Author: Daniel Pipes and Teri Blumenfeld
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: June 18, 2004
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13842
Fawaz Damra, the Palestinian-born
leader of Ohio's largest mosque, was convicted yesterday of lying about
his connections to terrorist organizations when he applied for U.S. citizenship.
As a result he may be sentenced to up to five years imprisonment, fined
$5,000, and face deportation.
The high profile court case turned
on videotapes showing Damra calling Jews "the sons of monkeys and pigs"
and saying that the Muslim nation will not regain its glory until their
"removal."
Faced with the daunting task of
explaining away these and other statements, the defense team called upon
two academic specialists on Islam and the Middle East to place them in
context and neutralize them. Not an easy task, to be sure, but very much
the sort of things Middle East studies profs, trained in post-modern theory
and all that, are well-equipped to do.
The duo were Scott Alexander, director
of Catholic-Muslim studies at Chicago's Catholic Theological Union, and
Michael Dahan, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. They were ready to do their part. Alexander explained in pre-trial
testimony:
As unquestionably hate-filled and
thus morally reprehensible as such language is, when Palestinians refer
to Jews as "descended from apes and swine," or encourage support for those
who "kill Jews," they do so with the reasonably justifiable self-image
of victim and persecuted, not of victimizer and persecutor.
For his part, Dahan contended in
testimony that "The statements Fawaz Damra made on the tapes were examples
of political rhetoric frequently used by Palestinians during that time
period."
Moreover, he grandly announced
that he "reached this conclusion based on the use of discourse analysis
methodology." Discourse Analysis is an obscure and highly complex theory
that is usually applied to indigenous peoples in conversational dialogue
analysis. Dahan uses it to insist that one cannot take any hate-filled,
violent statement at face value. In other words, Damra did not really mean
what he said.
With such a powerhouse team of
witnesses lined up, with their creative arguments, how could the defense
lose?
But then something unexpected happened.
Both of the scholars fell by the
wayside.
On the eve of the trial, Alexander
made a stunning about-turn. He told the court he would not provide expert
testimony for Damra. And then, rather than slink quietly away, he took
the surprising step of writing a letter to the press in which he openly
condemned the very statements by Damra that he previously had so vigorously
defended. His letter stated: "Mr. Damra did indeed promote violence and
hatred. I unreservedly condemn the speeches and actions of Mr. Damra in
the early 1990s when he was advocating and helping to raise money for movements
that perpetrate violent attacks on Israeli citizens."
No less astonishing, during research
for the case, Ms. Blumenfeld discovered that Dahan's sworn testimony was
plagiarized from two sources, one taken completely out of context concerning
Finnish perceptions of the media and the other a definition of Discourse
Analysis in a textbook. Dahan had quoted verbatim substantial portions
of the original text in his testimony. More incriminating yet, his bibliography
exposed him, for Dahan inadvertently copied from his source a reference
to a book that he did not cite.
Understandably, the defense did
not utilize the written testimonies of these scholars. And one can only
imagine how, on the stand, a remorseful Alexander or an exposed Dahan would
have damaged Damra's case. Thus did the imam find himself bereft of the
testimonies of these great stars in his firmament.
Not having the benefit of these
brilliant and dedicated minds, the jury was unable to be persuaded how
Damra's fulminations were perfectly acceptable. So it did what it had to
do and, after a short deliberation, found Damra guilty of lying.
Perhaps there is a lesson for lawyers
to be learned in the self-destruction of the Damra defense: choose your
Middle East specialist wisely, as the wrong one might undermine your carefully
constructed case.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org)
is director of the Middle East Forum. Teri Blumenfeld is a writer in Silicon
Valley, California.
