 1990. When Kahane was killed, who among us didn’t say it was the chickens coming home to roost, before the chicken turned out to be us and the assassin, Nosair, turned out to have roosted with Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, an open confederate of Osama bin Laden.

Rahman, the blind leader of one of Egypt’s largest terrorist organizations, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996 for plotting, in his Jersey City mosque, to blow up bridges and landmarks in New York.

And who’s that at the defense table for the Riverdale case? Lynne Stewart, who joined the Rahman defense team after Rahman’s other attorney, Ramsey Clark, told her that “if she refused, the Arab world would feel betrayed by their friends on the American left.” That was enough to convince Stewart.

There she is, a heavy-set 62-year-old woman with short gray hair, walking in a slight waddle to the bench to ask for an explanation of the judge’s use of “hate crime” and how that applies to this Riverdale case.

Does anyone on this Bronx jury know that Stewart was handcuffed by the FBI back in April and is herself awaiting trial on two counts of assisting terrorists, including helping Rahman smuggle terrorist directives beyond his prison cell? Maybe these Arabs from Yonkers acted alone but through the notorious Stewart, whom the Justice Department believes is a terrorist consigliore, these Riverdale bombers are just one degree of separation from Rahman and two degrees from Osama.

Assi’s other lawyer, Cohen, has wild salt-and-pepper hair that piles high on his head — not unlike Cosmo Kramer of “Seinfeld” fame — before it cascades down into a long ponytail like a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. In two-tone shoes, he walks across the courthouse floor and reminds the jury that Assi was “never far from Palestine, never far from his tradition.” He “socializes in the Palestinian Muslim community.” Oh, he threw the dud Molotov cocktails, all right, says Cohen, and that was wrong, but he was “fixated” for days by the death of Muhammad Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy famously shot in his father’s arms in September 2000. The photo and video whipped up a frenzy around the world.

Who wasn’t fixated, asks Cohen? He says even one of the New York City cops on this case thought the Dura killing “horrific.”

In case the jury didn’t remember — and Judge Stephen Barrett refused to let the jury see footage of the shooting — Cohen told the jury that Dura’s father “screamed in anguish, trying to shield his son’s limp body against the weapons of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Now, never mind that even the Jordan Times just last week ran a story that said young Dura was shot in a crossfire between Palestinians and Israelis, meaning the fatal bullet was of indeterminate origin. What matters is that Assi blames Israel.

“It wasn’t Jews who killed that young boy,” said Cohen. “It wasn’t Jews practicing their religion that killed that young boy,” so Assi’s revenge can’t be a hate crime against Jews. “It was the Israeli army that killed that young boy. An Israeli soldier who killed that young boy. The world was fixated on it,” not just Assi.

The day before Assi took a ride to the Conservative Synagogue of Riverdale, he and his entire family attended a Palestinian demonstration, spurred by the Dura killing, in Times Square. It wasn’t a rally against Jews, said Cohen, it was a demonstration organized by Muslims and Christians and Jews — yes, you can bet Jews were there. It was a demonstration, said Cohen, that asked Israel to “stop killing children. Stop killing Palestinian children.”

And that synagogue in Riverdale, it wasn’t a target for Assi because it was a synagogue, said Cohen. The building was “not just a house of worship ... it’s a building where they raise money for Israel. It’s a building where pro-Israeli speakers come to speak.”

It’s also a synagogue less than a mile north along a straightaway from the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, home of activist Rabbi Avi Weiss, who once demonstrated outside the Jersey City mosque of Sheik Rahman. Maybe Assi couldn’t tell one shul from the other, or maybe the more liberal synagogue was good enough, just like the left-wing kibbutz was a good enough target for Palestinians last month.

What, Cohen asked the jury, actually was the crime here? All that happened was “a broken window. No one went to the hospital. No one was physically injured. The synagogue wasn’t engulfed in flames. But it is a big deal to the system. ... The message from the politicians, the message from the brass, was ‘solve this case. It doesn’t matter—solve this case ... bring some people in,’ and then work backwards and prove the evidence against those you bring in.”

Imagine, said Cohen, the police used aerial photography “for a broken window.” The FBI was called in, “maybe the CIA, who knows?”

It’s not about Jews, it’s about Israel. “The prosecutors keep wanting you to think this had something to do with Jews,” Cohen told the jury. “How many times did we hear from witnesses, ‘Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur, the High Holidays, the High Holidays’ ... how many times ‘yahrtzeit ceremonies’? How many times, ‘little memorial plaques for the dead’? Was it necessary? We know it’s a synagogue.... plaques for the dead? From 1932? What does that have to do with this case?”

