newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-libias0917,0,3619601.story
Muslim Bayville woman victim of hate crime
BY JENNIFER MALONEY
9:11 PM EDT, September 16, 2007
Zohreh Assemi knows what terrorism is.
In 1982, she and her 5-year-old daughter escaped the security forces of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was purging Iran of political opposition.
On Sept. 11, when 19 hijackers attacked her adopted country, she decided to become a U.S. citizen.
So when two men ambushed her in her Locust Valley nail salon Saturday, it was their words -- not their blows -- that hurt her most.
They called her a terrorist.
"When you're a victim of terrorism and you lose everything you have to terrorism, the worst thing they can call me is a terrorist," she explained Sunday in her Bayville home. "That hurts a lot."
But that pain is countered by Assemi's friends and customers, who she says have rallied behind her.
"I have a lot of support from American people and I will not be homeless again," she said. "I'm not scared. I'm a tough woman."
Assemi, 50, owns Givan Nail and Skin Center, a high-end nail salon in a cluster of chic stores near Birch Hill Road called The Plaza.
At 6:30 a.m. Saturday, Assemi was opening her second-floor shop when two men burst out of a bathroom across the hall. They grabbed her from behind, put a gun to her head and forced her inside, she said. There, they slammed her head on a counter, shoved a towel in her mouth, smashed her hand with a hammer and sliced her face, neck, back and chest with a knife and a box cutter, she said.
"They were cursing, ' -- -- Muslim, leave Locust Valley, leave The Plaza. Go back to the place you came from,'" she recalled.
They scrawled anti-Muslim messages on her mirrors and tore the place up, she said. They also stole about $2,000, she said.
"They said if I call the cops, they'll kill me and if I don't leave The Plaza, they're gonna kill me," she said.
After they left, Assemi crawled to her desk and called 911. She was treated later at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset and released. Police said they are investigating the attack as a bias crime.
Police are looking for two men: one was 5-foot-6, wearing a dark shirt and sunglasses; the other 5-foot-10 with a mustache and goatee, wearing a dark shirt and sunglasses and white shoes.
"It is a bit abnormal in that they hurt her, damaged the business and took money," Nassau police Sgt. Robert Atchison said Sunday. "There may have been another motive to this and so we're looking into all those different angles."
Assemi said her problems began last month, when she began receiving threatening phone calls from people calling her a terrorist and telling her to leave the shopping center.
Assemi's lease had recently come up for renewal. Gloria Bethune, president of the company that owns the property, declined to comment, saying she had to consult with her attorney.
Moving gingerly Sunday in her two-story shingled home overlooking Mill Neck Bay, Assemi offered a bandaged hand for a weak handshake. Cuts crisscrossed her arms, neck and face. But she spoke defiantly.
Assemi, who says she is not religious, sneaked across the Iranian border to Turkey after Khomeini's notorious security forces imprisoned her father-in-law, a general with the previous government, and threatened her family. She was granted political asylum in the United States and began working at The Plaza two years later.
Her husband, who came later to join Assemi and their daughter, died in 1993.
Assemi has owned the business for 12 years.
"After the disaster of Sept. 11, my heart told me, 'This is your flag,'" she recalled. "It's my home now and nobody can take it away. I'm going to stay and I'm going to survive."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the FBI Sunday to investigate the beating as a hate crime.
"The bias attack on Zohreh Assemi is an indicator of the rising trend of Islamophobia that is growing in certain segments of American society and is promoted by a small minority of Islamophobes," said Aliya Latif, civil rights director of the group's New York chapter.
Last year, the group saw a 9 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes across the country, she said.
