by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
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Like the last entry in this blog, the following is an excerpt of a book I am developing called Terror in the Land of the Living. This is chapter 5, "Holding Hands". I felt it was appropriate to publish it now, in the wake of the recent deadly jihadist attack in Toulouse, France - and the global reactions to it. As always, your feedback is more than welcome.
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It was Saturday. David, although not a particularly observant Jew, enjoyed attending the Sabbath services offered at the off-campus Chabad House. The prayers were more like those he was familiar with from back home, from his local synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood he was from. The Chabadniks prayed in Hebrew; they prayed at ease with themselves and with their guests – an eclectic mix of different kinds of people, but overwhelmingly college Jews in search of something they just could not find at the campus Hillel House. Besides, all the local Israelis, if they went anywhere at all for prayers, went to Chabad.
The building was a regular apartment walk-up that had served as off-campus housing in the past.
As the Torah scroll was raised high in the air by a young Jew who looked like he was probably enrolled in the campus ROTC, David heard the distinct sound of several gunshots from not too far away outside. It was loud enough that most people paused in their chanting, but not disruptive enough to cause the young rabbi to halt the services.
Before he knew why, or what he was going to do, David was out the front door of the building. He noticed that the security guard assigned to the synagogue entrance - a large, imposing African-American man - had his hand on the pistol he kept holstered at his side.
"What's going on?" David asked the guard.
He pointed at the Hillel House, just inside the campus grounds. David went pale. His mind raced. The Hillel Sabbath services were underway there now. Billy was likely attending; surely Ruth, as well.
Ruth.
"I radioed in a call to the police," the nervous guard continued. But David was already gone, sprinting towards the Hillel House.
The police were just getting settled in there, as was a special weapons and tactics unit, and some unidentified people in dark suits. Probably FBI, David thought. The police were arrayed behind their vehicles, four cars and a van, aiming rifles and pistols at the top floor of the two-story building. David was kept behind a police barricade with several dozen other onlookers. 'How had the cops and the Feds arrived so fast?' he wondered.
A silhouette moved in front of a window. Police snipers peered through scopes, but it was impossible to discern if the figure was hostage or hostage-taker.
Considering the times and the target, David doubted it was a hostage situation at all.
He was right.
After a few minutes, while the commanding police officer was discussing with the men in dark suits what steps should be taken next, there was a loud shout from the Hillel House's upper floor. That was followed by an explosion that shook the whole street and collapsed the Jewish student center in on itself.
"Oh no," David thought during the terrible moment of silence that followed, "not here."
The policemen, medics, FBI agents and David all raced to get to the ruins, to try and save who could be saved. They stopped as they approached the crumbled ruins. Strewn about were dismembered bodies, blood and human flesh. And prayer books.
The would-be rescuers paused and waited for a moment. They hoped to hear cries of agony, screams of fear. But there was nothing. Not a sound but rubble settling.
There were normally over forty people who attended Saturday services at the Hillel House.
The rescue workers dove in. They carefully cast aside beams, concrete slabs, brick walls, trying desperately to find a sign of life. All they found were desecrated bodies and desecrated religious articles. As they searched, every once in a while someone called out for silence, thinking they had heard something. Again and again, their hopes were dashed.
After three hours of painstaking and back-breaking searching, someone again shouted for quiet. All work stopped.
Then, they heard it - a weak cough from deep beneath a collapsed eastern section of the outer wall of the House.
All hands shifted into high gear. Lifting, pulling, pushing. Until, finally, hand touched hand.
"Hang on!" the firefighter said, grasping at the victim's fingers. "Can you hear me? Can you speak to me?"
There was a raspy sound in response, a cough and then a weak shout, "Get me out of here!"
It was a woman's voice. With only one hand free, she was drowning in the smashed concrete and bricks, desperate for relief.
The time passed slowly. The firefighter held her hand. They talked. He told her to hold on, that she was nearly free. She told him her name - Ruth - and that she was a student. He introduced himself as Will O'Brien. Her speech was punctuated with cries of pain and fear. She began to fade in and out of coherence.
"Get going people!" O'Brien shouted.
Seconds later, there was a loud crack and the few parts of the building's western wall that still stood leaned further down to join the rest of the rubble. The rescue workers were forced to stop, for fear of causing further collapse onto themselves. A commanding firefighter ordered everyone out of the wreckage. Quickly, but carefully, they picked their way off the heap that had been the Jewish student center of Dulles University mere hours before.
"O'Brien!" shouted the chief.
Will glanced at the western wall, he glanced at the hand he held in his own. He began to unlock his fingers, already sore from holding Ruth's hand so tight for so long. She didn't respond. She didn't object or move at all.
Ruth was dead.
