The Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice

Zak Ebrahim

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781471139079
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the TED series: The Terrorist's Son What is it like to grow up with a terrorist in your home? Zak Ebrahim was only seven years old when, on November 5th, 1990, his father El-Sayed Nosair shot and killed the leader of the Jewish Defense League. While in prison, Nosair helped plan the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In one of his infamous video messages, Osama bin Laden urged the world to "Remember El-Sayed Nosair." In both The Terrorist's Sonand his inspiring TEDTALK, Ebrahim dispels the myth that terrorism is aforegone conclusion for people trained to hate. Based on his own remarkable journey, he shows that hate is always a choice-and so is tolerance. Though Ebrahim was subjected to a violent, intolerant ideology throughout his childhood, he did not become radicalised. Terrorist groups tap into certain vulnerabilities that are usually circumstantial: poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, lack of resources and options. Ebrahim shows how those same vulnerabilities can create great strengths, leading people to form great reserves of empathy and tolerance. He believes that, because we all have a deep capacity for empathy, humans have the choice-and can find the will-to reject negative ideology.

1

November 5, 1990 Cliffside Park, New Jersey

My mother shakes me awake in my bed: “There’s been an accident,” she says.

I am seven years old, a chubby kid in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas. I’m accustomed to being roused before dawn, but only by my father, and only to pray on my little rug with the minarets. Never by my mother.

It’s eleven at night. My father is not home. Lately, he has been staying at the mosque in Jersey City deeper and deeper into the night. But he is still Baba to me—funny, loving, warm. Just this morning he tried to teach me, yet again, how to tie my shoes. Has he been in an accident? What kind of accident? Is he hurt? Is he dead? I can’t get the questions out because I’m too scared of the answers.

My mother flings open a white sheet—it mushrooms briefly, like a cloud—then leans down to spread it on the floor. “Look in my eyes, Z,” she says, her face so knotted with worry that I hardly recognize her. “You need to get dressed as quick as you can. And then you need to put your things onto this sheet, and wrap it up tight. Okay? Your sister will help you.” She moves toward the door. “Yulla, Z, yulla. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” I say. It’s the first word I’ve managed to utter since I tumbled out from under my He-Man blanket. “What should I put in the sheet? What . . . things?”

I’m a good kid. Shy. Obedient. I want to do as my mother says.

She stops to look at me. “Whatever will fit,” she says. “I don’t know if we’re coming back.”

She turns, and she’s gone.

Once we’ve packed, my sister, my brother, and I pad down to the living room. My mother has called my father’s cousin in Brooklyn—we call him Uncle Ibrahim, or just Ammu—and she’s talking to him heatedly now. Her face is flushed. She’s clutching the phone with her left hand and, with her right, nervously adjusting her hijab where it’s come loose around her ear. The TV plays in the background. Breaking news. We interrupt this program. My mother catches us watching, and hurries to turn it off.

She talks to Ammu Ibrahim awhile longer, her back to us. When she hangs up, the phone begins ringing. It’s a jarring sound in the middle of the night: too loud and like it knows something.

My mother answers. It is one of Baba’s friends from the mosque, a taxi driver named Mahmoud. Everyone calls him Red because of his hair. Red sounds desperate to reach my father. “He’s not here,” my mother says. She listens for a moment. “Okay,” she says, and hangs up.

The phone rings again. That terrible noise.

This time, I can’t figure out who’s calling. My mother says, “Really?” She says, “Asking about us? The police?”

A little later, I wake up on a blanket on the living room floor. Somehow, in the midst of the chaos, I’ve nodded off. Everything we could possibly carry—and more—is piled by the door, threatening to topple at any second. My mother paces around, checking and rechecking her purse. She has all of our birth certificates: proof, if anyone demands it, that she is our mother. My father, El-Sayyid Nosair, was born in Egypt. But my mother was born in Pittsburgh. Before she recited the Shahada in a local mosque and became a Muslim—before she took the name Khadija Nosair—she went by Karen Mills.

“Your Uncle Ibrahim is coming for us,” she tells me when she sees me sitting up and rubbing my eyes. The worry in her voice is tinged with impatience now. “If he ever gets here.”

I do not ask where we are going, and no one tells me. We just wait. We wait far longer than it should take Ammu to drive from Brooklyn to New Jersey. And the longer we wait, the faster my mother paces and the more I feel like something in my chest is going to burst. My sister puts an arm around me. I try to be brave. I put an arm around my brother.

“Ya Allah!” my mother says. “This is making me insane.”

I nod like I understand.

