The Terrorist’s Son Read online

  For years, theories will flourish that my father entered the Marriott with at least one, possibly two, other conspirators, though no one else will ever be charged. My father was wearing a yarmulke to blend in with the mostly Orthodox crowd. He approached the podium, where Kahane was declaiming with his signature fury about the Arab menace. My father paused, and then said aloud, “This is the moment!” Then he fired at the rabbi, and raced out of the ballroom. One of Kahane’s supporters, a seventy-three-year-old, tried to block him. My father shot the man in the leg, then continued out onto the street. According to reports, his friend Red, the taxi driver who would call my mother that night, was supposed to be waiting outside the Marriott in his cab. A doorman, however, had apparently told him to move along. So my father got into the wrong cab. After the cab had gone one block, another of Kahane’s supporters stepped in front of it to stop my father from getting away. My father put his gun to the driver’s head. The driver leaped out of the cab. Then my father leaped out, too. He ran down Lexington, exchanged fire with the postal officer, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, and fell to the street. According to some theories, my father’s accomplices escaped via the subway.

  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.

  My mother gratefully accepts the scholarships and moves us back to Jersey City. All we can afford is a place on a derelict stretch of Reservoir Avenue. My mother asks the landlord to install bars on the windows, but that doesn’t stop drunks from harassing my sister, my brother, and me when we play in the street. We move again, this time to an equally sketchy spot on Saint Paul Avenue. One day, when my mother leaves to pick us up at school, someone breaks in, steals whatever he can carry, and leaves a knife on our computer keyboard. In the midst of all this, we return to school. I’m in the first grade. It’s the middle of the year, the worst possible time to transfer, even if I weren’t a shy kid and my family wasn’t infamous.

  My first morning at Al-Ghazaly, I warily approach the doors to the classroom. They’re arched and enormous—it’s like I’m walking into the mouth of a whale. The room is abuzz with activity. The minute I step inside, though, all heads turn. Everything stops dead. There’s silence for two seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. And then the kids are leaping to their feet. They’re pushing back their chairs, which screech against the floor, and they’re rushing toward me. It happens so fast that I can’t decipher the energy. Is it hostile? Euphoric? Have I done something unforgivable, or hit a game-winning homerun? The kids are shouting now, one louder than the next. They’re all asking the same question: Did your father kill Rabbi Kahane? It seems like they want me to say yes, and that I’ll disappoint them if I say no. The teacher is trying to get to me. She’s peeling the kids away, telling them to sit down, sit down, sit down. In my awkwardness, all I can think to do—more than two decades later I still wince at the memory—is shrug my shoulders and smile.

  • • •

  In those first wintry months of 1991, the media and much of the world believe Baba to be a monster, and my mother hears rumors that the Jewish Defense League has declared a sort of fatwa of its own: “Kill the sons of Nosair.” 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. One night, my mother presents us with a Sears catalogue and tells us we can have anything we want. I pick every piece of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle merchandise I can find. 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.

  An activist-lawyer named Michael Tarif Warren has been representing my father. When the legendary civil rights advocate and unabashed radical William Kunstler unexpectedly offers his services as well, Warren graciously accepts the help. Kunstler has a long, mournful face, glasses perched above his forehead, and wild gray hair. He is lively and warm with us, and he believes in my father’s right to a fair trial. Sometimes, Kunstler and his team camp out in our apartment and strategize with my mother until all hours. Other times, we visit him in his office in Greenwich Village. He has a statue of Michelangelo’s David on his desk. Whenever we stop by, out of respect for my sister and mother, he takes off his tie and drapes it around the little guy’s neck to cover his private parts.

  Kunstler hopes to convince the jury that Kahane’s own people murdered him in an argument over money, then framed my father. My mother believes the story herself—her husband has assured her that he’s innocent, and there must be some explanation for the assassination—and we all get swept up in my father’s cause. $163,000 is reportedly donated for Baba’s defense. Ammu Ibrahim reaches out to Osama bin Laden, who contributes twenty thousand himself.

