Video: The terrorist’s son: As
a child, Zak Ebrahim was
taught to hate
If you’re raised on dogma and hate, can you choose a different path? Zak Ebrahim was just seven years old when his father helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His story is shocking, powerful and, ultimately, inspiring.
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The terrorist’s son fighting the sins of his father
Zak Ebrahim and his father El Sayyid Nosair in 1991
Zak Ebrahim and his father El Sayyid Nosair in 1991
Barbara McMahon
Published at 12:01AM, September 11 2014
Published at 12:01AM, September 11 2014
As a child, Zak Ebrahim was taught to hate. His father is El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian industrial engineer who moved to the United States and turned against his adopted country. Supported by a terror cell that would ultimately call itself al-Qaeda, he carried out two acts of terrorism that ultimately brought him a life sentence. In 1990 he allegedly shot and killed Meir Kahane, a militant rabbi and the founder of the Jewish Defence League, after a speech in a ballroom at a Marriott hotel in Manhattan. While in prison, Nosair helped to plan the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured more than a thousand people. “My father was the first known Islamic jihadist to take a life on American soil,” Ebrahim acknowledges.
Ebrahim was in danger of following his father’s path. He grew up in a bigoted household, he says, raised to judge people by their race, religion or sexuality, and he unwittingly absorbed some of his father’s hate-filled ideology. As a child, he loved his “Baba”, spent many years believing in his innocence and even wondered if some of his father’s actions could be justified. “There’s a reason that murderous hatred has to be taught — and not just taught, but forcibly implanted,” Ebrahim writes in his compelling book The Terrorist’s Son: a Story of Choice. “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 hoped to pass on to me.”
World leaders are scrambling to combat the rise of the Islamic State movement in Iraq and Syria. Last week the militant group posted a video online in which Steven J Sotloff, an American freelance journalist, was beheaded. Another American, Jim Foley, was beheaded last month. The British hostage David Haines could be next.
The publication of Ebrahim’s book, which seeks to show how young people conditioned to be terrorists can choose peace and tolerance, could hardly be timelier. At the fashionable restaurant in the centre of Manhattan where we meet, Ebrahim seems a rather sad and solemn figure sitting among the noisy families making the most of the last gasp of summer. He discloses that he has suffered from depression for most of his life. “Not a day goes by that I don’t wish my father had chosen to live a peaceful life with his family,” he says.
The book has fascinating insights into how his father became radicalised. His American mother, a Muslim convert, married Nosair after meeting him at a mosque. She wore the niqab that cloaked everything but her eyes. The marriage was happy until Nosair was wrongly accused of sexual assault and had an accident that compromised his ability to be the family breadwinner. His father, he writes, began “to harden against America, his bitterness building slowly”. Ebrahim remembers him praying obsessively and poring over the Koran. He no longer slept with Ebrahim’s mother, preferring a rug on the floor.
Ebrahim recalls his father going to secret meetings at a fundamentalist mosque in New Jersey, growing palpably less tolerant of non-Muslims and becoming a follower of a Sunni firebrand from Palestine called Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. He was on a fundraising tour of the US and inspired his flock — including Ebrahim’s father — with stories from the battlefield in Afghanistan that verged on magical realism, including Mujahidin accompanied into battle by angels on horseback and protected from falling bombs by squadrons of birds.
His father, he observes in the book, had found a new sense of purpose and he and other men from the mosque met frequently at the Nosair apartment, talking loudly and ecstatically about supporting the jihad in Afghanistan. When his son asked him innocently when he suddenly became such a devout Muslim, the father replied coldly: “When I came to this country and saw everything that was wrong with it.”
The little boy was taken by his father and his “uncles”, most of whom would later be convicted in the World Trace Centre bombing, to a shooting range. When Ebrahim hit the target one of the group said approvingly in Arabic: “Like father, like son.” He was being groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. On other occasions, Nosair took him to hear one of Osama bin Laden’s allies, the blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Ebrahim says he later learnt that the Blind Sheik had been urging his father to “make a name for himself”.
