The Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice by Zak Ebrahim (with Jeff Giles).
Title: The Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice.
Author: Zak Ebrahim (with Jeff Giles).
Genre: Non-fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2014.
Summary: The intimate, behind-the-scenes life of an American boy raised by his terrorist father. Zak Ebrahim was only seven years old when, on November 5, 1990, El-Sayyid 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-Sayyid Nosair." For Ebrahim, a childhood amid terrorism was all he knew. After his father's incarceration, his family moved more than twenty times, haunted by and persecuted for the crimes of his father. Though his radicalized father modeled fanatical beliefs, the hateful ideas never resonated with the shy, awkward boy. The older he grew, the more fully Ebrahim grasped the horrific depths of his father's acts. The more he understood, the more he resolved to dedicate his life to promoting peace. In this book, Ebrahim traces his remarkable journey to escape his father's terrible legacy. Crisscrossing the eastern United States, from Pittsburgh to Memphis, from a mosque in Jersey City to the Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, this book is the story of a boy inculcated in dogma and hate-and the man who chose a different path.
My rating: 8.5/10
My review:
♥ 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 lawn 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.
♥ 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.
♥ My mother consoles herself with two things. One is that, whatever possessed my father to commit such a monstrous act, he will never hurt anyone again. The other is that his survival is a gift.
On both counts, she is wrong.
♥ There's a reason that murderous hatred has to be taught-and not just taught, but forcibly implanted. It's not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a lie. It is a lie told over and over again-often to people who have no resources and who are denied alternative views of the world. It's a lie my father believed, and one he hoped to pass on to me.
♥ Between my mother's attempts to protect her children from the awful knowledge of their father's actions and my own little-kid desperation not to know, it would be many years before I internalized the full horror of the assassination and the bombing. It would take me just as long to admit how furious I was with my father for what he had done to my own family. At the time it was too much to take in. I carried fear, anger, and self-loathing around in my gut, but couldn't even begin to process them. I turned ten after the first World Trade Center bombing. Emotionally, I was already like a computer powering down. By the time I was twelve, I'd been bullied so much at school that I thought about suicide. It wasn't until my mid-twenties that I met a woman named Sharon who made me feel like I was worth something-and that my story was, too. It's the story of a boy trained to hate, and a man who chose a different path.
♥ I can't make any grand claims for myself, but all our lives have themes, and the theme of mine so far is this: Everyone has a choice. Even if you're trained to hate, you can choose tolerance. You can choose empathy.
♥ When I was eighteen and had finally seen a sliver of the world, I told my mom I could no longer judge people based on what they were-Muslim, Jewish, Christina, gay, straight-and that starting right then and there I was only going to judge them based on who they were. She listened, she nodded, and she had the wisdom to speak the six most empowering words I have ever heard: "I'm so tired of hating people."
♥ My father does not harden against America overnight. His bitterness builds slowly, coaxed along by random encounters with ugliness and misfortune.
♥ In 1989, someone (it will never be clear who) attempts to assassinate Azzam by packing his pulpit in Peshawar, Pakistan, with explosives. The bomb does not go off. On November twenty-fourth of that same year, however, Azzam and his two sons are in a Jeep on the way to Friday prayers when an assassin detonates a bomb under the road. All three are killed. It is difficult to convey the effect of the news on my father. Looking back over two decades later, my mother will pinpoint Azzam's murder as the moment she lost her husband forever.
♥ A low ceiling of clouds slides over the shooting range, casting everything in shadow. A half-hearted rain starts to fall. We're about to pack it in when, on my final turn, something strange happens: I accidentally shoot out the light on top of the target, and it shatters-explodes, really-and sets the silhouette of the man on fire.
I turn to Baba, my whole body clenched, worrying that I've done something wrong.
Strangely, he grins and nods approvingly.
Next to him, Ammu laughs. He and my father are close. He must know that my father is planning to kill Kahane. "Ibn abu," he says, with a broad smile.
The implication of Ammu's words will trouble me for years, until I realize that my uncle is entirely wrong about me.
"Ibn abu."
Like father, like son.
♥ We wait for the van. We're in this immense parking lot-the biggest parking lot I've ever seen-and the world is gray and cold, and there's nothing to do, nothing to look at, nothing but a silver lunch truck surrounded by fog. My mother gives us kids five dollars, and we wander over to check it out. The truck is selling knishes, among other things. I've never heard of a knish-it sounds like something Dr. Seuss invented-but the spelling is so cool and weird that I buy one. It turns out to be a deep-fried something-or-other filled with potato. When I'm older, I'll discover that knishes are Jewish pastries, and I will remember having slathered one with mustard and devoured it on the way to Rikers Island, where my father was awaiting trial for shooting one of the world's most prominent, and divisive, rabbis in the neck.
