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From the Los Angeles Times

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The man behind the Manhattan mosque

Businessman Sharif El-Gamal has been undeterred by the furor over his planned Islamic center near the former World Trade Center site.

by Geraldine Baum, Los Angeles Times

April 5, 2011

Reporting from New York

When protesters flooded Lower Manhattan last Sept. 11 to vent about a planned Islamic cultural and prayer center, few knew the obscure New York businessman behind the project. Squadrons of police had to be deployed to control the angry crowds wielding bullhorns and placards, yet nobody cried out the name of Sharif El-Gamal.

The furor over what opponents call the "ground zero mosque" has receded for now, and plans for the $100-million project continue to move forward. The driving force remains the relentless El-Gamal, a Brooklyn-born college dropout who makes up in tenacity what he lacks in polish.

With light blue eyes and reddish, curly hair, snazzy suits and upwardly mobile ambitions, El-Gamal comes across like a typical New York mashup of cultures and religions. His first real estate partner was a Hasidic Jew, and even now when he's searching for a perfect expression, he's as likely to use Yiddish as Arabic.

On a recent Friday afternoon, El-Gamal, 38, paced around his sunny Manhattan office describing like an excited teenager how he got into wheeling and dealing property.

Suddenly a voice crackled from his computer.

It was a muezzin's call, programmed to remind him to pray five times a day. But instead of dropping to his knees in front of his desk, as he usually does, he headed for his buildings at 45-51 Park Place, now the most controversial prayer space in America.

By the time El-Gamal arrived, hundreds of Muslim men and a handful of women were already shoeless and murmuring prayers on the first floor of the crumbling buildings. After a brief service, almost every congregant offered a swab of saliva: The community is seeking a bone-marrow match for a Pakistani "brother" who has cancer.

"Pretty dangerous stuff," El-Gamal said dryly, before swabbing his own cheek and slipping into a subway train to return to his office.

Every Friday for almost two years, the site has served Muslims who work in nearby government offices, as well as the occasional hot dog vendor or construction worker who drifts over from the former World Trade Center site 2 1/2 blocks away. This went virtually unnoticed even after a story about the planned center, called Park51, appeared on the front page of the New York Times in December 2009.

But last May, after a car bombing attempt in Times Square by a Muslim American, opposition to Park51 began to mushroom, fueled by critics on the Internet and cable news, victims' relatives and conservative politicians. They denounced it as an insult to the memory of the nearly 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001, in the name of Islam.

Polls showed that most New Yorkers didn't want a mosque nearby even as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended Muslims' right to pray where they choose, saying, "There is no neighborhood in this city off-limits to God's love and mercy."

Although most of the opposition focused on the project's spiritual leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, El-Gamal also gained attention, including a profile on "60 Minutes."

Some labeled him slimy, greedy, arrogant and dishonest.

Pamela Geller, a conservative activist who led opposition through her blog, Atlas Shrugs, said El-Gamal was a "front man" for the money behind the project and for "Islamic supremacists" who believe in the tradition of erecting a mosque near the site of a war victory.

"It's been sold as a mosque of healing when it has the opposite effect," Geller said recently.

Timothy Brown, a firefighter who lost 93 friends on Sept. 11 and is suing to block the project, called El-Gamal a "bad apple."

"For him to keep shoving this down the families' throats, what does it show you about this man?" Brown said.

But El-Gamal has kept going.

He applied for nonprofit status for the project, and sought a $5-million grant from a public agency created to heal the area. He is recruiting Muslim and non-Muslim members for separate boards for the prayer space and community center, and has begun negotiating with banks for financing.

"My brother has always been an aggressive person but always a good person," said Sammy El-Gamal, who recalled how Sharif would win his allowance money during childhood backgammon games, but usually gave it back. "He's just persistent. When he wants something, when he believes in something, he doesn't give up."

When Abdul Rauf signaled in January that he would accept relocating the center farther from the site, El-Gamal nudged him aside.

Even before they parted ways, Abdul Rauf had left most of the responsibilities for the project to El-Gamal while he concentrated on a broader interfaith message. "Sharif did the design concept, the floor plan," Abdul Rauf said. "He pushed it ahead."

Back at his office, El-Gamal's face reddened as he recounted efforts to get him to retreat. At the height of the controversy even Donald Trump chimed in, offering to pay him a bonus to move.

