A woman who works for the IS team on the floor above me is married to an Iraqi aerospace engineer. Unfortunately, because of bigotry around the time of the Gulf War, he found he couldn’t get an engineering job—so he opened a pizza restaurant.
On Saturday, after several threats, an arsonist torched their restaurant.
Here’s the report from the Boston Globe:
PLYMOUTH - When an arsonist torched Salah El-Ehmeada’s pizza shop early Saturday, one of the first things to burn was a photograph of his two small children dressed as Santa’s elves.
The picture hung near the cash register, where El-Ehmeada often stood, chatting with customers and sending drivers out on deliveries.
El-Ehmeada is not a US citizen, but his life has many of the trappings of middle-class America. He and his wife, Shari, a Massachusetts native and security systems engineer at IBM, drive a minivan. They live in an apartment in Marshfield and are saving to buy a house. Their oldest son attends South Shore Head Start.
But whoever set fire to the Pizza Pie shop in a West Plymouth strip mall near the town airstrip didn’t see them as just another middle-class family, said El-Ehmeada, because they were blinded by prejudice.
“This is un-American. America was not built on this,” he said, standing in the blackened shell of his restaurant.
Early Saturday morning, someone broke into the closed shop through a back door and set fire to a stack of paper bags beneath the cash register. Before they left, they opened all the gas valves on the stove, El-Ehmeada said.
Fire spread up the walls, burning pictures, ceiling tiles, and insulation. Firefighters smashed a plate-glass window and cut holes in the roof to douse the blaze.
The State Police fire marshal’s office considers it an apparent arson, but investigators have not characterized it as a hate crime. Other than El-Ehmeada’s Middle-Eastern background, there was no evidence at the scene that suggested that he was targeted because of his ethnicity, said Lieutenant Paul Maloney, a State Police spokesman. He added, however, that investigators can’t rule that out.
El-Ehmeada - “Sal” to customers who know him - came from a town in Iraq called Mosul, 400 miles north of Baghdad on the Turkish border. His parents sent him to Britain in 1980 to get a Western education, he said, and he never returned. He studied aeronautical engineering in Canada but could not get work as an airline mechanic - a victim, he said, of discrimination during the Gulf War. He moved to the United States in 1997 and opened Pizza Pie in 1999.
Plymouth police and fire officials would not release information yesterday, referring questions to State Police.
El-Ehmeada said that he has no doubt that his business was set on fire by someone filled with ethnic rage after last week’s terrorist attacks. The day of the attacks, El-Ehmeada said, he received six or seven telephone calls from people spewing racial epithets and slurs. The next day, he called police after finding a spent shell casing, placed on end, outside the shop’s front door.
He received several more threatening calls but things seemed to quiet down until 5 a.m. Saturday, he said, when authorities called about the fire.
Watching on television from his shop Tuesday morning, El-Ehmeada said, he felt the same shock and revulsion as the rest of America, with an additional touch of shame that the terrorist acts may have been carried out in the name of Islam.
“I felt like a guy who comes from a good family, a great family,” he said, “and he wakes up one day and his brother is a serial killer on TV.”
Sandra McDonald of Carver expressed distrust of El-Ehmeada as she shopped at a nearby store, saying that she had heard that he had a flight simulator on his computer. Otherwise, the reaction from surrounding neighborhoods in Carver and Plymouth was supportive. A steady stream of customers and friends stopped by to express their concern as El-Ehmeada tried to clean up. One woman brought apple cobbler and cookies.
Linda Blankenship of Carver took her three children into the smoky ruins.
“This is what prejudice does to people. Look around here and learn,” she told them. “This is the ugliness of racism and hatred.”
“He didn’t do anything,” said her daughter, Marykate, 11. “He was making pizza.”