♥ History will prove that my father did not act alone. But it's 1990, and the NYPD can't yet fathom the concept of a global terror cell-virtually no one can-and they have no interest in trying to prosecute one.
♥ We haven't returned to our old school in Cliffside Park, either. The media descended on it the morning after the assassination, and we no longer felt safe or welcome there. Knowing we have nowhere to go, Al-Ghazaly, the Islamic school in Jersey City, has offered us all scholarships. It turns out that the slogan on Ammu Ibrahim's T-shirt-HELP EACH OTHER IN GOODNESS AND PIETY-can be a call to kindness, not just violence.
♥ Yet to many Muslims my father is a hero and a martyr. Kahane, the argument goes, was himself a bigot, a proponent of violence and vengeance, an extremist condemned even by many of his own faith. He referred to Arabs as dogs. He wanted Israel swept clean of them-by force if necessary. So while my father is demonized in many quarters, Muslim families thank us on the street and send donations from all over the world. The donations make it possible for my family to eat-and for me and my siblings to have the only extravagances of our childhoods. ..Then, at Al-Ghazaly, I discover that one of my classmates' fathers is so elated by Kahane's murder that he'll stop me every time he sees me and hand me a hundred-dollar bill. I try to run into him as much as possible. I buy my first Game Boy with his money. The world may be sending me mixed messages, but a Game Boy is a Game Boy.
♥ We move around New Jersey and Pennsylvania constantly, usually because there's been a death threat. By the time I finish high school, I'll have moved twenty times.
♥ Amidst all this, there is the nonstop emptiness of missing my dad. His absence gets bigger and bigger until there's no room in my brain for anything else. He's not there to play soccer with me. He's not there to tell me how to handle bullies. He's not there to protect my mother from the people in the street. He's in Attica State Prison-and won't be out until I'm at least fifteen, maybe not even until I'm twenty-nine. (I do the math in my head all the time.) I tell myself that I can't count on him anymore. But whenever we visit him, hope returns. Seeing the family together again makes everything seem possible, even when it isn't.
♥ So for one weekend we actually are the family that Baba insists we will always be. Yes, the phone rings each night at six PM, and my father has to recite his full name and his prison identification number and some other stuff to prove that he hasn't tried to escape. Yes, there's a fence topped with barbed wire running along the perimeter of our green suburban yard. And yes, beyond that, there's a colossal, gray thirty-foot wall. But the five of us are together, and the world doesn't seem like a threat. It's as if the big gray wall is protecting us-keeping other people out, rather than my father in.
As always, there's more to the picture than I understand. Baba may be a gentle Saint Bernard when he's with us, but the moment we leave he turns rabid again. When we puled back into the station wagon for the endless drive back to New Jersey-dazed and happy and full of that dangerous hope-my father returns to his cell and rants about the Jewish judge who sentenced him to prison and instructs visitors from the mosque to murder him ("Why should I be merciful with him? Was he merciful with me?") When that plan fails, he turns his attention to an even more vile plot. While I am fantasizing about being a real family, he is fantasizing about bringing down the Twin Towers.
..After the new round of convictions, we see my father once-at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. My mother is terrified about what will become of her and her children. We are destitute. We have no plans for survival-and no hope of my father ever being a true father, or husband, again. Even now, my father will not admit any guilt. When he goes to hug and kiss my mother, she pulls away for the first time, so repulsed that she thinks she's going to vomit. For many years, she will try to console us by saying that we have a father who loves us. But she will always remember the visit to the MCC as the day that her own heart finally gave up. My father is shipped off to a series of maximum-security prisons around the country. We can no longer afford to visit, even if we wanted to. My mother barely has the money to pay for my father's collect calls anymore. I don't want to talk to him anyway. What's the point? All he ever says is, "Are you making your prayers? Are you being good to your mother?" And all I want to say is, Are you being good to my mother, Baba? Do you know that she has no money and that she's crying all the time? But, of course, I'm too scared to say any of this. So my father and I keep having the same pointless conversations, and I twist the springy phone cord tighter and tighter around my hand because I just want it all to stop.
My mother wants it to stop, too. All that matters to her now is her children.
She demands a divorce, and we all change our last name.
We've seen my father for the last time.
♥ I'm not going to pretend that, as a thirteen-year-old, I've already internalized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings-that my enemies are suffering too, that retaliation is a dead end, and that pain can redeem and transform you. No, I simply hate getting hit. It makes me furious and fills me with self-loathing, and I fight back every single time. But everything I experience contributes to the day when I will finally understand that nonviolence is the only sane, humane response to conflict, whether in the hallways of a high school or on the global stage.