"Are we supposed to move so we can create a Muslim-free zone, Muslim-free blocks?" El-Gamal asked heatedly. "That makes no sense. … What happened on 9/11 was a criminal act of mass murder that had nothing to do with my people or my community. And it's about time we put a clear line in the sand."

It's a line he has made using all his dexterity as a quintessential striving New Yorker.

He was born in a Methodist hospital to a Polish Catholic mother and Egyptian Muslim father who divorced over religion. After his mother died of cancer when he was 5, El-Gamal and his brother lived with their father, an immigrant who was a rising Chemical Bank executive.

He's lived in different parts of New York as well as abroad — in Liberia briefly as a toddler and in Egypt from ages 11 to 18, with a one-year break on Long Island, where he played high school football.

"We ultimately went to Egypt because my father wanted us to understand our identity," El-Gamal said. "I went kicking and screaming."

In Alexandria, El-Gamal spoke English and played water polo at an international school run by Americans, while at home he spoke Arabic and was immersed in Egyptian culture. The family prayed at elegant mosques and fasted for Ramadan.

Memories of those mosques and his exposure to the Muslim world would stir his yearning for a dignified place to pray and commune in New York.

El-Gamal returned to the United States for college, but dropped out to work for a financial broker. "I was really lost, and in part it was cultural confusion. You're American but at the same time you don't have your community," he said.

Before he married and settled down, El-Gamal admitted, he led a fast Manhattan life that included a DUI and disorderly conduct arrests. He eventually found his calling in real estate development.

On the morning of the World Trade Center attack, like hundreds of New Yorkers, he felt compelled to rush to the scene to help. Yet in the months that followed, El-Gamal became enraged as he saw all Muslims being held accountable for the attack by 19 radical Islamists.

"I really wanted to understand my identity, thinking, 'How dare people say that about me and my religion,' " he said.

He started going to a prayer center located for decades in a second-floor loft space on Warren Street, also near the attack site.

"Muslims had been praying for years on those streets near the World Trade Center," he said. "But I was really shocked that this 5,000-square-foot loft where the paint was peeling, carpets were dirty, bathrooms inadequate was the representation of my religion in Lower Manhattan. … The mosques I'd been used to were magnificent houses that you'd be fascinated by even if you were non-Muslim."

One Friday in 2005 he heard a sermon by Abdul Rauf in a tiny prayer space on West Broadway.

"It was almost like I was now listening to a professor, in perfect English, giving something my soul had longed for," El-Gamal said. He told Abdul Rauf, "It's not really fair that only 70 people get to hear you."

That same year, after a lengthy search that led him to dozens of potential sites — all rejected by the Warren Street elders — El-Gamal found the Park Place buildings.

They had been vacant since the landing gear from one of the Sept. 11 planes torpedoed through the roof. El-Gamal's plan calls for a 13-story community center, run by Muslims but open to all, with a theater, pool, day-care center, culinary institute and prayer space. El-Gamal and Abdul Rauf said it would be a way of pushing back against the image of Muslims as extremists.

After four years of negotiations, El-Gamal bought the property for $4.8 million.

"At that point I wanted to — how do you say in Yiddish, 'create a marriage'? — oh, yeah, make a shidduch between Imam Rauf and the beautiful people from Warren Street," El-Gamal said.

That never quite happened. Some congregants flocked to the first floor of Park Place while others rented space nearby. Today, four mosques exist within walking distance of the former World Trade Center.

With the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 just months away, El-Gamal is preparing for renewed criticism. (Said Geller: "We will be there on the streets if they grant taxpayer money from a 9/11 fund to build this ground zero mosque.")

But El-Gamal has also set his sights beyond — to a groundbreaking in four to five years, and to accompanying his two young daughters, who take swim lessons at a Jewish center on the Upper West Side, where he lives, to the pool on Park Place.

"I have been trying for eight years now to help my community," El-Gamal said. "It's just not in my DNA to give up."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ground-zero-mosque-20110406,0,1656899,print.story

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Parole board grants release date for man convicted in 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping

California's parole board Tuesday upheld an earlier decision that deemed one of three men responsible for kidnapping 26 Chowchilla schoolchildren and their school bus driver in 1976 suitable for parole.