Cohen’s right, the Bronx district attorney wants the jury to think that a bomb thrown at a shul has something to do with Jews. And why do the 1930s keep coming up? Those plaques for the dead keep following us around. n

What Cohen wants is to bring the world’s battles back to the United States. The world is full war and hate. Do Kurds have the right to kill Turks and Iranians in Virginia? Is it OK for the various African tribes to continue their killing on American soil? Is there no problem if New York Hindus and Muslins throw a couple of firebombs at each other as happens in India?

If the jury frees these criminals, then a frightening message is being sent not only to Arabs, but also to every person who has come to our shores and wants to bring his or her hatred along.

the most rustic corner of the Bronx.

That should read "the most rustic corner of The Bronx."

Folks in Riverdale are so pretentious, that for years, I thought there were TWO Riverdales, one in The Bronx, and another just over the border in Westchester County. That is because I have encountered businesses (a Jewish private school, I believe it was) that claimed the fictional postal address of "Riverdale, N.Y." Their real postal address was "Bronx, N.Y." (The postal address for ANYWHERE in The Bronx is "Bronx, N.Y.") And yet, I'm not sure that the proper response to such pretentiousness is to firebomb folks' synagogues.

Cohen is still fighting the battles of Bill Kunsler, his mentor.

They lost before in America, and they'll lose again, this verdict notwithstanding (I have great faith in the jury system, but there are aberrations).

The underlying premise of his defense in both immoral and un-American.

I absolutely, positively, most assertively am declaring Cohen would be first in line to get his Zonderkommando ticket punched.

The Zonderkommando existed. They are not a fantasy. My uncle liberated Dachau with the US 45th Division in 1945.The first thing that happened was the "accidental" machine gunning of the camp guards. The second thing was a lot of score settling between camp inhabitants and others who had collaborated and had others killed.

My uncle, who was, like the rest of my family, born Jewish in America, was horrified by the whole experience, and made absolutely sure we never forgot the forces that he witnessed there, and all the way through Europe as a Jewish-American soldier.

I make sure my children understand those forces today as well. My kids learn baseball, democracy, and as much as I can tell them about human nature after my experiences.

that began more than 50 years ago with the creation of the State of Israel, when Palestinians were thrown out of their homes

Well, all the prosecution has to do to counter this line of argument is to present the facts. The Arabs in those parts of Palistine that became the infant state of Israel were NOT thrown out of their homes. They either left voluntarily, at the behest of various Arab groups who assured them that they would get not only their own property back, but that of the Jews too, when the Arab Armies threw the Jews into the sea, or they were bought out. Many were of course bought out well before, since Jewish settlement in the area had been ongoing since before 1900, and of course there were some Jews there long before that. Try again Mr. defense attorney.

Time to buy a gun.

and go directly to Jail? Riverside is a neighborhood in New York City, is is not? The city fathers, sadly many of them Jews, have declared the Second Amendment and almost identical provision of New York state law (substitutes "cannot" for "shall not") do not apply in New York City. Mere possession of a gun, without registering it, is a crime. The rules and regs for obtaining the necessary licenses are to say the least draconian. See the NRA synopsis for NYC for all the nauseating details. Best to have your barf bang handy before clicking on that link.

JESUS CHRIST!

I'm gonna have a stroke. I HATE this woman...

When are people going to get it...

It's not about Israel; It's not about land; It IS about Jews, and the fact that Arabs want ALL Jews DEAD... It's something that could be conveniently overlooked when most of the dead Jews were in Israel, but now, the real desire of the arabs is coming into view. And when they're done with the Jews, they'll be coming after Christians.

Mark

WHY is she still practicing law, and WHAT us it going to take to finally put this damnable bitch behind bars??

I'm so mad...she never represents anyone unless they're an America-hater, a Jew-hater, a baby-killer, or an outright terrorist. AWfully confident that continuing to represent these scumbags won't come back to bite her in the ass at her own trial, isn't she?

I wonder what she knows that we don't...

Pathetic.

I'm surprised that the perps didn't hail from my neighborhood, Bay Ridge, aka "Bay Ruit" (at least parts of it). There is a small synagougue here that I heard has hired armed guards in case "the neighbors" get similar ideas as these two idiots.

BTW: Riverdale, like Forest Hills, was a nice area filled with single family homes until some genius developer decided to fill both neighborhoods with some of the ugliest Condo/CoOp developments this side of Tamarac. I agree, Rustow, with the pretentiousness of Riverdale residents, but disagree with many assessments that it is the "nicest" section of the Bronx. That honor goes to City Island and portions of Throgs Neck near the water.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.