The First Step is Forgiveness—A post-9/11 Hate Crime and One Man's Unexpected Response
- Neil Parekh
- Sep 14
- 9 min read
Updated: Sep 14
A man tried to burn down his mosque in one of many post-9/11 hate crimes. Issa Qandeel confronted him, was shot at and chased him. The FBI wanted to make an example out of him, but Issa argued for a lesser sentence, citing the importance of forgiveness in Islam. I had the honor of interviewing him and telling his story in Colors NW Magazine on the one-year anniversary of the attacks of September 11.
(Naomi Ishisaka was the Editor-In-Chief. Pamela Stumpo contributed the commentary on the verses in the Qur’an.)
In a post-Sept. 11 rage, a Snohomish man tried to shoot him and burn down his mosque, but Issa Qandeel chose conciliation over vengeance.
His first response after Patrick Cunningham said he was going to shoot him—was to say, “Go ahead, shoot me.” His first instinct—after Cunningham had tried to burn down his mosque, fired a gun at him, and crashed into a telephone pole trying to flee the scene—was to forgive him.
And his answer to the FBI—after they said they were going to charge Cunningham with a hate crime and seek a sentence of up to 18 years—was to say, “Eighteen years! This guy is 53. He’ll be 71 when he gets out. What would you be teaching him?”
There are not many people who would invite death, forgive their attacker, and then question the harshness of the punishment.
In the year since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there have not been many people like Seattle’s Issa Qandeel, resolute in the face of assault. The loss of a sense of security and a thirst for vengeance and retribution after last year’s Sept. 11 attacks led to hundreds of verbal assaults, vandalism, and other hate crimes against Arab Americans, South Asians, and Muslims in the United States. The U.S. government quickly launched a “war against terrorism” and began airstrikes against Afghanistan. U.S. immigrants were the next targets, with wide sweeps for “potential terrorists” in Arab communities leading to secret detentions and suspension of due process.
In the face of all this, a mechanical engineer with one of Seattle’s largest architecture firms has quietly tried to live up to the tenets of Islam—namely compassion and forgiveness. Issa has struggled to mitigate law enforcement’s impact on the life of his attacker.
Although Issa is from Jordan, his family is Palestinian. They were forced to flee Palestine following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He is also an American.
His fiancée is in Jordan waiting for a visa. He started working out recently at a local gym, hoping to get into shape before she comes to the U.S. He has an easygoing personality and is quick to smile, likes to joke, and has a boyish charm.
I first met Issa about a week after Cunningham, a White Snohomish man, tried to shoot him last year after being discovered dousing two cars with gasoline outside Northgate’s Idris Mosque. When Issa tried to stop him, Cunningham fired on him with a handgun, but it misfired. Cunningham then crashed his car into a phone pole after trying to flee. Shortly after the Sept. 13 incident, local churches, through the “Watchful Eyes Program,” organized volunteers to keep a vigil outside the facility to try to stave off further incidents.
When my fiancée and I showed up to lend our support, we had no idea what to expect. Planning to stay the night, we brought books, newspapers, blankets, and plenty of snack food. At 11 p.m., there were about 40 people standing around the mosque, drinking coffee, chatting in small groups on the steps, laughing, and generally having a good time. It was more like a block party than a vigil.
Then we met Issa.
We started talking. And we kept talking. We didn’t stop until 5 a.m. when it was time for morning prayers.
Throughout the night, he kept flashing his irresistible grin, played jokes on his friends, and challenged them to foot races to the corner and back (he claimed to be a fast runner). He did this while keeping up a conversation that touched on “the incident,” his family in Jordan, the backlash following the 9/11 attacks, and the incredible outpouring of support for the Muslim community.
We learned about his ex-wife, who is still a close friend, his life before and after he committed himself to Islam, his close relationship with his sisters, his fiancée, and his plans to raise a family here in the United States.
This is the kind of charisma Issa has.
Unfortunately, he never had a chance to charm Cunningham.
Talking nearly a year after the incident, Issa says, “I wanted to meet the guy to tell him about my background. [Tell him about] who I am. I felt I would just let him know who I am and see whether he would regret [what he did] or not.”
Issa’s attempts to meet with him were rebuffed by the Cunningham family.
Cunningham pleaded guilty in May to two counts related to the attack. He was charged with obstructing the free exercise of religion and using a firearm in a violent crime.
“Had I met him in a different situation, he would have been my friend,” Issa assured me. Unfortunately, Issa met him in a parking lot behind the Idris Mosque.
Ever since that incident, Issa’s life has not been the same. Like women who wear hijab or Arab Americans and South Asians in general who have been the target of post-Sept. 11 distrust and hate crimes, Issa experiences a recurring feeling of unease.
“I was not feeling very comfortable [after the attack],” Issa says. “I felt like I lost my freedom. My freedom was definitely hijacked. My safety more than my freedom. I didn’t feel safe after that. I didn’t feel safe in my own home. For six months after that I used to watch if someone was following me. Before I got into my parking lot [at home] I would look around.”
Quietly, he added, “In my house I took precautionary measures. I was scared driving. I was scared in my own home.”
His family in Jordan was shocked. They pleaded with him to come back. “They really were pushing,” Issa says.
He resisted. “I thought that my life was in America. I’m American. I didn’t want to ‘run away’ back to Jordan.”
