Last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris brought back the disturbing memory of an attack in D.C., by a sect of Black Muslims on several institutions, including B’nai Brith’s headquarters and D.C.’s City Hall. The disturbance was prompted in part by anger over a film about Mohammed. A city councilman caught a stray shot, which may have helped in his campaign for mayor a year later. The councilman was Marion Berry, and the year 1977.
My guess, dear reader, is this attack happened before you were born.
The attackers were dubbed ‘Hanafi Muslims’: a breakaway group from Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
In early March 1977, the Hanafis attacked the headquarters of the Jewish charitable organization B’nai Brith (where they took over 100 hostages), City Hall (where the Hanafis shot and killed a young reporter, and a security guard later died of wounds), and, interestingly, the Islamic Center of Washington.
Back then, City Hall’s neighbors were cheap eateries and strip joints. But Bnai’ Brith, like Charlie Hebdo, was in a very nice neighborhood, near the intersection of Connecticut and Rhode Island Avenues. It was diagonally opposite St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the site of President Kennedy’s funeral mass.
The Islamic Center is on Embassy Row overlooking the Rock Creek Parkway – another very nice neighborhood. But that didn’t stop the Hanafis from taking eleven hostages there.
Further, the Hanafi headquarters itself was located in a lovely Tudor style corner lot house on the west side of 16th Street, N.W. This large house was purchased for them by L.A. Lakers star Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
The house had a tasteful, but high, black metal fence. Behind the fence patrolled a man with ski mask toting a gun or machete, depending on the time of day.
Why didn’t the D.C. government or the feds do something about this clear indicator of trouble? Was it a free speech issue? Or perhaps the gun wasn’t loaded? Or was it fear leftover from the 1968 riots?
Whatever the reason, my friends and I (then a young woman from Silver Spring, Maryland) started taking a different route to Georgetown, so we wouldn’t have to drive by that house.
One good takeaway from the 1977 hostage crisis was three ambassadors from Islamic nations, Ardeshir Zahedi of Iran, Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan of Pakistan and Ashraf A. Ghorbal had extensive phone conversations with the Hanafi leader, Hamas Abdul Khaalis.
Even though Khaalis and his group were Americans, these ambassadors had the courage to intervene. They invoked the Koran to convince Khaalis to let the hostages go.
Eventually the three ambassadors and the D.C. police chief met with Khaalis at B’nai Brith, and he released the hostages. (In a 2007 interview, Jabbar admitted having been close to Khaalis, but that Khaalis “got bent.” Khaalis and his operatives received very long sentences in federal prison, and he died of old age in one in 2003.)
I thought about the ambassadors’ long-ago intervention when I saw Arabic leaders in the forefront of the Charlie Hebdo march this week in Paris. I hope today’s leaders were acting out of courage, and not just for a good photo-op.
But a basic question remains: have we really learned anything since 1977?
In the Hanafi case, the threat was in plain sight to anyone driving along 16th Street.
In Paris, it appears there were ‘no go’ zones where police shied away, giving terrorists freedom to make and execute their plans.
Does the march in Paris indicate an end to the ‘no go’ zones soon, or will the Charlie Hebdo deaths be forgotten – like those who died in 1977?
Just how many lives and lifetimes will it take before Western societies learn to stop terrorism by Islamic extremists? It’s been nearly forty years since D.C.’s Hanafi hostage crisis, and we still don’t have an answer.