♥ My mother doesn't outright tell me that my father is a murderer after all, but I must suspect it because I get angrier at him with every passing week. After Kahane's death, I could comfort myself with the fact that my father had been found not guilty of murder and that, at worst, he would come home to us a free man in 2012. But by conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center, he has not just participated in a heinous act, but also seen to it that we will never be a family again. Life plus fifteen without parole. My father will never play soccer with me again. And he chose that fate himself. He chose terrorism over fatherhood, and hate over love. Forever the fact that our family is more infamous than ever now-the WTC bombing has polluted America's opinions of all Muslims. When we're in the station wagon, other drivers notice my mother's headscarf and veil and give her the finger, or swerve at us and try to drive us off the road. When we're shopping, people recoil at the sight of her. People shout at my mother, often in broken English, to go back to her own country. And I'm ashamed every time-not because I'm Muslim, but because I can never summon the courage to shout back, "She was born ion Pittsburgh, idiot!"
I'm a teenager now, and, even before the WTC bombing, my self-esteem was shot through with holes. The bullying at school is never going to stop, my stomach hurts all the time, and I bang my head against my bedroom wall at night for the same reasons that girls my age cut themselves. I think about how easy, how peaceful, it would be to be dead, and now there's this horrible new realization: My father chose terrorism over me.
♥ My mother looks out the window when she can't stand to watch anymore. Ahmed's been so abusive to her that she can hardly think straight. He's convinced her that we've become morally corrupt since my father went to prison, and that only he can redeem us. Once, when she tries to intervene on my behalf, he hits her in the head with a vase.
Ahmed is not a murderer like my father, but within the walls of our apartment-among people he claims to love-he is every inch a terrorist.
♥ So it's not until after Ahmed beats me for stealing that I try my hand at bullying again. I'm walking down the hallway at school and come upon a bunch of younger kids playing keep-away with a boy's backpack. The boy is crying. I grab the backpack and slam-dunk it into a trash can. For a moment, the sensation is gratifying. There's no denying that there's a rush to being on the other side of the equation. But then I see a look on the poor, tormented kid's face that I recognize so viscerally-it's bewilderment as much as fear-that I pull the bag out of the garbage and hand it back to him. No one's ever sat me down and taught me what empathy is or why it matters more than power or patriotism or religious faith. But I learn it right there in the hallway: I cannot do what's been done to me.
♥ I feel a rush of relief. If my friends don't blame me for my father's sins, then maybe, slowly, I can stop blaming myself. I feel as if I've been carrying something enormous and heavy, and finally put it down.
♥ Some teenagers might yawn at the thought of working at a theme park, but my brother and I are elated. We are babbling, high-fiving idiots in Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirts. In Tampa, there's sunshine, there's water everywhere, there's salt in the air. The world is opening up to us at last. For years, we've been on the run from our father's legacy, outcasts, terrified. For years, Ahmed had beaten us and watched us in such a creepy way that we've never felt safe. But now, my brother and I will lead safaris and river rides. We will go somewhere that Ahmed can't follow. The only way to get into Busch Gardens is to work there or buy a ticket. If he wants to spy on us now, it's going to cost him fifty bucks.
And this is how I finally, finally, finally get the chance to discover life on my own terms: my father is locked in, and my stepfather is locked out.
♥ I'm taking every fundamentalist lie I was ever told about people-about nations and wars and religions-and holding it up to the light.
When I was a kid, I never questioned what I heard at home or at school or at the mosque. Bigotry just slipped into my system along with everything else: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Pi equals 3.14. All Jews are evil, and homosexuality is an abomination. Paris is the capital of France. They all sounded like facts. Who was I to differentiate? I was made to fear people who were different and kept away from them as much as possible for my own "protection." Bigotry is such a maddeningly perfect circle-I never got close enough to find out if I should fear them in the first place.
♥ The flood of people, people, and people into my life is intoxicating. I walk around Busch Gardens with my head literally held higher because I know people who are not like me. I've got incontrovertible proof that my father raised me on lies. Bigotry is stupid. It only works if you never walk out your door.
♥ It's around this time that I come home in my Rhino Rally outfit one night and tell my mother that, despite all of my father's and Ahmed's proclamations, I'm going to try trusting the world. My mother has never made ugly comments about people, but she's been subject to even more dogma than I have over the years. It's now that she says those six words that I will build the rest of my life around: "I'm so sick of hating people."
