Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Lebanese art student Salam El Zaatari has been held in solitary confinement for six weeks after airport security found an artist's knife in his carry-on case. His real crime: Being an Arab.
Dec 11, 2001 | Malek Francis, chairman of the American Lebanese Congress, remembers his alarm when he heard that a 21-year-old Middle Eastern man had been arrested in Pittsburgh Oct. 28 trying to board an airplane with a knife. "Right away I wondered if he was one of them," Francis recalls, referring to the al-Qaida operatives who hijacked four planes Sept. 11 and turned them into missiles aimed at New York and the Pentagon.
Certainly Pittsburgh media thought so, at first. TV news bulletins reported that an "Arab" was "prevented" from "smuggling a knife" aboard an airplane, which was variously "hidden" or "stashed" in his laptop case. The mug shot that accompanied newspaper stories the the following days confirmed the public's worst fears: a dark-skinned, goateed young man, with the type of brooding expression that seemed to hint at coming violence.
Because the young man, Salam Ibrahim El Zaatari, was from Lebanon, Francis was soon asked to get involved in the case. The American Lebanese Congress works to improve relations between Arabs, Christians and Jews; Francis has been honored for his activism by an invitation to the White House, courtesy of former first lady Hillary Clinton. The transportation engineer says he was initially skeptical about El Zaatari's innocence. "If he was guilty, then I didn't want to get involved with him," Francis recalls. "I wouldn't have anything to do with someone like that."
Six weeks after El Zaatari's arrest, his advocates -- including an outraged Malek Francis -- say the former Art Institute of Pittsburgh student was guilty of nothing more than failing to notify immigration officials that he'd left school, and forgetting he had a disposable utility knife he used in his artwork tucked into his laptop case when he boarded a Northwest Airlines plane bound for Beirut via Detroit and Amsterdam. Since then, he's been held without bail in Allegheny County Jail, locked 23 hours a day in a cramped protective custody cell, frightened of the other prisoners who have threatened to kill the accused "terrorist."
A week ago Attorney General John Ashcroft released El Zaatari's name along with 93 others who were charged with federal crimes after the aggressive anti-terror sweep spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks. But the U.S. attorney's office has offered no evidence linking the art student with any terror activities, and several law enforcement officials have admitted they don't think there is any. They defend El Zaatari's prosecution nonetheless, insisting he broke a federal law by carrying weapons on an airplane. Holding him without bail is necessary, they say, because he's a flight risk.
But his defenders insist federal officials are making an example of El Zaatari, and say he'd never have been detained in the first place if it wasn't a time when Americans look twice at young Middle Eastern men.
"Everyone knows he's harmless," insists Francis, who discovered that the young man he initially thought might be a terrorist came from the same town he did, Saida, Lebanon. El Zaatari turned out to be the nephew of Francis's high school principal, a courageous man who prevented marauding Palestinian militia men from kidnapping Christians like Francis from school, a few times receiving vicious beatings for his efforts. Now Francis is grateful for the chance to return the favor to young El Zaatari, even offering his house as collateral in an attempt to free the young man on bail, but so far his efforts have been unsuccessful.
"If he were connected to organizations or knew anyone it might be different, but he isn't," says an angry Francis. "In fact, his family has been victims of fanatics in Lebanon. It's time to let this poor guy go home."
