Deportation Bid in Arab Case Focuses on Magazines

Democratic Palestine and Al Hadaf are not exactly mainstream magazines in this country. Circulating only a few thousand at best nationally, the Middle East-based publications carry big doses of propaganda on behalf of a Palestine Liberation Organization faction that has had a violent history.

Still, the magazines have been available at Arab-owned mom-and-pop shops that cater to the nation’s small Palestinian population. And Middle East scholars for years have been able to read the English-language Democratic Palestine and Al Hadaf, an Arabic-language publication whose title means “The Target,” in university libraries.

Now, these arcane publications have become a focal point of the government’s effort to deport a group of Arab immigrants for alleged subversive activities.

Along with a now-defunct sister magazine, they were cited by the government in the recent arrests of eight Los Angeles-area immigrants who are accused of membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist faction of the PLO.

Offer Glimpse

Some students of Palestinian politics say the magazines reveal ties between the Popular Front and another little-known faction based in San Francisco and they offer a glimpse into the Popular Front’s political views.

As he was being arrested Jan. 26, a subpoena for the periodicals was handed to Khader Musa Hamide, 32, of Glendale, a longtime alien resident who is alleged by the government to be the leader of the Popular Front in California.

Hamide, who studied business administration at the University of Oregon, was ordered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to “produce any and all records, ledgers, documents, files, books and materials” linked to Al Hadaf, Democratic Palestine and the now-defunct PFLP Bulletin, the forerunner of Democratic Palestine. The publications, the order declared, teach or advocate the “economic, international and governmental doctrines of world communism.”

Federal Case

Suddenly, magazines that for years had been readily available to anyone who wanted to read them were being used in a federal case to deport alleged political subversives under a 1952 law. The government has not indicated how the magazines will be used in deportation and bond hearings that are scheduled to take place today in U.S. Immigration Court.

Hamide, his wife, Julie Nyangugi Mungabh, 28 of Kenya, and the six other defendants have denied participating in Popular Front activities. Their lawyers have charged that the arrests constitute a “politically motivated” attack on the First Amendment rights of Arab-Americans.

“They (the government) seem to be focusing on these magazines, which clearly indicates their intent to limit constitutionally protected rights of speech and association,” said Dan Stormer, the lead attorney.

Beyond the civil rights issue, a number of Palestinians in California said in recent interviews that the Popular Front simply does not exist here or anywhere else in the United States and that the faction’s publications command little attention.

‘Not That Popular’

“You need to know that the Popular Front is not that popular,” said Osama Doumani, head of the San Francisco office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a former anthropology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

A harsher view of the Popular Front is taken by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the New York-based Jewish organization. The ADL maintains that the Popular Front is elusive because it has cloaked itself within the November 29 Committee for Palestine, a group headquartered in San Francisco that took its name in 1981 from a U.N. resolution promoting world solidarity on behalf of Palestinian refugees.

“Close observation and analysis of the activities of the November 29 (committee) indicates that it appears to be a de facto alliance between U.S. adherents of the Popular Front . . . and the (Trotskyist) Workers World Party (of New York) . . . “ a 1983 ADL report charged.

Local Chapters

In its literature, the committee describes itself as a coalition of more than 100 organizations, with 20 local chapters in the United States. It espouses self-determination for Palestinians and calls the U.S. government “a principal obstacle to resolving conflicts” in the Mideast. It also says, “The mass media try to make the very name ‘Palestinian’ synonymous with ‘terrorist.’ ”

At least one of the defendants, Hamide, has spoken at November 29-sponsored rallies, according to individuals who know him.

The ADL information was turned over to the FBI, which conducted the original investigation of the Arab immigrant defendants last year, according to David Lehrer, the ADL’s Los Angeles-based regional director.

Two of the Popular Front publications named in the government subpoena, the PFLP Bulletin and Democratic Palestine, were circulated through a post office box also used by a top member of the November 29 Committee, the ADL said.

When the PFLP Bulletin stopped production in Damascus, Syria, in November, 1983, readers were urged to write to P.O. Box 4145 in San Francisco to maintain their subscription to its successor, Democratic Palestine, which began publication in Syria the following January, according to the ADL.

Ranking Official

The box number, said the ADL, was identical to one used by Hilton Obenzinger, a ranking official of the November 29 Committee and a board member of the group’s newspaper, Palestine Focus, produced at the committee’s office in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Obenzinger, 39, a San Francisco political activist and poet who has taught American Indian children in rural California, made--and then broke--an appointment last week to meet with a Times reporter at his office.

Brian Hudson, an attorney on the legal team representing the Arab immigrants, said he advised Obenzinger not to be interviewed “because we do not know now whether or not the FBI is investigating” the November 29 committee.

According to a spokesman for the State Department’s Near East Asia desk, PFLP Bulletin’s roots go back to 1969, about two years after the Popular Front was founded by Dr. George Habash, an American-educated physician who molded the faction into an often-violent political force in the Middle East.

Subscription Rate

Its successor, Democratic Palestine, has a subscription rate in the United States of $24 annually, payable to a Beirut bank.

A recent 32-page copy of the English-language publication was sharply critical of “imperialist” Washington policies toward Libya, while writing at length in support of Moammar Kadafi’s Libyan regime; applauded the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan; denounced “Reagan’s soldiers of fortune” in Nicaragua, and repeatedly attacked Israeli policies in the Middle East.

“Reaching an imperialist settlement is a cornerstone in the U.S.’s foreign policy in order to consolidate the Zionist entity and its own domination of the Middle East,” charged one article.

Al Hadaf is a weekly publication backing the Popular Front, which, according to Edward Jajko, a Middle East expert at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, was founded in 1969 by Ghassan Kanafani, the late Palestinian writer.

Car Bombed

Kanafani, a Marxist Palestinian leader and a ranking member of the Popular Front, died outside his Beirut apartment in 1972 at the age of 36 when a bomb demolished his car as he was starting it. The murder of Kanafani along with his 17-year-old niece was never solved.

An influential novelist and journalist, Kanafani came to world attention as spokesman of the Popular Front during the hijacking of three Western jetliners to the Jordanian desert in 1970. Just before his death, he defended the May, 1972, terrorist massacre at Israel’s Tel Aviv airport as a strategic maneuver to revive the fighting image of the Popular Front.

The publication, according to the Hoover Institution’s Jajko and other Middle East scholars, probably circulates in the neighborhood of 20,000 copies and is considered one of half a dozen or so influential political publications in the Middle East.

A recent 50-page issue of Al Hadaf featured a much-bombed Palestine refugee camp on its cover, with a banner translating into “The Problems and the Solution.” One article attributed the troubles along the Palestinian West Bank settlements to the “fascism of the Zionist structure.” Another talked about Popular Front leader Habash pushing for national unity among the many PLO factions.

Published in Beirut until 1982, Al Hadaf is now produced in Cyprus, with editorial offices in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Algeria. Its per-issue cost in the Middle East is about $1 a copy; U.S. subscribers pay $150 annually.

Al Hadaf’s slogan is “All the Truth.”