• • •

Here is what my mother is not saying: Meir Kahane, a militant rabbi and the founder of the Jewish Defense League, has been shot by an Arab gunman after a speech in a ballroom at a Marriott hotel in New York City. The gunman fled the scene, shooting an elderly man in the leg in the process. He rushed into a cab that was waiting in front of the hotel, but then bolted out again and began running down the street, gun in hand. A law enforcement officer from the U.S. Postal Service, who happened to be passing by, exchanged fire with him. The gunman collapsed on the street. The newscasters couldn’t help noting a gruesome detail: both Rabbi Kahane and the assassin had been shot in the neck. Neither was expected to live.

Now, the TV stations are updating the story constantly. An hour ago, while my sister, brother, and I slept away the last seconds we had of anything remotely resembling a childhood, my mother overheard the name Meir Kahane and looked up at the screen. The first thing she saw was footage of the Arab gunman, and her heart nearly stopped: it was my father.

• • •

It’s one in the morning by the time Uncle Ibrahim pulls up in front of our apartment. He has taken so long because he waited for his wife and children to get ready. He insisted they accompany him because, as a devout Muslim, he couldn’t risk being alone in a car with a woman who was not his wife—my mother, in other words. There are five people in the car already. And there are four more of us trying to wedge in somehow. I feel my mother’s anger rise: She’s just as devout as my uncle, but her children were going to be in the car with the two of them anyway, so what was the point of wasting all that time?

Soon, we are driving through a tunnel, the sickly fluorescent lights rushing over our heads. The car is crazily cramped. We’re a giant knot of legs and arms. My mother needs to use the bathroom. Uncle Ibrahim asks if she wants to stop somewhere. She shakes her head. She says, “Let’s just get the kids to Brooklyn and then let’s go to the hospital. Okay? Quick as we can. Yulla.”

It’s the first time anyone has used the word hospital. My father is in the hospital. Because he’s had an accident. That means he is hurt, but it also means he is not dead. The pieces of the puzzle start clicking together in my head.

When we get to Brooklyn—Ammu Ibrahim lives in a vast brick apartment building near Prospect Park—all nine of us fall out of the car in a tangled lump. Once we’re in the lobby, the elevator takes forever to come, so my mother, desperate for the bathroom, takes my hand and whisks me toward the staircase.

She takes the steps two at a time. I struggle to keep up. I see the second floor blur by, then the third. Ammu’s apartment is on the fourth. We’re panting as we round the corner to his hallway. We’re ecstatic that we’ve made it—we’ve beaten the elevator! And then we see three men in front of my uncle’s door. Two are wearing dark suits and walking toward us slowly, their badges held high. The other man is a police officer, and he’s gripping his gun in its holster. My mother walks toward them. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, “and I will talk to you when I’m done.”

The men look confused, but they let her go. It’s only when she tries to bring me into the bathroom too that one of the dark suits puts his palm in the air, like a traffic cop.

“The boy has to stay with us,” he says.

“He’s my son,” she tells them. “He’s coming with me.”

“We can’t allow it,” says the other dark suit.

My mother is puzzled, but only for a moment: “You think I’m going to hurt myself in there? You think I’m going to hurt my son?”

The first suit looks at her blankly. “The boy stays with us,” he says. Then he looks down at me with a poor attempt at a smile. “You must be”—he checks his notebook—“Abdulaziz?”

Terrified, I start nodding and can’t stop. “Z,” I say.

Ibrahim’s family comes through the apartment door now and breaks the awkward silence. His wife herds the children into the apartment’s one bedroom and commands us to sleep. There are six of us. There’s a colorful matrix of bunks for kids built into the wall, like something you’d see at the PlayPlace at McDonald’s. We lie in every available cranny, writhing like worms, while my mother talks to the police in the living room. I strain to listen through the wall. All I can hear are low grunts and furniture scratching against the floor.

• • •

In the living room, the dark suits have so many questions that it’s like my mother is caught in a hailstorm. She will remember two questions above all others: What is your current home address? And, Did you know your husband was going to shoot Rabbi Kahane tonight?

The answer to the first is more complicated than the answer to the second.

Baba works for the City of New York, repairing the heat and air-conditioning in a Manhattan courthouse, and the city requires that its employees live in one of the five boroughs. So we pretend to live in my uncle’s apartment. The police only showed up here tonight because of that little lie in the record books.

My mother explains all this. And she tells the policemen the truth about the shooting: She’d known nothing about it. She hadn’t heard a single syllable. Nothing. She abhors talk of violence. Everyone at the mosque knows better than to agitate in her presence.

She answers a barrage of follow-up questions, head high, hands motionless on her lap. But all the while one thought is banging inside her head like a migraine: She must go to my father. She must be at his side.

