The Killing of Rabbi Kahane: Jihad in America

A Lone Gunman

No one paid much attention to the pudgy, bearded young man who huddled in the corner of the conference room at the Marriott East Side Hotel that night. There was no reason to. With his olive skin, darting dark eyes, and knit yarmulke an emblem among militant Zionists the 34-year-old engineer blended into the crowd.

As far as anyone knew, he was just another Jewish student, from one of the more right-wing yeshivas in New York, perhaps, who had come to the hotel to hear Rabbi Meir Kahane speak on the night of November 5, 1990. If the young man seemed a bit agitated, that was understandable. It was impossible not be agitated when Kahane spoke. Agitation was Kahane's stock in trade and there was always a palpable tension in the room when the diminutive fire-breathing rabbi took the stage.

Rabbi Meir Kahane (AP)

There was something exciting and almost dangerous about Kahane. After all, he was a man whose views were so extreme that he had been expelled from the Knesset in his adopted homeland of Israel. He was a man who advocated the removal by force, if necessary of all Arabs from within the biblical borders of Israel. Because of that view the Israeli government considered him a pariah. But to many Jews, particularly Zionists in the diaspora, he was a hero, a righteous and courageous man.

This was a man who was so extreme that in his native land, the United States, he and his followers had been put on a government watch list and the organization he had founded, the Jewish Defense League, had been identified as one of the most dangerous extremist groups in the country, more dangerous even than the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation.

Jewish Defense League Logo (AP)

This was man about whom no one was neutral. A powerful speaker despite a stutter that had dogged him since childhood Kahane had a machine gun-like delivery. Even if you disagreed with Kahane, even if you hated his message, you could not help but be moved by him. So no one paid much heed when the pudgy electrical engineer with the darting eyes joined a crowd of young men as they surged toward the stage when Kahane finished speaking.

In the excitement, no one noticed when El-Sayid Nosair pulled a chrome-plated .357 magnum from inside his jacket. As Kahane turned to greet his followers, Nosair fired a single round. The bullet ripped through Kahane's neck and exited through his cheek. His mouth filled with blood and he raised his hand to his head and collapsed to the floor. Unable to speak, he raised one finger to heaven, a Jewish tradition, a silent rendering of the most sacred of Hebrew prayers, the Shema "Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord your God is One."

In an instant, bedlam broke out. Nosair spun on his heels and began to force his way through the crowd that was by then in the grips of hysteria. Just before he reached the door, an old man, 73-year-old Irving Franklin, grabbed him. Nosair struggled to get free, but Franklin hung on. Nosair fired again, striking the old man in the leg to get free. Then he dashed out of the hotel onto the street and into a livery cab, thinking it was the getaway car he had arranged to have waiting. He was wrong, but there wasn't time to correct the mistake. Nosair shoved the barrel of the gun into the back of the cabbie's head, but before the cabbie could pull into traffic, one of Kahane's followers threw himself on the hood of the car. In the confusion, the cabbie jumped from his car, and so did Nosair. A moment later, he crossed paths with a postal service police officer. Nosair, mistaking the officer for a New York City cop, fired, wounding the officer slightly. The cop returned fire, dropping the young Egyptian in his tracks with a single bullet wound to the neck.

To the cops who first arrived on the scene, the slaying of Meir Kahane was one more killing in what was already shaping up to be the bloodiest year in New York City history. By the end of that year, 2,262 people would have died at the hands of killers. Yes, the slaying of the rabbi was a high-profile case, but only because the victim was such a controversial character, the cops thought. Perhaps it could be considered a hate crime, they thought; maybe it had political overtones. But by and large, the slaying of Meir Kahane was more or less a run-of-the-mill murder in a city that had seen too many of them, a deadly showdown, not much different than the almost daily deadly shootouts among rival gang-bangers in the Bronx and Brooklyn and in Harlem. In all probability, El Sayid Nosair was just another disgruntled loner with a gun and a grudge.

That's what the cops thought.