It’s the middle of the night. Seven-year-old Zak Ebrahim sleeps soundly in his favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas.
“There’s been an accident,” his mother says, shaking him awake.
He’s confused. Usually, his father wakes him up early to pray. Never his mother.
“Look into my eyes, Z,” she says. “You need to get dressed as quickly as you can.”
She throws a sheet on the floor and tells him to pack it up with as much stuff as his little body can carry. “I don’t know if we’re coming back.”
The television blares: “Breaking news. We interrupt this program . . .”
His mother reaches the TV and turns it off before he or his brother and half-sister can learn any more.
She’s already seen the news; an Arab gunman has been shot in the neck after killing someone.
The gunman is her husband.
Though Zak couldn’t have known it at the time, this was the moment — the day “my father chose terrorism over me.”
That night, Nov. 5, 1990, El-Sayyid Nosair became the first Islamic jihadist to take a life on American soil when he shot and killed Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, at the Marriott Hotel in Manhattan. Working with an international terror cell that would call itself al Qaeda, he later co-masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing from his prison cell.“Even if you’re trained to hate, you can choose tolerance. You can choose empathy.”
Ebrahim’s childhood became another of his father’s casualties. Ebrahim changed his name and moved 20 times before his 18th birthday to try to escape.
But he could not dodge his past forever.
“I’ve spent my life trying to understand what drew my father to terrorism and struggled with the knowledge that I have his blood in my veins,” Ebrahim, now 31, writes in his memoir, “The Terrorist’s Son: A Story of Choice” (TED), out Sept. 9.
“By telling my story, my intention is to do something hopeful and instructive: to offer a portrait of a young man who was raised in the fires of fanaticism and embraced nonviolence instead.
“Even if you’re trained to hate, you can choose tolerance. You can choose empathy.”
Nosair immigrated from Egypt in 1981. He took a job near Pittsburgh as a jeweler and, a year later, met Karen Mills, a Catholic-raised divorcée who left the church because she asked “too many questions.” She found answers in the stacks of the Pittsburgh Public Library, where she discovered a book on Islam. She converted soon after.
They marry 10 days after meeting. Nosair — who becomes a US citizen in 1989 — embraces Karen’s daughter from her first marriage as his own and is thrilled when she becomes pregnant with Ebrahim.
Ebrahim describes Nosair as a kind, hands-on father with a slapstick sense of humor. Although deeply pious, he expresses a fondness for American culture and often watches Disney movies and Saturday-morning cartoons with his kids. Nice days are spent outside kicking the soccer ball or throwing the baseball around — all in all, a “relatively normal” childhood, Ebrahim says.
Everything changes in the fall of 1985, when a member of the family’s mosque accuses Nosair of raping her. Although he is never charged, the stain on his reputation remains. He unmoors his family to Jersey City.
There he joins a local mosque the FBI will one day dub “The Jersey Jihad Office.”
The ramshackle facade with chipping paint over a Chinese restaurant belies the congregation’s international stature. Speakers and sheiks from around the world speak there — among them, the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman. Nosair brings Ebrahim to hear him preach in Brooklyn. Although the child can’t speak Arabic well enough to understand the sheik, “his ferocity frightens him.”“Bigotry just slipped into my system along with everything else: Pi equals 3.14. All Jews are evil, and homosexuality is an abomination. Paris is the capital of France. They all sounded like facts.”
More hard luck follows. Nosair suffers an electrical shock during a job installing stage lighting. His hand requires surgery, and he’s let go. He becomes depressed, antagonized, withdrawn — prime “ingredients to make an extremist,” says Ebrahim, during an interview with The Post.
At the mosque, Nosair meets and befriends Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni extremist who traveled extensively in North America and was best known for mentoring a young Osama bin Laden, co-founding al Qaeda and spouting inflamed rhetoric: “Jihad and the rifle alone: No negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues.”
When Azzam is killed by a car bomb in 1989 in Pakistan, Nosair’s transition into extremism is complete. He sells religious texts to raise money for the movement and spends weekends practicing survival skills and any free time at a Long Island shooting range firing assault rifles. He rants about moving to Afghanistan and threatens to move the family back to Egypt.
Little Ebrahim notices the difference in his father. He has become increasingly dogmatic, militant and intolerant of non- Muslims.
These beliefs rub off on Ebrahim.
“Bigotry just slipped into my system along with everything else: Pi equals 3.14. All Jews are evil, and homosexuality is an abomination. Paris is the capital of France. They all sounded like facts,” he writes.
Nosair takes Ebrahim to the Calverton Shooting Range on Long Island. He calls it an “adventure.” When they arrive, Nosair’s friend hands out AK-47s and pistols from the trunk of a car. Ebrahim gets a rifle. It’s heavy and unwieldy in his hands.
On his final turn, he accidentally shoots out the light above the target, and it explodes.
He’s worried that his father will be angry, but he only smiles. His uncle, who is with the group, smiles, too, and says, “Ibn abu.” Like father, like son.
Another person notes the change in Ebrahim’s father — and sees its potential. The blind sheik urges Nosair to “make a name for himself.” He considers an assassination attempt against future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and even stakes out his hotel, but ultimately chooses a different target.
He will kill Rabbi Kahane.
Kahane, the militant leader of the FBI-listed terrorist group the Jewish Defense League, organized violent “self-defense” groups and had long called on American Jews to emigrate en masse to Israel to reclaim the land — even annexing the West Bank and Gaza Strip and removing Arabs by force if necessary.
Nosair believed that Kahane was an “instrument” of Allah’s fury and that God had directed him to his mark.
After the murder — Nosair is shot by a US Postal Police officer and immediately apprehended — extremists hold him in the highest esteem. Donations for his legal defense pour in. Among the contributors is bin Laden, who pledges $20,000.
In 1991, a state jury acquits Nosair of murder but convicts him of lesser charges, including assault and weapon possession. He is sentenced to the maximum — seven to 22 years in state prison.
A police raid of his home uncovers 47 boxes of suspicious materials, including bomb-making manuals, ammunition, hit lists and even plans for an attack on the “world’s highest building.” But no one bothers to fully translate the contents until it is too late.
To his family, Nosair maintains his innocence. They believe him and spend weekends at Attica playing family, kicking soccer balls, eating spaghetti and meatballs and ignoring the barbed wire.
But it’s all a farce.
“While I’m fantasizing about being a real family, he is fantasizing about bringing down the Twin Towers,” Ebrahim writes.
Fantasy becomes reality on Feb. 26, 1993, when a truck bomb explodes in the garage of the World Trade Center’s north tower, killing six people, including a pregnant woman, and injuring more than 1,000.
Prosecutors argue that Nosair and Abdel-Rahman are behind the attack as part of a broad “seditious” blueprint. Nosair, who was convicted by the feds of “murder in the aid of racketeering” in Kahane’s death in 1995, is a year later found guilty of “terror conspiracy” in the WTC attack. He’s sentenced to life plus 15 years without parole and remains in a federal prison in Illinois.
The family is at its breaking point. During a visit at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, his wife pulls away from Nosair “for the first time, so repulsed that she thinks she’s going to vomit,” writes Ebrahim.
This is the last time Nosair will see his family. Shortly after, his wife files for divorce. She eventually remarries. Ebrahim clings to the belief that his father is innocent and remains in contact with him.
But when the phone rings on New Year’s 1998, Ebrahim is ready to vent about the years of disappointment and anger.I want to tell [my father] how crappy our lives have become since he decided that other people’s deaths were more important than his own family’s lives. But, as always, I can’t get the anger out. I just sob in the phone.
- Zak Ebrahim
“I want to tell him how crappy our lives have become since he decided that other people’s deaths were more important than his own family’s lives,” he writes. “But, as always, I can’t get the anger out. I just sob in the phone.”
This is the last time he speaks to him.
Although he’s finally free of his father, Ebrahim is still viewed by his peers as the son of the most hated man in America. He’s bullied mercilessly.
The family moves constantly, dodging death threats, discarding their names and links to the past. His mother, a housewife, has no training in the working world. They sink deeper into poverty.
They get as far as Tampa, Fla., before they stop and settle in. After years on the run, Ebrahim allows himself to undergo the typical teenage rites of passage: cars, girls, drinks — and a job at the local theme park.
Busch Gardens saves his life.
“From the moment I put on my Rhino Rally safari suit, I meet tourists and co-workers of every description, which is so liberating that I can hardly put the feeling into words,” he writes. “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.”
He befriends two gay men and jokes with a tour group from Israel. “Bigotry cannot survive experience,” he says. “My body rejected it.”
Thanks to his favorite TV show, he also finds a father figure.
“I didn’t have a positive male role model until I started watching ‘The Daily Show,’ ” he says of the show’s host, Jon Stewart, adding in the book, “It only seems fitting that my new role model is Jewish.”
Part of the sloughing off of the past is disconnecting himself from his religion. A bachelor, he no longer considers himself a Muslim and does not believe in God. His goal these days is to spread his story — through his book, co-authored by Jeff Giles, and in speaking engagements such as a TED Talk he did in Vancouver this year. He seeks to mitigate “some of the damage my father has inflicted on the world.”
But as he speaks out against his father, now 58, the door he locked so long ago opens ever so slightly.
In 2010, when he first “came out” as Nosair’s eldest son during a talk at Southwestern University in Texas, his father tried to initiate contact. After thinking long and hard — what if he never had the chance to ask all the questions he’s been holding onto all these years? — he said yes.
They exchanged pleasant but distant e-mails. But when Ebrahim asked him point-blank about his crimes, he received an incoherent, defensive reaction. He knew then that he had been naive.
“I still feel something for him, something that I haven’t been able to eradicate — some strand of pity and guilt, I guess, though it’s thin as spider’s silk,” he writes.
“I realize now that I don’t really know my father. I never really knew him.”