Remember Ari

For those who travel over the Brooklyn Bridge from the East River Drive, you might have wondered why the road leading to the bridge is called the “Ari Halberstam Ramp.” Twelve years ago, a 16-year-old rabbinical student, Ari Halberstam, was gunned down by an Islamic terrorist inflamed by the rhetoric from his imam in a Brooklyn mosque. The New York Sun remembers Ari but the New York Times, unfortunately, is sympathetic to those who preach the hated in the mosque of Ari’s killer. From the New York Sun:

No sooner had the New York Times launched its series on the Imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge than the phone rang at The New York Sun. It was Devorah Halberstam, the mother of Aaron "Ari" Halberstam, a 16-year-old rabbinical student gunned down on the Brooklyn Bridge on March 1, 1994. She was calling to say that Monday would be the 12th anniversary of the murder of her son and that the mosque the Times was extolling as a seat of peaceable Islam was the place from which Rashid Baz set out on the shooting spree that claimed her son.

The current Imam at the ISBR, Sheik Reda Shata, is described by the Times as “neither a firebrand nor a ready advocate of progressive Islam … He is in many ways a work in progress, mapping his own middle ground between two different worlds … who embrace American freedom and condemn the radicals they feel have tainted their faith.” This is the same man who said the “lion of Palestine has been martyred” when the founder of Hamas was killed by Israel. The article continues to show how little has changed in this mosque ... and the New York Times.