News came this week that Fawaz Damra has been mailed back to the Palestinian Territories where he will no doubt be welcomed with opened arms:
The deportation order was carried out Thursday, said Tim Counts, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Damra was flown to Amman, Jordan, and then crossed the Allenby Bridge to the West Bank.
Bill West at Counterterrorism Blog is happy. He should be. It's nice to see hard work of the good guys finally come to fruition. As a senior agent at the INS (now ICE) in Miami, he initiated criminal investigations into the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) cell then lead by Sami al-Arian and including Damra. However, I'm not going to do a Snoopy Dance for this success story, because quite frankly, it's not much of a victory.
Nailing Imam Damra and (finally) punishing him took enormous law enforcement and prosecutorial resources, and for what? Unless he's in an Israeli prison right now, he's going to return to his terrorist ways. He hasn't stopped being a senior PIJ leader, he's just stopped being a US-based PIJ leader. Meanwhile, mainstream media and CAIR have successfully framed Damra's case as a moderate imam and community leader who was wrongfully deported because of a few unfortunate statements he made long ago.
Describing Damra as an "interfaith" leader, the single AP report on the case ignores all-together the terrorist part of the guy's career. However, AP does report straight on an associate's paranoid, anti-Semitic accusation that it was the "pro-Israel lobby" that brought Imam Damra to the Allenby Bridge:
He immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s and is married with three U.S.-born children.
Damra's lawyer, Michael Birach, said the imam was a bridge-builder and a healer who made a real contribution to religious understanding in the Cleveland area. He called Damra a victim of federal officials who wanted to look tough after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"He was just a poster boy for the war on terrorism," Birach said.
In Ohio, Damra became involved in interfaith activities, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But soon after, a tape of a 1991 speech in Chicago became public in which Damra said Muslims should be "directing all the rifles at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews."
He apologized and said he made the remarks before he had any interaction with Christians and Jews.
Haider Alawan, a friend of Damra's and a member of the Islamic Center of Cleveland's council of elders, blamed Damra's conviction on the pro-Israel lobby's influence of the federal government.
Apparently there's no motivating circumstance that would require original reporting, because no other news agency has produced an article about Damra's deportation. The only report I see originates from the AP. However, reading the AP report you would never know that Damra's entire American career was dedicated to furthering the causes of radical Sunni Islam at home and abroad. In his new book Steve Emerson writes of Damra (pg 254):
Damrah's radical activity in the United States began while he was living in Brooklyn..While residing in Brooklyn, Damrah was affiliated with the Al Kifah Refugee Center... Damrah also served as the spiritual leader of the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, an institution frequented by conspirators who were implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Damrah himself was later implicated as an unindicted coconspirator in this devastating attack. In addition...Damrah is also identified as Unindicted Coconspirator One in the indictment against Sami al-Arian, as a result of fund-raising efforts on behalf of [Islamic Committee for Palestine]. [Note: links are mine]
According to Emerson, Sami al-Arian established the Islamic Committee for Palestine as a fund raising front for PIJ. Bill West and his FBI counterparts began investigating al-Arian, Damra, and others in the mid-90s. Damra was finally was arrested in 2002, and convicted in 2004. He then lingered in the US while the government tried to find some country somewhere willing to take him. Ten years dedicated to neutralizing this joker in the US, but there is no guarantee he won't be operating soon out of Nablus or even Damascus.
Bill West is justified in his job well done. For him it was years upon years of tedious paperwork, endless Powerpoint briefings, clueless bosses, investigative deadends, piss-poor technology, link charts, memos, meetings, and funding scares. All to have this man deported out of the country. But ten years, Bill? Do you really believe this is the best way to fight radical Islamists in the US? Permit them to freely operate for years -- raising money, gathering acolytes -- while you gather enough evidence to convict them of...immigration fraud? Let them linger in prison for years while they gain local and national support from increasingly radicalized "civil rights" groups?
Unless the Israeli's or Jordanians snatched him up, Damra is sitting in a relative's living room in the West Bank right now getting reacquainted with PIJ leadership:
ICE officials said they do not know where in the West Bank Damra might be. Damra has family in Nablus, but Muslim civic leaders in Cleveland said on Friday that no one on either side of the ocean had heard from him.
All arrangements for Damra's deportation were worked out with officials from the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, said Counts, the ICE spokesman. He said Damra was turned over to Palestinian officials after crossing the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan and the West Bank.
But that bridge, called the Al-Karameh Bridge by Palestinians, is controlled by the Israelis, noted Julia Shearson, director of the Cleveland office of CAIR.
And now Israel has another target to put on their list.
Are we certain this is a victory?
