'Was My Mom a Terrorist?' appeared in the Syracuse Post Standard on Monday June 30, 2003;

If Dr. Dhafir is a terrorist, was my mom one, too?

By Madis Senner

Given the arrest of three Syracusans of Arab descent involved with the Help the Needy char ity Feb. 26 for sending money to feed starving children in Iraq, I had to ask myself whether my mom was guilty of the same thing. Because you see, my mom used to send money and goods to help starving family members in the Soviet-occupied territories - what the Gipper called the "evil empire."

But my mom was not alone. I think all of us of immigrant stock, which is the majority of Americans, have a mom or grandma or a great-great aunt who at some point sent packages to family and friends back home in "the old country," as it used to be called.

I remember all to well. It was the 1950s. I was a few years old. My parents had moved to Syracuse after spending six years in a relocation camp - what today we would call a refugee camp - leaving behind family and friends in Soviet-occupied Estonia. Those early years were tough: My father, a college-educated lawyer, found work wherever, while my mom cleaned houses. My mom would endlessly buy clothes on sale, among other things - a habit she maintained to her dying years - to send back to Estonia. Given that we did not have a car, my mom and other local Estonian moms, kids in tow, would ride to Rochester, where we could send packages to Estonia.

I remember asking my mom why we were sending stuff to family in the old country when we had so little ourselves. She said we were lucky, and that it was much worse back in Estonia. To add insult to injury, we had to pay the Soviet Union for this "honor" a sum that was several times the worth of the items we were sending.

So clearly my mom, by today's standards, was a terrorist, because she paid the original "evil empire" to keep her parents, younger brother and countless friends alive as best as could be.

What Dr. Rafil Dhafir, founder of Help the Needy, and others are guilty of is not filing proper documents. But why has his charity been singled out, when others involved in humanitarian organizations similarly deciding not to file have not been arrested?

The greater Syracuse area has deep immigrant roots. Many of our moms, grandmas and great-great aunts would be similarly branded terrorists today. Their spirits have been incarcerated with him since late February.