But Richard Schoenfeld, now 56, would not be scheduled for release until 2021, and his parole would have to clear several more hurdles, including a review by the governor, said Luis Patino, a spokesman for the parole board.

Photos: Chowchilla kidnappings

Any sitting governor between now and 2021 could ask the board to reconsider its decision to set a release date for Schoenfeld, Patino said.

Schoenfeld, his brother James and Fred Woods, who were all from wealthy families, were in their early 20s when they committed the crime, which would become the largest kidnapping-for-ransom case in U.S. history. The three started plotting the kidnapping after they lost $30,000 on a housing deal.

In July 1976, the three armed men commandeered the big yellow school bus from Dairyland Unified and drove it into a dry canal bottom. The children -– who ranged in age from 5 to 14 –- and the bus driver were herded into two vans and driven to a Livermore quarry.

They were then made to climb down into a moving van buried in the quarry 100 miles from Chowchilla. After imprisoning their hostages, the three defendants left to call in a $5-million ransom demand to the Chowchilla Police Department. But the phone lines were busy. They took naps and awoke to the news that the children had escaped.

The three young men were arrested and convicted.

A key issue at sentencing was whether they had kidnapped with bodily harm -- a circumstance warranting life in prison with no parole. Prosecutor David Minier convinced Superior Court Judge Leo Deegan that the nosebleeds, upset stomach and fainting suffered by three of the girls constituted injury. But an appeals court ruled in 1980 that there was no bodily harm, and the kidnappers were eligible for parole.

Recently, judges, prosecutors and investigators in the case have called for the kidnappers to be granted parole.

In 2010, a two-person parole board panel deemed Schoenfeld “suitable for parole,” but that decision was later rescinded. The parole board scheduled Tuesday's hearing to reconsider that decision. The other two kidnappers have yet to be found suitable for parole.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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Tim Rutten: Florida pastor Terry Jones and the far reach of free speech

The Koran-burning by a Florida pastor and the deadly protests it triggered in Afghanistan raise issues about free speech and Americans' attitudes toward Muslims.

by Tim Rutten

April 6, 2011

In this digital age, speech has been globalized just as surely as commerce.

That's one of the lessons to be taken from the troubling sequence of events in which a tiny Florida church's distasteful publicity stunt of burning a Koran triggered five days of protest and mob violence across Afghanistan. Through Tuesday, more than 20 people had been killed, and the hand of our Taliban antagonists has been strengthened.

Terry Jones, you may recall, is the anti-Islam pastor of a Gainesville fundamentalist church with a congregation of about 30, who gained international notoriety and hours of press attention last fall by threatening to burn a Koran on the Sept. 11 anniversary. After appeals from, among others, President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Jones relented. Last month, however, he decided to hold a mock "trial" of Islam's holy book that ended with its burning.

This time, the American news media simply ignored Jones' crude cabaret of bigotry, but a video made its way onto the Internet. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused to let the provocation pass. On March 24, he issued a news release demanding that the United States "bring to justice the perpetrators of this crime." On Thursday, he gave a speech condemning the burning and demanding Jones' arrest. The next day, deadly rioting erupted after Friday prayers in Afghan mosques. Sunday, in a meeting with Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Karzai demanded that Congress pass a resolution condemning Jones.

For their part, both Obama and Petraeus unequivocally condemned Jones' desecration of the Koran, though the president also called the killings that followed "an affront to human decency and dignity."

Others have raised the question of whether our conception of constitutionally protected speech needs to adjust itself to an age in which words spoken in Gainesville can have deadly impact in Mazar-i-Sharif. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for example, wants Congress to explore ways to limit now-protected expressions, such as Jones'. "Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war," he said Sunday. "During World War II, we had limits on what you could do if it inspired the enemy." Graham, who wields considerable influence as a former military lawyer, said he wants to do "anything we can to push back here in America against acts like this that put our troops at risk."

Obviously, there have been necessary wartime restraints on speech, but they've always involved restrictions on transmitting information, such as troop movements. What Jones did is luridly offensive, but it amounts to an expression of opinion. Blasphemy is protected by the 1st Amendment, and any attempt to make it otherwise -- however well-intended -- is a prescription for disaster.

