Imam Mohammed Qatanani greets his supporters outside the Peter Rodino Federal Office Building in Newark after testifying in his deportation trial.
Photos by Walter Ruby
June 5, 2008
The testimony phase of the trial of Imam Mohammed Qatanani, the Palestinian-born and Paterson-based religious leader who is being threatened with deportation by the United States government, ended on June 2 with vivid testimony by Qatanani about torture he claims to have endured while in Israeli custody in 1993.
And while immigration Judge Alberto J. Riefkohl, who is presiding over the case in Federal District Court in Newark, said at the end of the day that he will not render a decision before mid-September, there has already been one casualty in the trial: Israel’s image as a bastion of human rights and due process of law. The trial, with Qatanani’s portrayal of an Israeli military justice system that routinely holds and questions Palestinian suspects for months without charges or access to lawyers, has received wide coverage in such media as The New York Times, the Associated Press, and The Star-Ledger.
The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to evict the 44-year-old cleric to Jordan, where he lived after leaving his native Nablus in 1989, for having failed to disclose on his application for permanent residency in the United States what DHS characterizes as an arrest and conviction in Israel in 1993 for having been a member of Hamas. Qatanani, who had returned home that year from Jordan to visit family, insists he was detained rather than arrested by Israeli military authorities and insists he was never charged with or convicted of anything during the three months he was held and questioned by military investigators. He staunchly denies any connection with Hamas, although he acknowledged during the trial that he had been involved in Jordan in the Islamic Brotherhood, another Islamist group that, unlike Hamas, is legal in that country.
After three days of vivid testimony earlier in the month by witnesses for the prosecution, including an FBI agent and an Israeli academic who once administered military law in the West Bank, and a string of character witnesses for Qatanani, including a Conservative rabbi and local law enforcement officials, Qatanani finally took the witness stand on his own behalf on the last day of the trial. A slightly built and soft-spoken man with a grey beard, clad in a white robe and Islamic headgear, the imam of the largest mosque in New Jersey asked that his six children be excused from the courtroom as he described being forced to sit on a child’s chair for hours with his hands bound while in Israeli custody. Qatanani also said he was kept in a freezing cell and subjected to violence and threats.
Losing composure several times in his responses to questions by his attorney, Claudia Slovinsky, Qatanani said that he still suffers from pain in his neck and lower back incurred during his detention 15 years ago and asserted that investigators threatened to harm his family if he did not confess. Addressing Riefkohl, Qatanani said, “They say, ‘We will kill your family.’ They say: ‘You know what your family is doing now? We will go to them, we will burn them.’”
Stating emotionally that he had had “no human rights, nothing,” during the months he was interrogated, Qatanani said, “At that time, you feel that death is better than life.”
Interfaith outreach
During cross-examination, lawyers for DHS did not challenge Qatanani’s assertion that he had been tortured (Riefkohl had already noted that in 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court acknowledged that interrogation techniques similar to those described by Qatanani were used routinely by the Israeli military for years but ruled out their use going forward), but sought instead to chip away at his credibility by seeking to tie him to individuals and organizations with terrorist links. Lead prosecution lawyer Alan Wolf got Qatanani to acknowledge that his former brother-in-law, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, had been the top Hamas military leader in the West Bank before being killed by Israeli military forces. Yet Qatanani responded that he met him on only one occasion and that he himself had no involvement in his political or military activities.
Qatanani supporters shout support for the imam outside the courthouse.
While Qatanani acknowledged serving alongside el-Mezain at the ICPC for three years before replacing him as head imam in 1999 and living in an apartment next to his, Qatanani
insisted that he had a difficult relationship with el-Mezain and was never himself involved in fund-raising on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation. Qatanani pointed out that in contrast to el-Mezain, who was known for pressing a militant agenda, he himself has stressed interfaith outreach, building ties to Christian and Jewish religious leaders in New Jersey.
In general, Wolf appeared to follow a less aggressive approach in his questioning than earlier in the trial, when he had cited a passage from the Koran asserting that God will punish “unbelievers and hypocrites” and asked a pro-Qatanani witness, Rabbi David Senter of Temple Beth Shalom of Pompton Lakes, whether a person who believed in such language could really be the moderate figure Senter believed him to be. Riefkohl criticized Wolf for that line of questioning, which supporters of Qatanani characterized as putting Islam on trial alongside the imam.
At the end of the day, Qatanani was greeted as a hero by several hundred supporters who had held vigil across the street from the courthouse throughout the trial. The crowd roared Allahu Akbar! (“God is Great”), as Qatanani said, “America is beautiful — the land of freedom,” adding, “I want to thank our Jewish and Christian friends for standing with us today.”
Eminently visible among the overwhelmingly Muslim crowd were three Satmar-affiliated rabbis from Monsey, NY, whose spokesman, Rabbi Dovid Feldman, said that they had come to respect Qatanani, who allowed them to use and upgrade a halal slaughterhouse in Paterson until they were able to open a kosher one.
--TOP--
- Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
