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Fitzgerald: The respected cleric’s deportation trial

May 12, 2008 7:58 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

“Deportation trial under way for respected Passaic cleric” — headline of this article about Qatanani

“Respected” by whom? For what? It is not the job of the reporter to tell readers what to think about Qatanani. If he is “respected” by his fellow Muslims, so what? Do we know exactly what others think of him? We do not. And it is not the reporter’s job to take sides so blatantly.

The reporter’s whole piece appears to have been written by the PR manager of the imam’s campaign. There is, for example, this:

On the sidewalk outside the Peter Rodino Federal Building in Newark, hundreds of supporters gathered in a noisy but peaceful demonstration that lasted more than five hours. Throughout the day, Qatanani sat alongside his wife and six children, his youngest son reading the Koran while his daughter studied for her Advanced Placement U.S. history exam. His wife and three oldest children also face deportation; the younger children are U.S. citizens.

They were “peaceful” perhaps — apparently we are supposed to be grateful for that — but what does it mean when not a dozen but “hundreds” of people demonstrate, and not for a half-hour but for “more than five hours”? What does it mean when they do this not in front of, say, a store that it is claimed has unfair labor practices, but in front of the Peter Rodino Federal Building, in an attempt to influence a legal hearing? Such a hearing should never be the subject of five-hour, or one-hour, demonstrations, by “hundreds” or by a dozen people, who are attempting to influence the application of clear rules by those whose task it is not to admit, as citizens or permanent residents, those who lie on their applications.
And the reporter also suggests, falsely, that Qatanani simply appeared to report — truthful fellow that the reporter wishes you to think he is — sua sponte, that oh, yes, he had once upon a time been arrested and admitted to being a member of Hamas:

Federal agents, however, knew nothing of Qatanani’s arrest until the imam contacted the FBI and told them about it in 2005, an FBI agent testified later in the day.

In fact, as one learns later in the story, Qatanani had lied on his green card application:

But on his green card application, Alicea said, Qatanani had answered “no” to a question asking applicants whether they had been arrested, fined, charged or imprisoned.

Furthermore, he did not simply appear and volunteer the information that he had previously lied. No, what happened is that the Qatatani was having trouble getting his green card, and he went in to discuss that matter. And he didn’t show up simply to reveal a little “error” — that is, lie — on his original green card application. No, he showed up, and then was interrogated by an FBI agent, Angel Alicea. And it was in the course of that interrogation that he revealed that in fact he had been arrested, had been charged, had been imprisoned, all of which he had chosen previously to lie about on his green card application:

Angel Alicea, an FBI special agent serving on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, said he met with Qatanani after mosque officials called the bureau to discuss his green card application.

Qatanani was frustrated, his lawyer said, because he was unable to get an interview with immigration officials and his work visa had expired, forcing the loss of his driver’s license. “He thought we had something to do with it,” Alicea said.

During that February 2005 interview, Alicea said Qatanani told him he had been arrested by Israeli soldiers a week after he crossed from Jordan to the West Bank in 1993 and that he was detained for three months, kept in a cold room and chained to a small chair.

Of course the absurdity of Qatatani’s claim that such a “confession” was extorted from him through “torture” is reported, with a straight face, by this reporter. The same claims of “torture” are being made by every other person released from Guantanamo, the place where every prisoner gains 20-40 pounds, where the guards must wear gloves to touch the “Holy” Qur’an, and every conceivable effort is made to meet every demand of prisoners who are unrepentant, and often murderously dangerous in their behavior toward the despised Infidels who guard them.

So we are made to see, in this outrageously tendentious report, how heartless is a government that would deport this Good Man, this “respected cleric,” this man who came in, we are led to believe, to volunteer information detrimental to his own case because, you see, like George Washington, he could not tell a lie, or rather, he simply could not live with himself if he had not owned up to his initial lie, and instead forthrightly told the truth (just ask agent Angel Alicea if that is how it went).

And there is this take-the-cake piquant detail:

Throughout the day, Qatanani sat alongside his wife and six children, his youngest son reading the Koran while his daughter studied for her Advanced Placement U.S. history exam. His wife and three oldest children also face deportation; the younger children are U.S. citizens.

So there he is. The put-upon truth-teller and respected pastor, with his wife, and his six children, with his youngest son reading the Koran, that holy book, and his daughter, studying like a good American child for the AP US history exam. Does anyone doubt that these must be good, true, loyal Americans? Could she be studying for the AP American history exam and conceivably not be a good and loyal American? Could she conceivably owe her allegiance to a Total Belief-System that flatly contradicts the spirit and letter of the American Constitution? And could she, and her siblings, and her mother, and her father, a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood (why, he admitted it himself, to agent Alicea, perhaps hoping that by offering such an admission he would gain credibility for his denial that he was a supporter or member of Hamas — which, he knew, was on the list of terrorist organizations while the malevolent Ikhwan is, as yet, not), really be risks to this country?

Oh yes they could.

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