Still others have wondered whether it might be possible to apply the "fighting words" exception to the 1st Amendment to cases such as Jones' stunt, which seemed almost certain to provoke a deadly response half a world away. In its 1942 ruling in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire, the U.S. Supreme Court defined that exception in a way that could be construed to cover Jones' desecration of the Koran:

"There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include … 'fighting words' -- those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality."

The problem is that, ever since Chaplinsky, the court has narrowed the scope of the fighting words exception, holding that it can't be used, for example, to restrain flag burners. Moreover, any attempt to extend the audience whose sensibilities must be weighed beyond our borders attenuates the exception beyond reason. What, in this instance, of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who were not incited to violence by Jones' provocation?

The issues raised by these events are not a challenge to our conception of free speech, but to our collective conscience. The question that ought to be asked isn't whether the wretched Jones' repellant theater is protected speech, but why the United States continues to produce as many people who speak and act as he does about Muslims?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten-koran-20110406,0,6137545,print.column

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National security: When secrecy is a weapon

U.S. officials hurt our democracy by withholding information from the courts but then disclosing it to the public whenever it suits their needs.

by Jameel Jaffer

April 6, 2011

In a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo spoke with surprising candor about the CIA's "targeted killing" program. He discussed the scope of the program (about 30 people are on the "hit list" at any given time), the process by which the CIA selects its targets (Rizzo was "the one who signed off") and the methods the CIA uses to eliminate them ("The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head"). In a wide-ranging conversation, Rizzo volunteered details about a highly controversial counterterrorism program that had previously been cloaked in official secrecy.

What was most remarkable about the interview, though, was not what Rizzo said but that it was Rizzo who said it. For more than six years until his retirement in December 2009, Rizzo was the CIA's acting general counsel — the agency's chief lawyer. On his watch the CIA had sought to quash a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by arguing that national security would be harmed irreparably if the CIA were to acknowledge any detail about the targeted killing program, even the program's mere existence.

Rizzo's disclosure was long overdue — the American public surely has a right to know that the assassination of terrorism suspects is now official government policy — and reflects an opportunistic approach to allegedly sensitive information that has become the norm for senior government officials. Routinely, officials insist to courts that the nation's security will be compromised if certain facts are revealed but then supply those same facts to trusted reporters.

Sometimes the motivation for the disclosure is political and sometimes it's personal, but in either case disclosure has little to do with the public's need (or right) to know and everything to do with the official's need to tell. Rizzo's interview with Newsweek was particularly brazen, because Rizzo allowed his statements to be attributed to him rather than to the now-familiar "highly placed intelligence official." But where the state's ostensible secrets are concerned, it has become common for government officials to tell courts one thing — nothing — and reporters another.

Examples are easy to find. After Congress enacted the Patriot Act, FBI officials swore to a court that national security would be compromised if the FBI revealed how many times it had used a particularly controversial surveillance power. But when then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft realized that he could use the statistic to discredit critics of the act, he volunteered the statistic at a press conference. Similarly, the CIA filed affidavits in various lawsuits insisting that national security would be compromised if the government officially acknowledged its network of secret prisons, but at a subsequent press conference President Bush did exactly that. In a suit involving the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden filed an affidavit asserting that the CIA could neither confirm nor deny allegations concerning clandestine interrogation techniques. But after disclosure became more politically palatable than continued concealment, Hayden confirmed publicly that three prisoners had been waterboarded in CIA custody.

In these instances, the government first insisted on secrecy and then later disclosed its putative secrets, but occasionally the chronology works the other way round. After the New York Times disclosed the existence of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, the Bush administration officially acknowledged the program, described and defended it publicly, and made available to the press a 40-page report detailing the program's supposed legal basis. Five months later, the administration sought to quash a constitutional challenge by arguing that the government couldn't defend the program in court without disclosing information that was simply too sensitive to disclose.

It's hard to be upset that Rizzo spoke candidly to Newsweek. The public knows too little about the government's national security and counterterrorism policies, and without leaks we would know even less. But if senior executive branch officials believe that information can safely be shared with the press, they should not be asserting under oath — or allowing their subordinates to assert under oath — that the information is too sensitive to be released under the Freedom of Information Act, or too sensitive to be shared with federal judges.

