9/11 family still seeking ‘normal’

On Feb. 26, 1993, terrorists detonated a 1,336-pound nitrate-hydrogen bomb in the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, intending to send the structure crashing into the South Tower, destroying both buildings.

Merokean Aram Iskenderian was there that day, working as a bond broker high atop New York City in Cantor Fitzgerald’s corporate headquarters, on the World Trade Center’s 101st to 105th floors.

The buildings survived the attack, as did Iskenderian. His wife, Sheri, said Aram fully believed terrorists would return. He even predicted how far into the future they would be back –– exactly a decade.

Eight and a half years later, 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers slammed two jetliners into the Twin Towers in two massive fireballs. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks. Among them was Aram Iskenderian. He was 41 years old. He had four children.

“Some people didn’t go back into the building” after the 1993 attack, Sheri said. Her husband, however, loved his job. It was, she said, his livelihood, and he would not be intimidated.

As is the case with all 9/11 families, the past 15 years have been unspeakably painful for the Iskenderians. “We’ve found a new normal,” said Sheri, a former Merrick School District Board of Education trustee. “To me, it’s very lonely. It has been a hard journey for the kids. They have persevered and excelled and lived to their potential academically and socially.”

Indeed, Sheri said, her husband would be proud. Their oldest daughter, Meryl, 26, graduated from Syracuse University with a master’s degree in social work and is now a clinical social worker in Worcester, Mass. Their middle child, Kara, 23, earned a bachelor’s from Tufts University and is studying law at Duke. And their twins, Jason and Alex, 19, are now sophomores at Tufts.

The Iskenderian children were 11, 8 and 4 when their father was killed.

In 2013, Kara was only minutes away from finishing the Boston Marathon when Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonated two pressure-cooker bombs packed with ball bearings and nails near the finish line. Sheri was there, across the street from the blast site. “I knew right away” that the bombing was the work of terrorists, Sheri recalled in a Nov. 21-27, 2013, Herald Life story, “Turning tragedy into triumph.” “My only thing was to get out of there. You were fenced in, and you couldn’t get out.”

Kara was undaunted. She ran the New York City Marathon in the fall of 2013, completing the race in 4 hours, 14 minutes. She ran the Marine Corps Marathon, which takes place in Arlington, Va., and Washington, D.C., last year.

Remembering Aram
The Iskenderians do not attend memorial services. “We talk about” Aram, Sheri said. “We feel we can remember him without having to go someplace. He’s very present in our conversations and in our thoughts.”

She understands, she said, that many take comfort in the public ceremonies on Sept. 11 each year. She attended one at ground zero on the fifth anniversary of the attacks and helped to read the names of the dead. “It was hard,” she said. “Personally, I didn’t find any comfort.”

She does not, she said, plan to visit the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. “It would just be too difficult,” she said. “It’s too difficult to be there again.”

Since the attacks, the Iskenderians have, for the most part, remained out of the public eye. They are, Sheri said, a very private family. And, she noted, “I’ve been so focused on raising my family.”

This year is different, though. This year, Iskenderian is speaking out in the press to convey an urgent message. She said she worries about the heated rhetoric that she is hearing in this year’s presidential election. In particular, she said, she is concerned about Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims, either fully or partially, from immigrating to the United States.

She noted that she has never harbored ill feelings toward Muslims because of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center or the Boston Marathon. “I do not hold any hatred against the mainstream and the majority of Muslims in this country,” she said. “Any fringe element of any religion can be dangerous.”

Terrorism, she said, is not “the norm of the Muslim world … If I don’t hate all Muslims, there has to be a reason.”

Where hate comes from
Iskenderian’s family knows all too well the ills that hate can beget. Her husband’s grandfather immigrated to the U.S. after surviving the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman Empire. Her ancestors fled the Poland-Lithuania region, escaping the anti-Jewish pogroms, or riots, that spread across the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In part because of her family’s history, Iskenderian said, she has worked through the years to ensure that her own children accept the vast majority of Muslims for who they are –– decent, law-abiding people who are trying to survive in an often harsh world.

“We’ve had people of the Muslim faith in our life” since the Sept. 11 attacks, Iskenderian said. “We’ve talked about where hatred comes from, where intolerance comes from.”

“To some degree,” she said, “it’s poverty.” Many Muslims, she noted, “come from an area of the world that has never been stable.”

Iskenderian said she supported construction of a 13-story Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from ground zero, at the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory store. Then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg did as well. And the Lower Manhattan Community Board voted 29 to 1 to approve it. It was never built, however, in part because of public opposition to it. A three-story museum with a prayer space instead took its place in 2014.

“I would have liked to have seen” the center, Iskenderian said. “I felt it was almost necessary for healing.”

A shift in rhetoric
Syed Fahad Qamer is a 36-year-old attorney and president of the Jaam’e Masjid Mosque in Bellmore. His family emigrated from Pakistan. He came to the U.S., to Merrick, at 15. He graduated from Calhoun High School and went on to earn a law degree before entering public service as a prosecutor and education attorney for 11 years. He is now in private practice.

Qamer said that this year’s presidential election has ramped up anti-Muslim rhetoric beyond levels that he has seen before. “In every election cycle, particularly this time around, the rhetoric has completely shifted from respectable to something not against terrorists, but against all Muslims,” he said. “The discussion is now that Islam is a problem, instead of the terrorists who are committing these heinous crimes.”

“Terrorism is a problem for everybody, for non-Muslims and Muslims,” Qamer said. Muslims “live in this country, and we want a safe, peaceful environment.

The Trump campaign, he said, “is trying to make an enemy out of Muslims and Islam for political advantage … I would encourage people to reach out to Muslims and find out what they believe.”

With her youngest children well established in college, Iskenderian said, she is starting to focus more on herself. She holds a bachelor’s in chemistry from Tufts and worked for seven years for Citibank before settling down into family life as a stay-at-home mother.

“I’ve started to pay attention to what I want in my life –– a more productive normal for me,” she said. “What that entails, I don’t know yet.”

In the short term, she said, she plans to continue speaking out in support of Muslims and to campaign for Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, starting in Pennsylvania.