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| 1.18.02 |
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| Controversy in Cleveland: Imam Damra's History |
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All that changed, however, when, in late-September, a local
television station in Cleveland aired a videotape of a 1991
speech Damra made while raising money for Palestinian Islamic
Jihad. On that tape, he recommends the stabbing of Jews in Israel
and urges the crowd to point "a rifle at the first and last
enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys
and pigs, the Jews."
Damra characterizes those statements as the result of youthful
prejudices he had developed growing up in the harsh environment
of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and pointed out that at the
time he made the speech, Islamic Jihad was not recognized by
the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. He apologized
publicly.
"The person who made those comments had absolutely no interaction
with the Jewish/Christian community, or have[sic] any idea what
extraordinary people they are, as I now do," Damra wrote in
THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER on Oct. 1, 2001. "As all of us go
through evolution in our life, intellectual and spiritual, so
did I, and I will now do everything in my power to continue
to show the community that I am the peacemaker they have come
to know me as."
But the tape brought up further questions about Damra's past,
including the fact that in Feb. 1995, when the U.S. attorney
for the southern district of New York named 170 possible co-conspirators
in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Damra's name was on
the list. He was questioned by the FBI in connection with the
bombing, but was never arrested and never charged with any crime.
Damra's successor at the Brooklyn mosque, the militant Egyptian
cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rachman, was convicted in 1995 of conspiring
to blow up New York City landmarks and is now serving a life-sentence.
Damra has had a tough time convincing many of those who have
come to know him as a religious bridge-builder that the prejudices
of his past are behind him. But everybody has the ability to
change, grow, and develop, he says, and over the past 10 years,
he has undergone a religious and philosophical transformation.
"Back then, I was a young and angry man, an unformed mind and
soul, whose rage blinded him to the humanity of others," he
wrote in an Op-Ed piece for THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER on Nov.
14, 2001. "½Not only do such sentiments not represent my attitudes
today, they are antithetical to my values and faith, my commitment
to tolerance and peace. ½I am not the first person to have done
and said foolish things in his youth and then undergone a process
of political, moral and religious evolution."
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Appearing in the video with Fawaz
Damra:
Martin Plax is the executive director of the Cleveland
chapter of the American Jewish Committee.
Werner Lange is the pastor of the Auburn Community
United Church of Christ in Cleveland (Chagrin Falls)
Kenneth Chalker is the pastor of the First United
Methodist Church in Cleveland. |
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