This was the same person who negotiated with the FBI on Cunningham’s behalf to lower his sentence.
“They were trying to make me feel better,” he remembered of his first conversations with the FBI. “They wanted to show me that they care. From the first night, they started talking about making an example of this guy about hate crimes. It made me feel sad.”
The FBI wanted to sentence Cunningham to 18 years in prison. Issa recalled thinking to himself, “He’s a citizen like me. Even if he’s on the other side of the equation, maybe he didn’t know better.”
In Issa’s eyes, to make an example out of Cunningham would have been tantamount to another crime—this one perpetrated by the government. Issa reasoned that it would be better to “help this guy so that maybe he would be able to help others.”
After several months of negotiating back and forth with the FBI, Issa says he got them to agree to a five-year sentence along with a letter of apology to him and the Muslim community. Cunningham will be formally sentenced in October.
To Issa, it came down to forgiveness and his faith in Islam.
“In Islam, forgiveness is very, very important,” Issa said as he looked up several verses in the Qur’an.
As it is written in An-Nahl (16:126): “And if ye punish, let your punishment be proportionate to the wrong that has been done to you: but if ye show patience, that is indeed the best (course) for those who are patient.”
In An-Nahl (16:128) it is written: “For Allah is with those who restrain themselves, and those who do good.”
In Ash-Shurah (42:40) Allah says: “The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto (in degree): but if a person forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from Allah. For (Allah) loves not those who do wrong. But indeed, if any show patience and forgive, that would truly be an affair of great resolution.”
The commentary on these verses helps to explain Issa’s thinking. On the first verse, the commentator writes: “Lest you should think that such patience only gives an advantage to the adversary, you are told that the contrary is the case: the advantage is with the patient, the self-possessed, those who do not lose their temper or forget their own principles of conduct.”
The commentary on Ash-Shurah adds: “Patience and forgiveness may look like futility or lack of purpose, but in reality it is the highest and noblest form of courage and resolution. And it may carry out the purpose of reform and the suppression of evil even better than stern punishment. The gentleness of innocence often persuades where stronger measures fail.”
This is where Issa the joker becomes Issa the philosopher:
“In a world that’s full of hatred, wars and fighting, everyone asks what they can do to contribute to a more peaceful world,” he says. “The first step is forgiveness. Isn’t that what Jesus talked about, Mohammed, Moses, and all the prophets? All the religions talk about forgiveness. None of us is willing to take the first step, to start forgiving.”
Showing some frustration, Issa added: “If we don’t do this, we can’t claim to belong to any of these religions.”
Issa said that after Sept. 11, there were many mistakes made.
“The main mistake was for the government not doing its homework of making sure the public understood that the American Muslims are Americans before anything else,” he says.
“I also believe we made a huge mistake by retaliating the way we did in Afghanistan. It’s pretty clear by now that we did not achieve the goals we hoped we would from that war. [Osama] bin Laden and his guys are still on the run and nobody on earth seems to know where they are. We lost soldiers in Afghanistan, and it seems that the only people who paid the price of all of that are the Afghan civilians who lost more souls than we did in the towers!”
Thinking back on the wars in Lebanon, the fighting in Palestine, the Iran-Iraq war, Chechnya, Vietnam, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Issa concluded:
“If all these wars did not contribute to making us different persons, what would? I was attacked, I was almost killed, but I don’t care. I don’t hate this guy’s race or his group. I don’t know him in person. Maybe I would hate him if I knew him, but how can I hate him if I don’t even know him?”
Issa doesn’t blame Cunningham for what he did. “He’s not educated (about Islam). He doesn’t know anything about Muslims. Anybody who knows anything about any religion would not attack. Religions are not to hate. God gave us religions actually for us to like Him.”
When he forgave Cunningham and sought an appropriate punishment, Issa felt he was reaffirming his commitment to Islam.
For Issa, accepting the possibility of death did not faze him. “If it is Allah’s will, so be it,” he once told me. Of course, he also said that he hopes it is Allah’s will that he die of natural causes.
There are not many people who would forgive their attacker and then negotiate with the FBI for a shorter sentence.
There are far fewer people who would tell a man with a gun, “Go ahead, shoot me.”
This world could use a few more people like Issa Qandeel.
We need to remember the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. We need to honor the memories of the people who lost their lives, the first responders who ran toward danger and everyone who suffered from long-term illnesses after breathing toxic dust in lower Manhattan.
We also need to remember and honor ALL of the victims of hate crimes that followed the horrific attacks of that day. The backlash against Muslims, Sikhs, and persons of Arab and South Asian descent after 9/11 is well documented, but often overlooked.
The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice held a Post-9/11 Civil Rights Summit in 2011, produced a full report and published highlights of prosecutions and examples of discrimination on their website. I’m frankly surprised they’re still available.
The videos of the Summit have since been removed from the DOJ press room. I was able to find Part 1 and Part 2 on DOJ’s YouTube Channel, along with Tom Perez’s closing remarks. I have saved the videos in case the current Administration realizes that the DOJ has a YouTube Channel and learns how to remove the videos from there.
I have also saved the web page with highlights as a .pdf and the full report in case they are removed from the DOJ website. This is what we need to do when we come across important historical information and relevant documents.
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