  We visit my father at Rikers again and again. I see him in a prison uniform so many times that it will color my previous memories of him. Over two decades later, I will picture my family around the dinner table in Cliffside Park, a year or more before my father’s arrest. I’ll imagine him talking to us cheerfully, passing a platter of lamb—and wearing an orange jumpsuit.

  6

  December 21, 1991

  New York Supreme Court, Manhattan

  My father’s supporters sit on one side of the courtroom, Kahane’s on the other, like at a wedding. The factions have broken out into fights on the sidewalk during the trial, so there are thirty-five police officers in court today. It’s a Saturday. The jury has been deliberating for four days. They’ve heard the state argue that El-Sayyid Nosair was a hate-fueled man, acting alone. They’ve seen the lead prosecutor hold up the .357 Magnum, stare at my father, and then turn to them and say, “This gun took one life, wounded two others, and scared an awful lot of people. Tell them by your verdict: not here, Nosair, not here.”

  Jurors have also heard Kunstler’s team contend that Kahane was murdered by enemies within his own entourage, and that the killers framed my father by placing the murder weapon next to him as he lay bleeding on Lexington Avenue. They’ve been reminded repeatedly that, thanks to the mayhem at the Marriott, not one witness remembers seeing my father shoot Kahane.

  By the time the jury returns with their verdict, it’s late in the afternoon and we’re at home in Jersey City. The phone rings. My mother answers. It’s Uncle Ibrahim’s wife, Amina. She’s shouting so loud that even I can hear her: “He’s not guilty! He’s not guilty!”

  The courtroom erupts after the verdict. There are screams of fury from one side and cries of relief from the other. They’re like two opposing storm fronts. As for the judge, he is appalled by the jury’s verdict. He tells them it’s “devoid of common sense and logic.” Then, as if he fears he hasn’t made himself clear, he adds, “I believe the defendant conducted a rape of this country, of our Constitution and of our laws, and of people seeking to exist peacefully together.”

  The jury has found my father guilty of lesser charges: criminal po
ssession of a weapon, assault (of the postal officer and the elderly man) and coercion (in the hijacking of the taxi). The judge sentences him to the maximum sentence permissible by law, seven to twenty-two years. But the courtroom is still roiling, even as the jurors file out. One of Kahane’s followers points to the empty jury box and shouts, “That was no jury of our peers!” Still more are chanting, “Death to Nosair! Death to Nosair! Arab dogs will die!”

  • • •

  The fact that my father’s been found not guilty of murder gives my family just enough hope to end up hurting us. His lawyers vow to appeal the convictions. I’m eight years old now, and I am convinced that Baba will be walking through the door at any moment, and that we will be resuming our lives. But my father never shows up. And every day he doesn’t, I withdraw deeper.

  Within a year of the trial, donations to my family slow to a trickle and become difficult to live on. My father’s friends are still loyal to us (a deliveryman named Mohammed Salameh promises to marry my sister when she comes of age) but they’re more loyal to the jihad (Salameh will be sentenced to 240 years in prison for his part in the World Trade Center attack before my sister even enters her teens). 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.

  We always live in dangerous neighborhoods, without another Muslim family in sight. I get punched and kicked at school because I’m different, because I’m pudgy and don’t talk much. My mother gets taunted on the street—called a ghost and a ninja—because of her headscarf and veil. And there is no permanence to anything. Someone always discovers who we are. The word spreads that we are those Nosairs. The fear and humiliation return, and we move again.

  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.

  • • •

  One weekend when I’m nine, my mother drives us across New York to Attica, which is on the far edge of the state, near Canada. The car’s an old station wagon with fake wood paneling on the sides. My mother has folded the back seats down so we can sleep or play or roll around if we want to. Ever since we left New Jersey, I’ve been bubbling over with nervous energy. This weekend we’re not just going to visit my father in some big, boring room where there’s nothing to do but play Chinese checkers. This weekend we’re going to “live” with my father. My mother has tried to explain how that’s possible, but I still can’t picture it. We stop for groceries along the way—somehow or other, she’s going to cook for us all—and my mother lets me buy a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. The soft kind. When we get back in the car, I’m twice as excited as I was before, thrilled about seeing Baba and about the cookies. My mother looks at me in the rearview mirror and laughs. She never gets to see me happy anymore.

