The Terrorist’s Son (9 page)

“Weird. Those were actually my regular navigator's last words.”

“Seriously?”

“No, his last words were actually, ‘Help me, Z! Why
are you driving away?!' But you get the idea. Tomer, I don't mean to be rude, but you seem really unqualified to be a navigator. I'm kinda surprised you volunteered.”

“My watch has a compass on it.”

“You know what? That's good enough for me. Let's hear it for Tomer, everybody!”

The crowd laughs and claps, Tomer's kids louder than anyone, and we're off.

•  •  •

Some version of that scene plays out every day at Rhino Rally, with every conceivable kind of person sitting in the navigator's seat. It's amazing how much you can learn about somebody when you survive the rain forest
and
the savannah together, when the bridge you're crossing suddenly splits apart and your vehicle falls into the river and floats away on a raft of miraculous lifesaving logs. 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.

During my breaks from Rhino Rally, I start hanging out at Busch Gardens's Middle Eastern rock show, Moroccan Roll. (I've always loved the idea of being onstage. I got a part in a high school production of
Bye Bye Birdie
once, though Ahmed wouldn't let me take it.) I go to the show so often, in fact, that I make
friends with a Muslim trumpet player named Yamin. Through him I meet two dancers, Marc and Sean, who are gay. I'm reticent around them at first. I have no experience with gay men and, I'm ashamed to admit it, I judge them. Because of what I've been taught, it's like there's a sign over their heads flashing the words
BAD INFLUENCE! BAD INFLUENCE!
Maybe they don't notice that I'm standoffish. Maybe they pity me for my small-mindedness. Or maybe they're just giving me a free pass because I'm friends with Yamin. In any case, they are nothing but genuine and nonjudgmental with me. They let me babble about Rhino Rally, they don't laugh when I say I secretly love to sing, they try (and fail) to teach me a few dance moves. Their sheer niceness breaks me down. I've been bullied for so long that I'm a sucker for kindness.

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.”

•  •  •

Then suddenly, amazingly, we are free of Ahmed. Even my mother is free. She doesn't leave Ahmed in a fit of
rage—she doesn't tell him that he's a hateful human being and that there's no Muslim paradise waiting for him. She's too weary, too beaten down for that. Still, leaving him at all is a triumph in my book. She packs up and returns to Pittsburgh to care for her own mother, who has had a series of brain aneurysms.

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 wild-ass
zero-G roll
? Is it the out-friggin'-rageous
Immelman loop
? 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 know that systemic poverty, fanaticism, and lack of education make the kind of transformation I'm describing a staggering long shot in some parts of the world. 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 making 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.”

•  •  •

I stopped taking my father's calls when I was eighteen. Every so often, I'll get an e-mail from the prison in Illinois saying that he would like to initiate correspondence. But I've learned that even that leads nowhere good. My father's been appealing his convictions forever—he thinks the State infringed on
his civil rights during the investigation—so one time I e-mailed him and asked, flat-out, whether he murdered Rabbi Kahane, and whether he participated in the plot to attack the World Trade Center in 1993. I told him,
I'm your son and I need to hear it from you
. He answered me with an indecipherable, high-flown metaphor that had more twists and turns than the roller coaster at Busch Gardens. It made him seem desperate and grasping. Not to mention guilty.

Kahane's assassination was not just hateful, but a failure as anything other than simple murder. My father intended to shut the rabbi up and to bring glory unto Allah. What he
actually
did was to bring shame and suspicion onto all Muslims, and to inspire more pointless and cowardly acts of violence. On New Year's Eve in 2000, the rabbi's youngest son and daughter-in-law were killed—and five of their six children wounded—when Palestinian gunmen fired machine guns into the family's van as they made their way home. Another family destroyed by hate. I felt sick with sadness when I read about it.

I felt sicker still on 9/11. I sat watching the footage in our living room in Tampa, forcing myself to absorb the unfathomable horror of the attack—and struggling with the devastating feeling that I was somehow complicit by blood. Of course, the pain I felt was nothing compared to the pain of the true victims and their families. My heart still breaks for them.

One of the many upsides to not speaking to my father
anymore is that I've never had to listen to him pontificate about the vile events that took place on September 11th. He must have regarded the destruction of the Twin Towers as a great victory for Islam—maybe even as the culmination of the work he and the Blind Sheikh and Ramzi Yousef began years earlier with the yellow Ryder van.

For what it's worth—and I'm not sure what it
is
worth at this point—my father now claims to support a peaceful solution in the Middle East. He also claims to abhor the killing of innocents, and he admonishes jihadists to
think of their families
. He said all this in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
in 2013. I hope his change of heart is genuine, though it comes too late for the innocents who were murdered and for my family, which was torn apart. I don't pretend to know what my father believes anymore. I just know that I spent too many years caring.

As for me, I'm no longer a Muslim and I no longer believe in God. It broke my mother's heart when I told her, which, in turn, broke mine. My mother's world is held together by her faith in Allah. What defines
my
world is love for my family and friends, the moral conviction that we must all be better to one another and to the generations that will come after us, and the desire to undo some of the damage my father has done in whatever small ways I can. There's one remaining vestige of my own religious education. Whenever I read online about some new act of evil, I instinctively hope against hope that it isn't the work of Muslims—the
many peaceful followers of Islam have already paid a high enough price for the actions of the fundamentalist fringe. 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.

•  •  •

In April 2012, I had the surreal experience of giving a speech in front of a couple hundred federal agents at the FBI headquarters in Philadelphia. The Bureau wanted to build a better rapport with the Muslim community, and the agent in charge of the campaign had heard me advocate for peace at his son's school, so there I was—feeling honored, but nervous. It was a daunting crowd. I started with a joke (“I'm not used to seeing so many of you at once—usually I deal with you two at a time”), which was met with confused silence and then a pretty good laugh, for which I will be forever grateful. I proceeded to tell my story, and to offer myself up as proof that it is possible to shut one's ears to hatred and violence and simply choose peace.

After my talk, I asked if there were any questions, and there weren't. That seemed unusual, but maybe the FBI agents were too nervous to raise their hands? Anyway, I said, “Thank you very much for having me,” and the crowd clapped and began to disperse. And then something nice happened, which has always stayed with me: A handful of agents formed a line to shake my hand.

The first few agents offered polite words and firm grips. 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: