Chicago Tribune - March 28, 2003
WARTIME STREETS NEW YORK CITY: 'No war!' in city that knows war
By Dan Mihalopoulos Tribune staff reporter
Manohar Kanuri left his home last weekend, not 200 feet from where the World Trade Center once stood, and headed along the Manhattan streets that had been closed for months while workers cleared the rubble from the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
His destination: A huge anti-war demonstration in Manhattan.
"I know how it is to be a victim of war and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, least of all innocent people," said Kanuri, 42, an unemployed stock analyst whose business dried up after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Despite promises that the war in Iraq will make the U.S. safer from terrorism, residents of the city most affected by terrorism are far less enthusiastic for the battle than other Americans. And the more a New Yorker was affected personally by Sept. 11, the weaker the impulse seems to be for attacking Iraq as a means of avenging the more than 2,800 lives lost here.
A poll released this week showed that just after the conflict began, New Yorkers became more supportive of the war and President Bush's handling of it. Still, with nearly 70 percent of Americans backing the war, just 47 percent of New Yorkers support it, while 49 percent are opposed.
New York's anti-war chorus includes many lower Manhattan residents, Sept. 11 survivors and others such as the immigrant dishwashers, busboys and cooks who lost their jobs at the Windows on the World restaurant.
War opposition was on display Thursday as hundreds of chanting demonstrators lined three blocks of Fifth Avenue and dozens lay down in the streets to begin a day of civil disobedience activities.
Police, some in riot gear and on horseback, clamped plastic handcuffs onto about 150 protesters who refused to get up and then put them into police vehicles.
"`Rally 'round the flag' is the resounding cry heard throughout the nation. In New York City, that cry is muted," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Many New Yorkers with direct ties to the Sept. 11 attacks say their painful experiences helped form anti-war opinions.
At the march that drew Kanuri last week, protesters from the gentrified neighborhoods closest to the World Trade Center site displayed signs reading, "Ground Zero parents against the war" and "Ground Zero kids against the war."
Maria Weisbin, a book editor who has lived six blocks north of the site since 1979, recalled her husband screaming for revenge from the rooftop of their apartment building as they watched the towers burn and collapse.
She supported the war to remove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. "I could throttle bin Laden myself," said Weisbin, 53.
But she and her husband oppose the war in Iraq, she said, because they believe there is no connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Sept. 11.
"We have come the closest of anyone in America to seeing war in our own neighborhood," Weisbin said. "We don't want our grief to be used."
Rita Lasar, whose brother Abe Zelmanowitz died at the World Trade Center, is a member of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and travels the country to promote peace.
"We who lost the most on Sept. 11 are speaking out," said Lasar, 71, of Manhattan.
Zelmanowitz, a 55-year-old computer programmer, could have escaped easily from his office at an insurance company on the 27th floor of the north tower. He instead stayed with a quadriplegic coworker. Both were killed when the tower collapsed.
President Bush praised Zelmanowitz as a hero in a speech a few days after the attacks. But the White House recognition horrified Lasar.
"I realized my country was going to use my brother's death to kill Afghans who are as innocent as my brother," she said.
She and two other members of Peaceful Tomorrows were among more than 50 people arrested last week at an anti-war demonstration in Washington.
About 20 former employees of the Windows on the World restaurant, which was on the 106th floor of the north tower, marched in the largely peaceful protest in New York last week. Opposition to the war is strong among those who were lucky enough not to be scheduled for the breakfast shift on Sept. 11. All 73 of their co-workers who were at the restaurant that morning died.
The owner of Windows hired about 30 of the 300 surviving workers for his new restaurant in Times Square, but about half of the 300 remain unemployed.
The survivors reunite every week at the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York to trade job leads, though mostly they commiserate. And on Wednesday, 82 former workers signed an anti-war letter to Bush. "We do not believe this war will rectify the pain we have suffered after Sept. 11," they wrote, urging Bush to focus on improving the economy.
Magdi Labib, 48, was a captain at the restaurant and is now unemployed. A naturalized U.S. citizen from Egypt, he fears that the war will inflame anti-American sentiments and said he pines for a lost era in New York when his biggest worry was avoiding muggers.
"This war will bring us more terrorism," Labib said.