  Attica is massive and gray—it’s like the castle of a depressed king. We go through security. The guards inspect everything, even the groceries, which have to be perfectly sealed.

  “We got a problem here,” one of them says.

  He is holding up the Entenmann’s. There’s something wrong with the box. It turns out that there’s a hole in the cellophane window on top, so they won’t let me take it in. My eyes start stinging with tears. I know that the minute we walk away, the guards are going to eat my cookies. They know there’s nothing wrong them.

  My mother puts a hand on my shoulder. “Guess what,” she whispers.

  If I answer, my voice will break, and I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the guards, so I just look at my mother expectantly until she leans down and says these amazing words in my ear: “I bought another box.”

  I run across the grass toward my father. He’s grinning broadly and waving for me to run faster, faster, faster. He’s standing in front of a white, suburban, one-story house that’s been plunked down inside Attica’s walls so families like ours can spend the weekend together. There’s a picnic table, a swing set, an outdoor grill. I’m out of breath when I reach my father. I throw my arms around his waist, and he reaches down to pick me up. He pretends I’ve gotten too big for him to lift—“Ya Allah,” he groans, “Z must be short for Z-normous!”—and he falls on his back in the newly cut grass. We wrestle for a few moments, then my brother calls from the swing set, “Push me, Baba, push me!”

  The weekend is perfect—even the boring moments are perfect, because they’re normal. We play soccer with the family from the house next door. We have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and a plate of Entenmann’s for dessert. Then my parents say goodnight early and disappear into a bedroom. My sister tells our little brother he should go to bed but he says he’s not tired, not even the tiniest bit—then falls asleep within thirty seconds on a black leather couch in the living room. So my sister and I seize the moment and watch a videotape of Cujo, which I snuck into our basket at the prison library. It’s about this sweet Saint Bernard that gets bitten by a bat and gets rabies, then starts going mental in Connecticut. My sister and I snuggle close as we watch. Our mother would go mental herself if she knew we were watching it, which adds to the thrill.

  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 pile back into the station wagon for the endless drive back to New Jersey—dazed and happy and full of all 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.

  7

  February 26, 1993

  Jersey City, New Jersey

  I’m about to turn ten, and I’ve been bullied at school for years. I can’t pretend it’s just because of who my father is. For reasons I will probably spend my whole life trying to unravel, I seem to be a magnet for abuse. The bullies’ latest trick is to wait until I’ve turned to open my locker and then slam my head against it and run. Whenever this happens, the principal says he wants to be “fair to all parties,” so I usually get sent to detention along with the bullies. The anger and dread have made a permanent nest in my stomach. Today’s a Friday, and my mother has let me stay home from school to recover from what we agree to call “a stomach bug.”

  I’m camped out on the couch, watching Harry and the Hendersons, a movie about a family who’s hiding a Bigfoot-type creature from the police because the police won’t understand how kind and gentle he is. In the middle of the movie, there’s breaking news. My mother’s in her bedroom, trying to write a historical novel, so she’s not there to turn off the TV this time.

  There’s been an explosion in the parking lot beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The
NYPD, the FBI, and the ATF are on the scene, the early theory being that a transformer has exploded.

  I knock on my mother’s bedroom door. When she doesn’t answer, I crack open the door a bit. My mother is sitting at her desk. She’s engrossed in writing her novel—it’s about an American woman who goes to the Middle East and has some kind of adventure, that’s all I know—and she’s typing in a sort of trance.

  “You should come out,” I say. “There’s something going on.”

  “Can’t,” she says, without looking up.

  “But—”

  “Stop it, Z. My heroine’s caught in a sandstorm, and her camel won’t budge.”

  So I flop back on the couch and watch the story unfold for hours. The wreckage is horrific. People are stumbling out covered in ash. The reporter is saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this before.” At three PM, my mother comes out of her bedroom, blinking in the sunlight like she’s emerging from a cave. She looks at the TV and stops short.