"We're besieged," she explained. "Making a statement is about all we can do. They aren't delighted to see our flag wave. This is enemy territory."
Kathy had compiled a bulging dossier of press clippings and computer printouts about the masjid that grew in a once heavily Jewish area. Until the mid-1990s, its imam was the late Egyptian-educated Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, dispatched by the Saudis as a Wahhabi missionary in 1985 and financed by them thereafter. His disciple, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an explosives specialist, possibly helped assemble the bomb detonated in the '93 World Trade Center attack. He was convicted of plotting to blow up the UN, FBI headquarters and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. Gulshair acted as interpreter for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" now serving life for the first WTC bombing, conspiring to use explosives at other NYC landmarks and colluding to assassinate US politicians.
BUT OF more immediate concern to Kathy and the few leftover neighborhood natives is the "in-your-face insolence of the immigrants." For years the mosque had been calling the faithful to prayers via a rooftop loudspeaker five times daily. Police intervention persuaded the imam to omit the pre-dawn sonorous summons. Catholic Kathy knows all about "Allahu akhbar" and how the muezzin intones it.
On the way back, I decided to photograph the masjid, sensing it could make a story. Kathy became frantic. "Don't you dare," she almost yelled. As I slipped the camera back into my handbag, she explained that several weeks before my arrival two journalists, Bos Smith and Paul Williams, HAD photographed a similar Brooklyn mosque, Masjid al-Takwa. They were grabbed by 20 ninja-uniformed men, shoved into the mosque cellar, held captive and roughly interrogated by the group's henna-bearded leader, Ali Kareem. He released them only after they fibbed that they were interested in converting to Islam. On a subsequent visit to the site they were accosted again and an attempt was made to seize and break their camera.
"I don't know who may be watching us now," Kathy warned.
"This kind of a relationship," Kathy commented, "just isn't possible these days. Muslims call us infidels and want all infidels out. We're threatened."