Finally, my mother blurts out: “I heard on TV that Sayyid is going to die.”

The dark suits look at each other, but do not answer.

“I want to be with him. I don’t want him to die alone.”

Still no answer.

“Will you take me to him? Please? Will you take me to him, please?”

She says it again and again. Eventually the dark suits sigh and put away their pencils.

• • •

Police are swarming everywhere in front of the hospital. There is a rowdy crowd assembling of the angry, the frightened, and the curious. There are TV vans and satellite trucks. A helicopter overhead. My mother and Ibrahim are handed off to a pair of uniformed policemen who are openly hostile. My family is nothing to them. Less than nothing: the family of an assassin. My mother is shell-shocked and dizzy and, of all things, starving. The policemen’s anger is just one more thing she senses as if through a cloudy pane of glass.

She and Ibrahim are brought in through an entrance at the far end of the hospital. On the way to the elevators, my mother peers down a long hallway, freshly waxed and gleaming under the stark lights. She sees a mass of people clamoring to get through security. Reporters are shouting questions. Cameras are flashing. My mother feels clammy and weak. Her head, her stomach, everything starts to rebel.

“I’m going to fall,” she tells Ibrahim. “Can I hold on to you?”

Ibrahim balks. As a devout Muslim, he’s not permitted to touch her. He allows her to hang on to his belt.

At the elevator bank, one of the policemen points and says gruffly, “Get in.” They ride up to intensive care in hostile silence. When the elevator opens, my mother steps into the bright light of the ICU. A SWAT officer jumps to attention and levels his rifle at her chest.

She gasps. Ibrahim gasps. One of the policemen rolls his eyes and waves the SWAT officer off. He lowers his gun.

My mother rushes to my father’s bed. Ibrahim drifts in slowly behind her to give her space.

Baba is unconscious, his body badly swollen and stripped to the waist. He’s attached to a half-dozen machines by wires and tubes, and he’s got a long, stitched-up wound on his neck from where the postal police officer shot him. It looks like there’s a giant caterpillar on his neck. Nurses work hurriedly at my father’s bedside. They are not happy about the interruption.

My mother reaches out to touch Baba’s shoulder. His body is hard and his skin so cold that she recoils. “He’s already dead?” she asks, her voice trembling. “Ya Allah, he’s already dead!”

“No, he’s not dead,” one of the nurses says, not bothering to hide her annoyance. The family of an assassin. “And keep your hands off him. You can’t touch him.”

“He’s my husband. Why can’t I touch him?”

“Because we have rules.”

My mother is too upset to understand, but later she’ll decide that the nurses were afraid she would tear out the tubes and wires and let my father die. She puts her hands at her sides now. She leans down to whisper in his ear. She tells him that it’s okay, that she is there beside him, that she loves him, that—if he’s just been holding on for her—it’s okay, she is there, she loves him, he can let go. When the nurses are not looking, she kisses his cheek.

Later, in a small conference room off the ICU, a doctor tells my mother that my father is going to live. The doctor is the first kind person she has encountered all night and—comforted by his empathy, uncomplicated and humane—she cries for the first time. He waits for her to gather herself before he says anything more. The doctor says Baba lost most of the blood in his body, and was given a transfusion. He still has a bullet somewhere in his neck but, because his carotid artery was nearly severed, they didn’t want to risk probing around for it. The fact that the bullet never exited my father’s body is what saved his life.

The doctor sits with my mother while she takes all this in, or tries to. Then the policemen return. They usher my mother and Ibrahim to the elevator and press the down button. When the elevator arrives and the doors open, one of them points and says again, “Get in.”

Outside, it is dawn. On any other day, the sky would seem beautiful. But Rabbi Kahane’s death has just been confirmed—the bullet did exit his body, so he died of the same wound that nearly killed my father—and the parking lot is still filled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• Half-title page
• CHAPTER 1 November 5, 1990. Cliffside Park, New Jersey
• CHAPTER 2 Present Day
• CHAPTER 3 1981. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• CHAPTER 4 1986. Jersey City, New Jersey
• CHAPTER 5 January 1991. Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York
• CHAPTER 6 December 21, 1991. New York Supreme Court, Manhattan
• CHAPTER 7 February 26, 1993. Jersey City, New Jersey
• CHAPTER 8 April 1996. Memphis, Tennessee
• CHAPTER 9 December 1998. Alexandria, Egypt
• CHAPTER 10 July 1999. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• CHAPTER 11 Epilogue
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• WATCH ZAK EBRAHIM’S TED TALK
• ABOUT TED BOOKS
• ABOUT TED