♥ I've only met my grandmother a few times in my life because she was so appalled when my mother converted to Islam. She apparently meant it when she said my mother wasn't welcome at her house wearing some goddamn scarf on her head. For my mother, though, love and loyalty transcend everything. And it turns out that, in the midst of my grandmother's decline, a strange, fortuitous thing has happened. If you ever need proof that bigotry is nothing but a trick of the mind, here it is: Because of her strokes, my grandmother has forgotten, utterly and in an instant, that she hates my mother's religion and abhors my mother for choosing it. And prejudice is not the only bad habit my grandmother's brain has let go of: She's also forgotten that she had smoked for fifty years.
♥ Before the summer ends, some of my Busch Gardens buddies and I take a long lunch and check out a roller coaster called Montu. The ride's named after an ancient god of war who was half man and half falcon. It's in a part of the park called Egypt, which strikes my funny bone in just the right way. It rises like a sea monster up over palm trees and Middle Eastern-themed shops and faux sandstone ruins covered in Arabic. (The Arabic cracks me up: it's all gibberish.) My new friends and I climb into the coaster. Nobody can shut up. They're arguing about what Montu's coolest feature is: is it the seven totally intense inversions? Is it the world-ass zero-G roll? They can't decide. They want me to cast the tie-breaking vote, but I have no idea what they're talking about because there's one more thing we'd never experienced in our Islamic bubble-real live roller coasters!-and I'm scared out of my mind.
We're towed up to the first crest and released into what feels like a free fall. For a solid minute, I cannot even open my eyes. When I do, I see my friends' faces. They are shining with happiness. I gaze out over Egypt. The Serengeti plain. The parking lot. Then we hurtle into the zero-G roll at sixty miles an hour, and there are three questions pinging in my mind: 1) Are my shoes going to fall off? 2) If I throw up, will the vomit travel up or down? and 3) Why didn't anyone take just a couple of seconds out from telling me who I was born to hate and mention, even in passing, that roller coasters are the coolest things in the world?
My mind flashes back to my very first memory: my father and I spinning in the giant tea cups at Kennywood Amusement Park, in Pennsylvania. I was only three at the time, so I really just remember flashes of light and bursts of color. One moment does come back, though-my father laughing, standing up in the tea cup and shouting a familiar prayer: "O Allah, protect me and deliver me to my destination!"
My father lost his way-but that didn't stop me from finding mine.
♥ I've written so much about prejudice in this book because turning someone into a bigot is the first step in turning him into a terrorist. You find someone vulnerable-someone who's lost his confidence, his income, his pride, his agency. Someone who feels humiliated by life. And then you isolate him. You fill him with fear and fury, and you see to it that he regards anybody who's different as a faceless target-a silhouette at a shooting range like Calverton-rather than a human being. But even people who've been raised on hate since birth, people whose minds have been warped and weaponized, can make a choice about who they want to be. And they can be extraordinary advocates for peace, precisely because they've seen the effects of violence, discrimination, and disenfranchisement firsthand. People who have been victimized can understand more deeply than anyone how little the world needs more victims.
♥ I also know that not everyone has the moral fire of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King, Jr.-I certainly don't-and that not everybody can convert suffering into resolve. But I'm convinced that empathy is more powerful than hate and that our lives should be dedicated to make it go viral.
Empathy, peace, nonviolence-they may seem like quaint tools in the world of terror that my father helped create. But, as many have written, using nonviolence to resolve conflicts doesn't mean being passive. It doesn't mean embracing victimhood, or letting aggressors run riot. It doesn't even mean giving up the fight, not exactly. What it means is humanizing your opponents, recognizing the needs and fears you share with them, and working toward reconciliation rather than revenge. The longer I stare at this famous quote by Gandhi, the more I love how steely and hardcore it is: "There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for." Escalation cannot be our only response to aggression, no matter how hardwired we are to hit back and hit back harder. The late counterculture historian Theodore Roszak once put it this way: "People try nonviolence for a week, and when it 'doesn't work,' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries."
♥ Otherwise, I put people before gods. I respect believers of all kinds and work to promote interfaith dialogue, but my whole life I've seen religion used as a weapon, and I'm putting all weapons down.
♥ The third one, a woman, had been crying.
"You probably don't remember me-and there's no reason you should," she said. "But I was one of the agents that worked on your father's case." She paused awkwardly, which made my heart go out to her. "I always wondered what happened to the children of El-Sayyid Nosair," she continued. "I was afraid that you'd followed in his path."
I'm proud of the path I've chosen. And I think I speak for my brother and sister when I say that rejecting our father's extremism both saved our lives and made our lives worth living.
To answer the agent's question, here is what happened to the children of El-Sayyid Nosair:
We are not his children anymore.