Stile: Cardinale wins on terror card

Friday, November 9, 2007

By CHARLES STILE
RECORD COLUMNIST

Thank goodness the campaign in the 39th Legislative District is over. If it had lasted another week, Republican Sen. Gerald Cardinale might have designed a mailer with his Democratic opponent, Joe Ariyan, shaking hands with Osama bin Laden.
Sound absurd? Of course it does. But given Cardinale's strategy in the final days of the race, nothing was beyond the realm of implausibility.

Terrified of losing his Senate seat, Cardinale played the terror card himself in a smear-by-association ploy. Through fliers, ads and interviews on a political Web site, he suggested that Ariyan, who practices law in Hackensack, was backed by "those who support extremism" and had himself defended "suspected terrorists."

Like any poisonous campaign attack, Cardinale's ads glossed over, omitted and stretched facts to create a terribly distorted impression of Ariyan as a terrorist sympathizer. Fresh off his victory Tuesday, Cardinale remains unapologetic.

"I was so offended by what I saw I that I felt" it should be part of the campaign, he said. "I have Arab friends. I have Jewish friends. ... They were all incensed at what they saw."

Cardinale's constituents are the ones who should be incensed by his tactics.

In fact, the attack leaves a legacy of infamy not only for Cardinale but for the entire state Republican Party, which condoned it with its silence. The normally voluble Tom Wilson, the Republican state chairman, did not return two calls seeking comment.

It was also a setback for the North Jersey Arab-American community, which has struggled mightily since Sept. 11 to earn public and political acceptance. Cardinale's terror card reinforced the post-9/11 suspicion that all Arab-Americans are sympathetic to Islamic terrorists, said Aref Assaf, president of the American Arab Forum, an advocacy group based in Morris County.

"We are being scapegoated. That is the bottom line," Assaf said. "We are an easy target."

Assaf likewise said he was disappointed by the Democratic Party's "half-hearted" response. Instead of publicly condemning the attacks, they chose to take a below-the-radar approach, calling Jewish households with pre-taped messages from U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Steve Rothman discrediting the Cardinale attack as "foul play."

"Maybe they are afraid that they themselves would be viewed as soft on terrorism," Assaf said.

Ariyan denies that his campaign ducked the issue. He said they were locked in their own chaotic get-out-the-vote effort, leaving little time to respond. "Hindsight is 20-20," Ariyan said.

Here is a synopsis of Cardinale's accusation:

Ariyan's law partner, Hani Khoury, is a past president and current board member of the North Jersey chapter of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, which Cardinale says is an extremist group whose members have expressed support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Of particular interest was Hussein Ibish, a former national spokesman who once called Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a "monster, war criminal, ethnic cleanser, mass murderer and terrorist."

He extrapolated that Khoury must share the same views -- and that Ariyan was tainted by the campaign donations he received from Khoury.

Now here's the view of the ADC that Cardinale omitted:

The group was founded by a former congressman in 1980 to debunk stereotypes and promote racial tolerance. It collaborates with civil rights organizations and conducts diversity training for Homeland Security, a spokeswoman said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has met with the group's top officials and her predecessor, Colin L. Powell, addressed its national convention. It condemns terrorism and advocates a peaceful "two-state" resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

(Ibish, for his part, said in an interview that he wrote his inflammatory remarks when he was a college student not affiliated with the ADC. He called them "intemperate'' and said his views have since evolved.)

"We don't consider them to be an extremist organization,'' said Etzion Neuer, regional director of the New Jersey chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. "They are a mainstream Arab-American organization with which we have had serious disagreements."

Cardinale also distorted his opponent's involvement with Arab-American immigrants detained shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

"As founding partner in his law firm, Ariyan chose to defend illegal immigrants suspected of terrorism after 9/11 and later deported from our country,'' an ad in The Record last Sunday charged.

Ariyan said Cardinale got it dead wrong: The firm's clients were being held on immigration violations, such as overstaying a visa, not for terrorism. They were defended by Khoury, who is an immigration lawyer.

That's not the only thing Cardinale got wrong. The ad's fine print cites an Oct. 1, 2005, article in The Record as the factual basis for the accusation. Only, there was one small problem -- there was no such article. A campaign official acknowledged they intended to cite an Oct. 5, 2001, account.

Even so, that article yields no evidence to sustain the charge. There is no mention of Ariyan at all. Khoury is quoted, discussing challenges his unnamed clients face -- on immigration violations, not terrorism charges.

Ironically, Cardinale got help in his campaign from a blistering mailer by the Jewish Defense League, which the FBI classified in 2000 as a "violent extremist Jewish organization."

He also got help from Allen Rapaport, a 51-year-old flooring contractor and Norwood Republican who won a council seat Tuesday. Rapaport formed the Bergen County Council of Concerned Jewish Sentinels with about a half-dozen friends in response to Ariyan's candidacy, he said.

Rapaport ran an ad in two weekly Jewish newspapers last week condemning Ariyan as "a problem politician" who "has ties to the troubling ADC organization whose national spokesman has spewed some of the most hateful anti-Semitic propaganda in recent history."

"I know Gerry forever," he said Wednesday. "I called him up and I said, 'Gerry. What do I do? This is a threat to my soul.' So Gerry gave us some guidance."

That guidance now has Khoury and the ADC exploring a possible lawsuit against Cardinale and Rapaport, they said. Ariyan said he's also considering a rematch in four years. "I'm still so much in shock that he would stoop to this level for the purposes of winning an election,'' he said.

For Assaf, the immediate future is dispiriting. One party rubbed dirt in a raw wound, the other failed to speak out in his community's defense. For people struggling for acceptance, "this is very painful," Assaf said.

Staff Writer Elise Young contributed to this column.


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