A New Ambiguity is Haunting Mourners

There were prayers and bowed declarations of God’s greatness. Greetings of all-encompassing peace. The funeral procession and the handfuls of dirt that began to fill up the grave. Then the men left the dead to part with hard embraces and tears, and the women were given their opportunity to visit the grave, sitting and weeping on the gray soil.

This was the funeral for Abdullah Nimer, 53, a Palestinian American and father of six who was murdered while selling clothing door-to-door in working-class South Los Angeles.

The funeral was traditional, yet tinged with a new ambiguity that seems likely to plague any violent death of a Muslim living in America: No matter how explicitly the police say otherwise, family members cannot let go of the conviction that Nimer died because of his religion or race.

Nimer, who lived in Bell, was visiting customers in the 400 block of East 74th Street last week when a man walked up to him and demanded the keys to his van. Nimer apparently did not immediately give up the keys and was shot, police said. Nothing was taken--not the keys, his wallet or the merchandise in his van. The suspect fled in a brown, late-model Lincoln.

“We are treating this as a simple robbery,” Los Angeles Police Det. Bill Fallon said.

But at Nimer’s funeral Wednesday, the notion that he had become a collateral casualty of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would not be stilled.

“Just as terrorism is not what Islam stands for, hate crimes are not what America stands for,” Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, told mourners at a Garden Grove mosque.

Why, mourners asked each other, would anybody want to kill Nimer, particularly in a neighborhood where he had made many friends and customers over the years, and where before recent events, he had never been robbed or threatened?

They remembered a deeply religious, gentle man. “Ask his customers, his neighbors; it doesn’t matter what nationality they were, they were crying as much as us,” said one of Nimer’s sons, Islam, 21.

Linda Hernandez of South Gate, a customer for more than 14 years, said her adult daughters and granddaughters cried when they heard Nimer was killed. Her daughters were about 10 when they first met Nimer.

“He had so much class,” Hernandez said. “I know people were deeply hurt about what happened in New York, but let’s get the right person. . . . This man was one in a million.”

Nimer’s widow, Siham, 52, said her husband’s treks to visit customers had recently become laced with menace. Customers and those who knew him remained friendly, but others occasionally insulted or threatened him, she said.

“Some customers were told, ‘Don’t buy from these people. They’re ugly people,’ ” Siham said in Spanish, a language honed by the couple over many years of working with a mostly Latino clientele. “He would just close his ears and keep walking.”

He went out with trepidation, she said, feeling the need to support his family.

“There are few men like him. Thank God my children had a father like him,” she said.

The morning of Sept. 11, Nimer woke Islam and took him to the television.

“He told me, ‘We built a good community in 20 years, and all that work is gone in 20 minutes,”’ Islam recalled. It “was not Muslims who did this,” he recalled his father telling him. It was his father’s way of making a statement of faith: A true Muslim could not commit such an act any more than a true Christian.

“He saw it as an attack on Islam, too,” his son said.

Nimer brought his family from the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya near Ramallah in 1986. They had lived in Spain for a couple of years before returning to the West Bank and eventually coming to America, hoping for better economic prospects, better schools and an escape from the chronic violence that pitted Jew against Palestinians. Every summer, the father would take the family back to the West Bank, determined to keep the children rooted.

Once in the United States, Nimer sold clothes, bedspreads, curtains and other items door to door. From his home in Bell, he visited customers in Huntington Park, South Gate and surrounding communities. Over the years, he created a regular customer base so large that he no longer had to seek out new clients, said Mohammad Nimer, another son.

“He knew all their children,” Mohammad added. “They were very close to him.”

Many of his customers, like Hernandez, paid in installments, so they saw Nimer almost every week. He didn’t just collect money, Hernandez said. He came into the living room to chat and made it a point to see how her family was doing.

“He became like family,” she said.

Customers found out about his death on Spanish television. Many called his family in tears. Many tried to pay what they owed Nimer immediately in one lump sum, his wife said, but she insisted that they wait.

There have certainly been reasons for Muslim Americans to feel targeted, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The FBI is investigating the shooting death of a Christian Egyptian grocer in San Gabriel as a possible hate crime. An Afghan man’s hotel room was set ablaze with a Molotov cocktail in Ontario. And in Arizona, a Sikh--a member of an Indian group often mistaken for Muslim--was shot and killed by a man who police say claimed to have acted on America’s behalf.

“It’s been extremely stressful,” Ayloush said. “From day one, we were not allowed to grieve with the public. No one verbally told us we couldn’t, but the looks we got told us so. Many felt our grief was not genuine because of our religion. This hurts deeply.”

Islam Nimer said he always imagined the day that he and his siblings would enable their father to slow down. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to give my father that chance to rest.”

The family finds consolation in their religion. His father longed to die as a martyr before that word became perverted, made synonymous with suicidal acts of terror. For him, it meant dying innocent.

“I’m happy for him because I think he died a martyr,” Islam said. “I think he went straight to heaven.”