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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 – 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.

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