The Killing of Rabbi Kahane: Jihad in America

The Road to Terror

El-Sayid Nosair (AP/World Wide)

That was due in part to his seeming insignificance, authorities would later say. At 34, there was nothing about Nosair that made him stand out. An engineer from Egypt, he had moved to the United States in 1981, settling first in Pittsburgh. According to his neighbors at the time, he seemed to enjoy his early days in America and even took an American wife who had converted to Islam. But over time, and for reasons that remain unclear, Nosair became disenchanted with the American Dream, and began to embrace a radical strain of Islam whose believers believed that they were called upon by God to establish Islamic law the world over.

In 1985, he became embroiled in a dispute with a woman who had set up housekeeping with the Nosairs and their children in Pittsburgh. The woman accused Nosair of sexual assault and filed a criminal complaint against him. The woman later dropped the charges, and allowed the leaders of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh to consider the case. Nosair and the woman were summoned, and the religious court ruled that Nosair was innocent and that the woman had tried to blackmail him.

Despite his exoneration, Nosair opted to leave town, and that year he moved with his wife and children to Cliffside Park, a teeming community on the Palisades overlooking New York City. From the cliffs near his home, Nosair had a commanding view. He could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, and closer still, the towering columns of the World Trade Center. But there was someone who had an even better view than he, Nosair thought.

Sheik Omar Ahmad Abdul Rahman (AP)

Sheik Omar Ahmed Abdul Rahman had been born blind, but to his followers, he was a man of unparalleled vision. Years earlier, he had helped establish al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, a radical organization that was linked to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar as-Sadat, as a punishment, sanctioned by a religious ruling from Rahman, for making peace with the Israelis at Camp David. Though an Egyptian court cleared Rahman in connection with the assassination, the Blind Sheik, as he came to be known, boasted of the success operation and of al Jamaa al-Islamiayas role in it. The group he had founded, he said in a tape-recorded message to his followers, had "carried out many jihad operations againsttyrants. The most famous and the most successful operation was fighting the atheist, the oppressorAnwar as-Sadat.

Anwar Sadat (AP)

In the years following that assassination, Sheik Rahman had gained stature in the world of Islamic extremists, and as authorities would later learn, Nosair was one of his most fervent supporters in the United States.

By the late 1980s, Nosair was in regular telephone contact with Rahman, and by 1990, Nosair and Abuhalima had helped clear the way for the Blind Sheik to immigrate to the United States. It remains a source of some controversy that the sheik was granted a visa first a tourist visa and later a green card despite the fact that his name appeared on a State Department watch list of known terrorists, leading some observers to suspect that either there had been a massive bureaucratic snafu at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, or that the U.S. government had given him a free pass in exchange for his unflinching support of the guerilla fighters in Afghanistan.

Also with the help of his followers, the Blind Sheik found sanctuary first at the El Farouq mosque in Brooklyn and later at a Jersey City mosque, Masjid Al Salaam, a second-floor loft in Kennedy Square, a few miles from Nosairs home and directly across Kennedy Boulevard from the offices of the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Though the sheik was a known radical, and though government officials did keep tabs on him, he was hardly perceived to be as serious a threat as other agitators, authorities would later say. Kahane, for example, was considered far more dangerous.

To Nosair, the diminutive gray-haired man with the dark sunglasses and the scholarly white beard was more than just a preacher. He was, Nosair would later say, my prince.

A few days before the Kahane shooting, according to a report published years later in the Village Voice, an FBI informant spotted Nosair and the Blind Sheik huddled together at a Lebanese restaurant in Brooklyn. The two were deeply engrossed in conversation.

Perhaps, authorities would later surmise, they were putting the finishing touches on what was to become the first significant act of international terrorism on United States soil.