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Meet Your Muslim Neighbor

Has the Diocese Picked the Wrong Bedfellow?

By Anne Knight

Soon after the September 11 attack on America by Islamic terrorists, it was learned that three of the hijackers lived in San Diego. In the resulting atmosphere of tension, Rosemary Johnston, a local Catholic, began organizing town hall meetings called "Meet Your Muslim Neighbors." Their format typically consists of an introduction to Islam's tenets and practices and a question-and-answer session. The meetings are sponsored by a coalition including local Muslims and the diocesan ecumenical office, headed by Monsignor Dennis Mikulanis, pastor of Saint Charles Church. Another Catholic participant has been Father Bruce Orsborn, president of the Inter-religious Council and pastor of Saint Jerome Church.

"These meetings give us a chance to educate others about what we [Muslims] believe and respond to the fear and suspicion about the Muslim community that exist as a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks," explained Imam Sharif Battikhi, American Islamic Service Center director, as reported in the Ecumenical Council's January/February 2002 newsletter. Another Muslim leader who has played a prominent role in the forums is Imam Mohammad El-Mezain, a Muslim scholar and director of the largest U.S. Muslim charity's San Diego office. "The main enemy for society, besides the terrorists, is ignorance, and the best way to combat that is education," he said, according to the December 6 North County Times' report on a December 5 Meet Your Muslim Neighbor meeting in Vista. "The whole notion of Islam is a religion of peace," Mikulanis said, at the same meeting (San Diego Union-Tribune, 12/6/01). "We have to be very careful that we do not judge all Muslims by the actions of some." Orsborn, while participating in a November 27 meeting in Oceanside, said that "believing the terrorists were an accurate reflection of the Islamic faith would be similar to believing that Adolph Hitler and his followers were an accurate reflection of the Christian faith." According to a spokesman for the American Muslim Coalition of San Diego, San Diego County has approximately 14 mosques and 80,000-100,000 Muslims.

As of December 4, the credibility of such efforts to disassociate the local Muslim community from Muslim terrorism may have suffered a setback. On that day, under a directive from President Bush, 12 armed federal agents raided and closed the Rancho Penasquitos office of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, El-Mezain's organization. The office in San Diego was established a little over a year ago and was one of four offices of the Texas-based organization, which is accused by the U.S. government of having ties to Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group committed to destroying Israel. The foundation's assets were seized and its bank accounts were frozen nationwide. Hamas is known for developing suicide bombing as a weapon and is considered the largest and most deadly of the militant Palestinian organizations.

Johnston and El-Mezain have collaborated in organizing the Meet Your Muslim Neighbor meetings. Johnston does not appear alarmed by the federal actions against El-Mezain's organization: "It doesn't mean that they're guilty. They're [Muslim organizations] all going to be under the microscope" San Diego Union-Tribune, 12/5/01). Is the diocese alarmed? The above-mentioned December 5 meeting in Vista was the third in the series and, as of late March, eight such meetings had been held in the county. An announcement in the March 3 Saint Rose of Lima parish bulletin for a March 16 meeting in Chula Vista stated, "Among the organizations supporting this event is the Roman Catholic Diocese Office for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs." El-Mezain was a participant in that meeting, which was moderated by Johnston. I called Father Mikulanis on April 17, to request comment on the diocese's co-sponsorship of the Meet Your Muslim Neighbor meetings, in light of the government's accusations against the Holy Land Foundation and the fact that El-Mezain is a high-level foundation official. "As far as I'm concerned, News Notes is the publication of Satan," he responded, when I said I was working on an article on the Meet Your Muslim Neighbor meetings. "You never say anything positive about the Church -- never, ever -- and I'd just as soon not talk to you. So, have a nice day." He then hung up. Father Orsborn was unavailable for comment. The March 16 presentation was held at Rancho Del Rey Middle School. When the three Muslim panel members were introduced, no mention was made of El-Mezain's affiliation with the Holy Land Foundation. When asked about it during the question-and-answer period, he and the other two panelists began to respond. One of the other two panelists was the above-mentioned Sharif Battikhi. They denied that the Holy Land Foundation has any relationship with Hamas. They maintained that the foundation is helping the truly needy in Palestine, acknowledging that foundation funds may be going to families involved in Hamas but implied that this circumstance does not constitute aid to terrorism. One panelist explained that they don't make assistance to orphans contingent on what their parents did. The panelists blamed the U.S. government's actions against the foundation on the Israeli government. They pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had visited Bush shortly before the raids occurred. They depicted the move as being part of an American strategy to satisfy the Israelis.

However, others paint a different picture of the Holy Land Foundation. In 1993, says the fbi, three foundation officials met with five Hamas leaders in Philadelphia and discussed how to disrupt the peace process and overthrow the Palestinian Authority. At a 1994 meeting in Mississippi, Hamas officials indicated that the Holy Land Foundation was its primary U.S. fund-raising organization, the fbi asserts. The fbi accuses the foundation of paying for 11 U.S. fund-raising tours by two prominent Hamas members, one of whom allegedly said, at a 1994 fund-raiser in Los Angeles: "Finish off the Israelis! Kill them all! Exterminate them! No peace ever!" The fbi report asserts that, after the speech, El-Mezain appealed to the crowd to donate money and mentioned that he had raised $1.8 in the U.S. that year for Hamas. The Bureau alleges that El-Mezain stated outright, in two other 1994 fund-raising speeches, that foundation monies collected are for Hamas and that he travels throughout the country for this purpose. Stephen Schwartz, writing in the Weekly Standard (12/17/01), calls the Holy Land Foundation a Hamas front group which "concerned American Muslims have denounced ... on numerous occasions. The hlf has been more than a fund-raising arm of those who organize suicide bombings in Israel. It has been the nerve center of the radical Islamist organizational structure in the United States, manipulating a network of interlocking groups." One of the allegedly interlocking groups identified by Schwartz is the Council on American-Islamic Relations. At the December 5 meeting, one of the panelists was the San Diego representative of this council.

The March 22 Union-Tribune reported that Rosemary Johnston was to be saluted by the San Diego Mediation Center as a peacemaker for organizing the Meet Your Muslim Neighbor meetings. By now her résumé of social involvement is lengthy. Johnston was fired as the diocesan pro-life office director in 1991 for her public dissent from the Church's teaching on contraception. In June 1994 she organized and led a picket outside the U.S. bishops' meeting in La Jolla to protest the pope's statement prohibiting women's ordination. After leaving her diocesan position, she worked with St. Vincent de Paul Village and became involved with the Ecumenical Council of San Diego County. She helped found the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the Ecumenical Council's Interfaith Shelter Network. In addition to serving as the network's director, in March she became the Ecumenical Council's executive director. "I think the town meetings have proved an important opportunity for them [Muslims] to distinguish themselves from the terrorists and help people realize that when you look at the Koran, 'Muslim terrorist' really is an oxymoron," Johnston told the U-T.

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