Allowing government officials to eschew official information channels in favor of unofficial ones has real consequences. It's not just that officials can control what information is released to the public, and when, and in what contexts. They can also control which legal challenges get heard, because courts can't adjudicate challenges to government policies if they don't know what those policies are. When the executive branch strips the courts of information, it also strips them of authority.

The courts themselves are partly to blame. Although both the Constitution and the Freedom of Information Act invest the courts with the power to determine whether claimed state secrets are actually state secrets and whether classified information is properly classified, courts too often accept executive claims without scrutiny. And it is almost unheard of for courts to hold government officials to account for disclosing to the press information that they previously refused to disclose to the judiciary.

The judiciary's failure to exercise its authority in this area is corrosive. Our democracy depends on a judiciary that enforces the Constitution, an accountable executive and a public that knows the whole story, not just the facts that executive officials decide it's in their interest to disclose.

Jameel Jaffer is deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jaffer-nationalsecurity-20110406,0,5383135,print.story

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From Google News

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Long Island beach body search continues Wed.

(Video on site)

OAK BEACH (WABC) -- Suffolk County police, New York state troopers, firefighters and cadaver dogs resume their grim search Wednesday for more victims of a suspected serial killer.

The searches at Gilgo Beach and Oak Beach have even extended into the small gated communities along the beachfront.

Fog, rain and sand whipped up by the wind made things tough for searchers Tuesday as they made their grim trudge through the brambled dunes with no new discoveries.

The Suffolk County Medical Examiner did not release any information on the four latest sets of remains found earlier this week. All of them are now with a forensic anthropologist at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, where they will be subjected to DNA analysis.

The one thing police are sure of is that none of the four victims is missing Jersey City prostitute Shannan Gilbert , who vanished May 1, 2010. She had banged on the door of a home in Oak Beach before running off again, screaming that she was being chased. Gilbert, 24, had visited Craigslist client Joseph Brewer, who has not been named a suspect and is said to be cooperating with police.

Gilbert's disappearance led to the present search and the discovery of the beach dumping ground. Investigators think the four identified victims, all prostitutes found back in December, were killed elsewhere and their bodies driven to the beach for disposal.

"This is not like a TV show," Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said. "This is tedious work which will take time, but that's what detectives, homicide does."

The first four victims were found off Ocean Parkway along Gilgo Beach. Last week, investigators found the fifth body about a mile east of where the first four were located. That discovery prompted police to resume a widespread search of the north side of the highway on Monday, a search that yielded the remains of three additional victims.

"It's a tough area," Dormer said. "It's very easy to miss something, but that's why we're doing it again."

The new discoveries Monday were due to a new tactic, as fire trucks from three towns used their extension ladders to put searchers 20 feet over the brambles, high enough to see ground disturbances.

The westbound lanes of Ocean Parkway will remain closed Wednesday from the Captree Bridge to the Nassau County line. People who live in shore communities along the barrier beach will need identification to reach their homes via the Robert Moses Causeway.

Almost five months since the first discovery, the lingering question is do police have any suspects? So far, they're been very careful to avoid releasing too much information in this case, but experts say it's likely they know much more than they're letting on.

"It's quite possible the police have more information, but they are holding back and that they have a suspect in mind," Dr. Larry Kobilinsky said.

Kobilinsky is an expert in crime scene analysis at John Jay College, and he says it's likely investigators already have solid leads.

The first four victims advertised their services on the online bulletin board Craigslist, which assigns unique email addresses to each posting.

When you respond to an ad, you leave an electronic footprint behind, and as officers have scouring the brush, Kobilinsky says it's likely they've been mining Craiglist's weblogs and email records as well.

"The police have some hard evidence to find the killer, provided they can identify the computer, its location and develop some linkage to the suspect," he said.

Detectives believe the crimes happened in the middle of the night and that the killer chose the same, desolate location, pulling-onto the shoulder of the westbound lanes, dragging the body out of his vehicle and dumping it no more than 25 feet off the roadside.

Of the four victims identified so far, Maureen Brainard-Barnes was murdered first. She was last seen on July 9, 2007.

Melissa Barthelemy was next, having disappeared almost exactly two years later, in 2009.

Megan Waterman vanished on June 6 of last year, and Amber Lynn Costello disappeared in early September of 2010.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/long_island&id=8055922&pt=print

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