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Over the next week, the rubble was cleared, the bodies removed and identified, and the administration and students were in shock. Reporters from every state in the Union and from most industrialized states in the world invaded the campus. Dulles University took its place beside the Twin Towers in the collective consciousness of America.
Almost.
Within a week after that, the tune changed. The victims of what came to be called "4/10", nearly all 34 of them, were Jews, after all. And the killer, an Arab. Jews are killed by Arabs because of Israel, went the common thinking on campuses and in newspaper editorial board meetings. Then the Dulles attack wasn't really terrorism, per se, was it?
The newspapers added a new phrase to the American public marketplace of ideas: "Misdirected attack". All that happened at Dulles, the editorialists and the analysts explained, was a "misdirected attack". More forthrightly, many left-wing and a few far-right columnists wrote that the blame for the attack on the American university lies with Israel, with the Jews in government and in the media.
David did not have time, of course, to read any of the newspaper coverage of the "misdirected attack" that killed his friends Billy and Ruth, along with many other fellow Jews. He was too busy attending funerals and visiting houses of mourning on the upper East Coast. He'd been to New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, but New Jersey had been the hardest. Ruth was from New Jersey; Teaneck, to be precise.
The town seemed to David to be a fairly conservative, upper class Jewish enclave. He noted that the Margolis house stood out with its "nature look". He couldn't tell if it was simply overrun with weeds and vines, or if it was meant to have that amount of growth all over the front yard. An old wooden sign that said "Nuclear Free Zone" hung from rusty hooks over the front porch.
The house was filled with people of all kinds - Jews and non-Jews, religious adherents and atheists, locals and people who traveled great distances to console the devastated couple. Kitty Margolis sat on a large, Indian print pillow on the floor of her living room, looking extremely tired and unresponsive. Her husband, Phil, was nowhere to be seen, but David later learned that the day after he heard the news of his only child's death he had retreated to a little art studio he'd built in a shed in the backyard, coming out only to eat.
David hesitated at the entry to the living room. He knew that according to Jewish tradition one does not speak until spoken to in a house of mourning, but this hardly appeared to be a family that was a stickler for tradition. But what would he say, anyway?
Suddenly, as if sensing a new presence in the room, Ruth's mother looked up and toward the door to the room.
(Many years later, Phil Margolis told an interviewer from Art and Artist magazine that the paintings he created in the week after Ruth's death were "the most authentic I'd ever done. But they are also utterly empty, a void - because what else can one feel at such a time? - so I never sold them. I just can't.")
David stayed away from the endless campus "memorials" and "vigils", meant primarily to assuage the conscience of the campus administration. There were no such events organized by the Jewish student community, anyway, as most of its leading activist members were now dead.
Yet, it was the Muslim students, led by Hashim Shak'a, who strutted around campus wearing oppression like it was a new cologne. Every time the bombing was discussed, Muslim students went on the offensive, directing conversation away from the Jewish victims and towards the killer's motivations. They complained about prejudice; about stereotypes; but mostly about what they saw as harassment by Federal investigators.
Practically every Muslim and Arab student was questioned, and some were also paid a visit by INS officials. Even the campus imam, Hassan Shahzad, was questioned at length by the agents. That chat, as Imam Shahzad called it, was just informative, he reassured the students at the mosque the following Friday. He said that he informed the investigators that no one in his community could possibly be responsible for the bombing. "Ask the Zionist activists if they know anything," Shahzad had cordially suggested.
A conservative student journal on campus, The Voice of Reason, was prohibited from publishing for the remainder of the school year by the court of the student union after publishing a cartoon that featured a reporter writing a story on the latest Hollywood action film and telling his editor that Muslims were behind the film. When asked how he knows, the cartoon reporter replies, "Well, it was a bomb." The editor, Michael Goodfriend, called the action of the student union censorship and tried to enlist the help of national civil rights organizations, but to no avail.
Then came the statement issued by Dean Harvey Bouket. It became the email heard 'round the world.
After a half-hour-long meeting with the campus imam, Hassan Shahzad, Dr. Bouket addressed a gathering one evening of Muslim students in honor of the opening of a new wing to the campus mosque. At that gathering, the Dulles Dean praised the Islamic past and expressed hope for a brighter future. He condemned the attack carried out on the grounds of his school, saying that it was the act of one man and not of an entire community. He condemned the "hostile environment" that Muslim students now had to endure, thanks to prejudice and the FBI investigations.
"The Muslim community," Dr. Bouket said, "has become a victim of this terrible attack just as the Jewish community has so become."
Despite the ensuing thunderstorm of emails and letters, phone calls from former students and wealthy benefactors, and visits from state officials, Bouket refused to budge.
No apologies, no retractions.
