The New York Times · 3 April 2002

CP-2002-101

Threatened, Couple Flee Apartment In Brooklyn

By SUSAN SAULNY

Scan 588 × 1004 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

Death threats have prompted a Brooklyn couple to leave their home amid anger over reports that one of their sons, a humanitarian worker in the Middle East, shared breakfast with Yasir Arafat after being trapped in the Palestinian leader’s besieged compound over the weekend, the couple’s family said.

Noah Shapiro, a Manhattan lawyer, said that his parents, Stuart and Doreen Shapiro, who are both public school teachers, fled their home in Sheepshead Bay on Sunday to stay with friends out of state. He added that he did not feel safe in New York anymore, even as the police presence around his apartment has increased.

“I don’t even think we can measure the emotional toll,” he said. “People in New York have interpreted my brother’s actions to say that he is a terrorist, a traitor, an aide to Arafat. And none of this is based on fact.” In news interviews over the weekend, Adam Shapiro, the humanitarian worker, said he became trapped for a night in Mr.

Arafat’s compound after persuading Israeli military authorities to let ambulances in to treat the injured. He said Mr. Arafat offered him breakfast as a sign of thanks. The death threats against Mr. Shapiro’s parents began after he left the compound on Saturday. The threats to the Shapiros came via e-mail and telephone messages.

Fliers went up around Brooklyn urging people to dial a number where a message denounced Adam Shapiro as a traitor to America and the Jews, compared him to John Walker Lindh and urged his parents to condemn him. The recording even left a purported home address. A Web site also listed personal information about the Shapiro family and urged action against them, Noah Shapiro said.

According to Noah Shapiro, most of the messages wish “a fiery death” to the entire family. “Some of the messages say, ‘We hope,’ and others say, ‘This will happen to you and we will make it happen to you.’” He said the family was turning over all messages to the police, who are monitoring the family’s phone lines.

A spokeswoman for the Police Department refused to comment, citing security issues for the family, but Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, confirmed calling law enforcement officials on the family’s behalf. “This is sinister and serious,” Mr. Foxman said.

“We find it reprehensible to target anybody based on what they believe and what they stand for, whether or not we believe in their actions.” In a telephone interview from his home in Ramallah, Adam Shapiro expressed a sense of disbelief about what is happening to his family. “It’s not that I don’t understand people’s anger,” he said.

“But I do think it’s based on hatred and not on a balanced and fair understanding of the situation.”

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. The newspaper is printed on the clipping in the photograph’s credit line, “Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times”. THE DATE IS NOT PRINTED ANYWHERE ON THE CLIPPING: there is no masthead, no folio and no dateline, and the date recorded here comes from the hand-typed slide label. The article’s own references — Adam Shapiro leaving Yasir Arafat’s besieged compound on the Saturday, his parents leaving Brooklyn on the Sunday, and a photograph taken “yesterday” — place the paper on 2 or 3 April 2002 and so corroborate the label to within a day without confirming it. This is a different page from the archive’s other 3 April 2002 records: it is a New York metropolitan story and shares no text with either Mideast page of that date.

Cite this clipping

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