OSCAR ALVAREZ/Daily Bruin UCLA alumnus Dr. Riad
Abdelkarim was released earlier this month from detainment
in Israel. He was never charged with a crime.
By Kelly Rayburn
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF
krayburn@media.ucla.edu
Dr. Riad Abdelkarim, the Orange County physician detained by
Israeli officials while on a Middle East fact-finding mission
earlier this month captivated a campus audience with the story of
his trip.
Addressing a crowd of about 100 people at Moore Hall Thursday
night, the man who helped found Al-Talib magazine while a student
at UCLA in the late 1980s told the gruesome details of destruction
in a Jenin refugee camp and described the pain of his own
incarceration.
Abdelkarim was held, Israeli officials said, on suspicion of
aiding terrorist groups, but he was never formally charged with a
crime. After numerous groups in the United States called for the
end to his detainment, an Israeli court sent him home, nearly two
weeks after his May 5 arrest.
While numerous media outlets, including the Daily Bruin,
reported Abdelkarim’s previous service on the board of
directors for The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development
““Â a Muslim charity group the Bush Administration said
was a front for Hamas ““ Abdelkarim said this had nothing to
do with his detainment. Such a link is a “smoke screen and a
red-herring ““ a way for them to put this in the context of
the war on terror,” Abdelkarim said.
He said his detainment was more likely due to his reports from
the West Bank and was part of a larger Israeli effort to deny
humanitarian aid to Palestinians and suppress efforts to report the
truth on the Mideast crisis.
While the Israeli government maintains it only targets terrorist
infrastructure in an effort to defend itself from Palestinian
attacks, Abdelkarim came back with horrific reports of destruction
of civilian neighborhoods. His most vivid accounts were of the
condition of a Jenin refugee camp about a week and a half after
Israel pulled out.
He read an e-mail he sent to friends and colleagues which began
with the preface that nothing ““ not the pictures he had seen,
any articles he had read, nor even his visits to other Palestinian
refugee camps and towns ““ could have prepared him for what he
saw and smelled in Jenin.
“A horrible, foul, spine-tingling odor struck me,”
he read. “It was the smell of death.”
Abdelkarim was fairly certain this e-mail, which ended up being
posted on the Internet, is what led to his detainment.
He hunger-struck his way through the bulk of his detention,
eating nothing, drinking only water and tea, he said. At one point,
he was moved to a smaller cell, he said.
“I slept on the ground, next to a hole in the ground that
served as a toilet,” he said.
While detained, family members, colleagues and friends from many
different organizations demanded Abdelkarim’s release. He
thanked his congressman, Christopher Cox, R”“Calif., and U.S.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D”“Calif., for working for his
freedom.
Before Abdelkarim spoke, Nagwa Ibrahim, a 2000 UCLA graduate,
spoke and showed a documentary she made on her own trip to the
Mideast.
“What I saw was much more than I thought I’d
see,” she said.
She remembered seeing houses destroyed, with signs that showed
those who had inhabited them did not plan on leaving.
“You see pots and pans … you see a baby’s shoe …
“ she said.
Abdelkarim also spoke of leveled buildings. He reported seeing
separate piles of rubble where a soap factory, orthodox church and
a mosque had stood. They were likely destroyed by F-16s or Apache
Helicopters ““ “our weapons,” he said. Noting
another example of U.S. influence in Israel, he said he was put in
U.S.-made Smith and Wesson handcuffs when arrested.
After the event, Abdelkarim said perhaps if more students paid
taxes, they would care more about the Mideast crisis.
“Our dollars go to the destruction that is wrought,”
he said.