[yaweeka]

When fear changes everything
by
Bob Braun

Fear. This is no way to live.

Parents bring their children to see Dr. Monir Dawoud at his office, tell him the kids are too frightened to sleep in their bedrooms. "What should they do?" they ask.

Rafat Toss, once a prosecutor himself, now a commercial litigator, comes home to Jersey City at night and checks his closets. "I've never done that before."

Angad Zakhary, who buys and sells real estate, says he looks out his window every five minutes. "I want to know whether anyone is out there."

Another guy, Samir Assaad, a computer engineer, looks at me and he asks, "How do I know who you really are?"

Fear. It has its own life. Spawned by the vicious killings of a family of four -- bad enough, horrible enough -- but fed by rumors and by history and by memories so that it infects so many more. Part of the air they breathe now in Jersey City.

"This is easy for me to say," says Edward DeFazio, the Hudson County prosecutor, "but people should just be calm and patient.

"This looks like a unique incident. Nothing like has ever happened before, here, anywhere in the United States. You got to work by history, and there's no history of this and so there's no reason to believe it fits any sort of pattern or will happen again."

Fear. It's real, and should not be ignored.

Or exaggerated.

The problem is: The crime was so awful, so vicious. A young, poor, immigrant family -- Hossam Armanious, 47, his wife, Amal Garas, 37, and their two children, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8. They were bound and gagged and stabbed repeatedly.

The problem is -- a context and a history. They are Egyptian Copts. Christians, a minority that has lived uneasily for centuries with Muslims in their home country where there has been sectarian violence.
"Many of us escaped from Egypt to live here where we could live in peace," says Dawoud. "Where we could live without fear."

"Now it's like a curse following us wherever we live," says Assaad.

That's not the only context, not the only history. The word "terrorism" comes up in conversation. This is not a part of the country accustomed to religious violence, but it is a place where the word has its own negative cachet.

"Of course, this is terrorism," says Dawoud. "An act designed to create fear."

But why would terrorists attack a waiter and his postal employee wife and two young daughters who live in a nonde****** little house in Jersey City?

"If you don't feel safe in your home, then Bin Laden has won," says Dawoud.

And the Copts of Jersey City would feel less isolated, less alone, less besieged, if the rest of us saw what happened in the context of a word we all fear. They're afraid this will be written off as an obscure feud between sects from one country -- and forgotten.

Dawoud also wants Copts to have the right to keep registered guns in their homes for self-defense. DeFazio is quick to respond-- "There is no way we're distributing gun permits on the basis of religion. That's just not going to happen."

The problem is -- distrust. A sense that investigators might be afraid, for whatever reason, to tell the truth, that the truth would create complicated political problems.

"What I fear more now is a whitewash," says Toss, the attorney. "We're not sure the authorities will come out and tell us the truth. But we need to know it, no matter what it is. We need to know it so the fear stops."

DeFazio bristles a little at the suggestion. "Look, if this is religious, we're not going to hide it. We're going to say it. Right now, we don't know that it is."

Yes, another problem -- the paucity of facts in a boiling ocean of rumor and speculation and, yes, of course, fear. Among Jersey City Copts, the killings are a matter of constant conversation, but what can be said that is new when so little is known?

Some publications -- not this one, DeFazio quickly points out -- have printed rumors. They can be denied but they live on, nurtured by fear. In coffee shops, in private homes, what starts out as a maybe ends up three conversations later as sworn fact.

"The prosecutor's office has to be more open and more forthcoming," says Toss. "We have to know the facts that they know."

But facts to grab in a storm of fear bestow power and legitimacy on those who own them. Dawoud, for example, head of the American Coptic Association, talks with authority about the condition of the bodies. As if the surgeon knew, as if he saw them.

But did he? "I cannot say," he says.

No, I'm afraid that's not good enough. If he knows, he should say.

Fear. It's not going away.

"Let's assume this wasn't a religious crime," says Toss. "Let's assume it was a burglary. Had nothing to do with religion. Well, that's scary enough. Who kills four people in the middle of a burglary? And why wouldn't they break into someone else's house? My house? Your house?"

Fear.

No way to live.