Ebrahim was seven years old, dressed in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pyjamas, when his mother woke him and his two siblings in the middle of the night. The Jewish rabbi had been assassinated and Nosair himself had been shot. His father was eventually cleared of murder — no witness actually saw Nosair shoot the rabbi — but was found guilty of weapons charges. He was sentenced to between seven and twenty-two years. Three years later, Nosair was convicted of helping to plot the WTC bombing and received a life sentence plus 15 years with no chance of parole. Ebrahim’s mother demanded a divorce and the family changed their name in an attempt to escape Nosair’s infamy.
It should have been a fresh start, but his mother married another man who was abusive. Ebrahim, who had been bullied at school and subjected to death threats because he was a terrorist’s son, found no solace at home.
The change in his circumstances and outlook happened when Ebrahim turned 18 and got a job at a theme park in Florida. For years, he says, he had been on the run from his father’s legacy and had lived life as an outcast. Now he smelt freedom. He got drunk for the first time. He smoked a cigarette. He was already a devotee of Jon Stewart’s irreverent The Daily Show and began to see the world through different eyes. Meeting so many people of different faiths while at work, he started questioning everything his father stood for.
“Because we moved around so much, I lived in a bubble,” he explains. ‘’It wasn’t until I was exposed to the world and all the different people in it that I started to think how great it would be not to have to judge everyone I met in this predetermined way because of their race or religion. I was talking to my mother about it and suddenly she said, ‘I’m tired of hating people’, and it was like she was giving me permission to just go out into the world without judgment.”
He kept his background largely secret until a friend persuaded him that he had an important story to tell. A few years ago he began speaking at church rallies and at schools and wrote The Terrorist’s Son with the help of a journalist, Jeff Giles, after a well-received TED talk about his experiences.
Ebrahim tells audiences that he is uniquely placed to understand how dangerous religious extremism is. “People are susceptible to radicalisation because they are looking for a sense of purpose, and they are isolated, and they take their understanding of the world from someone who wants to manipulate them into violent acts,” he says. “You know, a kid from London who sees his government’s role in perpetuating a cycle of violence or disenfranchisement against the people in whatever country he’s from . . . it leads them to become angry. They don’t think the political process will work and so they think the only way they can change things is through violence. It’s such a simple trap, because we’ve seen over and over again that violence only perpetuates more of it.”
He was lucky, he admits, because his father’s influence on him was limited because he went to jail. Nosair is currently in federal prison in Marion, Illinois, in a unit known as a Little Guantànamo because it consists mainly of Arab inmates and is subjected to enhanced monitoring of inmates’ communications. Nosair periodically tries to win his freedom through appeals and claims that he does not support jihad as it is practised today. Ebrahim has not seen his father in 20 years and has intermittent telephone and email contact with him.
The 31-year-old displays a flash of anger when he recalls how he once asked his father to explain himself. “I tried to express how hard it was for me growing up without him and how hard it was as an adult to get over so many of the issues that come with being his son and he basically said: ‘It’s because you’re not a Muslim any more. If you were a Muslim, you would get over all of these things.’ And that, frankly, p***ed me off because he’s still taking no responsibility for it and putting all the blame on me for not being able to deal with it.”
By telling his story, Ebrahim adds, he hopes to do something hopeful and instructive. He could, he agrees, have found terrorism intoxicating, as did his father and the young westerners who have gone to places such as Syria and Somalia. The 23-year-old Londoner Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, the key suspect in the killing of Jim Foley and nicknamed Jihadi John, also has an Egyptian father who is awaiting trial in New York on terrorism charges. “It’s hard for me seeing all of the similarities,” Ebrahim says. He describes the recent beheadings as senseless and horrific. “War is hell and it’s really incredible the way people can lose their humanity in war.”
Ebrahim says he now has close friends of all religious faiths. He acknowledges that only a few people are exposed to the extremism and that most people want to keep their religious beliefs and live in peace, but he has given up his Muslim faith and no longer believes in God. “For my whole life I’ve seen religion used as a weapon,” he says, “and I’ve put my weapons down.”
The Terrorist’s Son by Zak Ebrahim is out today (Simon & Schuster, £7.99)
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