The Dr. Robert J. Goldstein Story

A Question of Balance

To members of the local Islamic community in Pinellas County and beyond, the comparatively lenient treatment that Goldstein and the other defendants received smacked of a double standard.

It was, they said, unimaginable that despite the vast array of weapons seized, despite the damning documents, federal authorities decided not to level terrorism charges after Goldstein pleaded guilty only to possessing the bombs. Even before the verdict was handed down, that sparked a burning controversy in Florida.

Ahmed Bedier

Ahmed Bedier, a spokesman for the local chapter of the Council for American Islamic Relations and a regular worshipper at the targeted mosque, told The Forward that he wondered whether federal prosecutors would have been more inclined to prosecute Goldstein and his accomplices under terrorism statutes a move which would have doubled their sentences if they had been Muslim. "That's the question we've been asking all along," says Bedier. "His acts fit the definition of terrorism regardless of who's committing it."

Imran Mandhai

In fact, Bedier contends, there are many in the Muslim community in Florida who noted with bitter irony a marked difference between the way federal prosecutors handled the Goldstein case and the way the feds handled another alleged ethnically motivated plot, the case of 20-year-old Imran Mandhai, of Hollywood, who was charged under terrorism statutes in 2002 after authorities determined that he was plotting to blow up a National Guard Armory and a power station. As in Goldstein's case, Mandhai had concocted his plot as part of an ethnic and politically motivated paramilitary campaign, authorities alleged. In the Mandhai case, authorities claimed that the goal was to trigger a jihad, and in October 2002, Mandhai was sentenced to 11 years and eight months. In fact, that sentence was a disappointment for federal prosecutors, however, who had hoped to use the sentencing guidelines contained in the terrorism statute to send Mandhai to prison for up to 191-anda-half years.

Nor was it just the Muslim community in Florida that railed against the comparatively light sentence prosecutors had sought in the Goldstein case.

Dr. Harvey Kushner

Terrorism expert Dr. Harvey Kushner of the University of Long Island, for example, conceded in an interview with The Forward that a double standard may have been at work in the Goldstein case. But he noted that it is equally possible that there was a subtle distinction between Goldstein's plot and similar acts by Islamic fundamentalists.

Certainly, he noted, there was a vast difference between a possibly deranged lone wolf like Goldstein and a member of an organized terror cell like those 19 men who brought down the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon and rained death on a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001. There might even be a difference, he said, between a disturbed outsider like Goldstein and the occasional lone Islamic extremist who is influenced by radical Jihadists already at war with America.

The case of Heshem Hadayet, the Egyptian immigrant who was killed in the summer of 2002 after he opened fire on an El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport is a case in point. Though the Hadayet case has since been reclassified as a terrorist incident, Kushner noted, it was initially investigated as a hate crime, a civil rights case.

The way Kushner sees it, Goldstein lacked the essential element a terrorist needs, the support, either implied or explicit, of the community he purported to represent. All the same, "if you're saying if the shoe was on the other foot, if this was an Arab trying to blow up a synagogue then he would have [faced] the terrorist charge, you might be right about that."

Others, like Steve Emerson, an author who tracks Islamic militant groups, insist that there was no double standard. "I have no problem calling Goldstein a terrorist, absolutely," Emerson told The Forward, noting that for Goldstein, it would be spelled with a small "t." "But where's the double standard?" The way Emerson sees it, it was likely that prosecutors decided that they had a better shot at getting Goldstein off the street if they charged him under civil rights statutes than by trying to navigate through what were then the uncharted waters of anti-terrorism statutes. Emerson insisted that federal prosecutors have made similar, equally controversial decisions in a number of cases, including cases involving Muslims with alleged links to terror groups. "There aren't that many terrorism charges made. Most of the charges are made on lesser areas [of the law)] because it's easier to convict," Emerson told The Forward.

"If you look at people connected to 9-11, there are people convicted of perjury, of visa violations," he told the newspaper "A visa violation is not exactly a terrorism charge."

For their part, prosecutors in the Middle District of Florida have always insisted that they played no favorites, and did not cut Goldstein a break. He received no special treatment because he was Jewish, Steve Cole, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa told The Forward and he received none because he was born in America.

"We have said from the very beginning, based on the evidence, based on the facts of the case...the appropriate charges were leveled...we wouldn't have treated him any differently if he had been another religion, another race," Cole told the newspaper. "The key thing is that this plot was foiled. Nobody got hurt, and everybody that was connected to it has been arrested and they're being sent to federal prison."