The Killing of Rabbi Kahane: Jihad in America

Training for Jihad

It takes more than practice to turn a man into a marksman. Ask anyone who's ever felt the exhilaration that comes when a thundering cannon of a handgun explodes in his hand. Ask anyone who has ever experienced the rush of expectation and almost Zen-like concentration in that one suspended nanosecond as the invisible bullet travels to its target. To be a true marksman, you almost have to become part of your gun. In a sense, it is an act of surrender.

Surrender.

Nosair savored that word, such a beautiful word, in all its apparent contradictions. Surrender. It is the essence of Islam, the belief that to honor God and all of His creation, one must surrender completely to Islam. Someday, Nosair prayed, the whole world would surrender to Islam, as he had. But in order for that to happen, Nosair had to surrender himself again, to give up that part of himself that wished to control things.

Surrender.

Nosair closed one eye, felt the roughness of the pistol grip against his palm, the weight of the gun in his hand, its mass, its severity, the smooth trigger against his finger. He exhaled slowly and hardly even noticed his finger pulled back on the trigger.

The sharp thunderous crack of the gun echoed through the Calverton shooting range. Ali Mohammed smiled approvingly.

It was the summer of 1989, and for months, Nosair and Ali and some of the other men of the Farouq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn had been regularly meeting at the Calverton range on Long Island.

In addition to Nosair and Ali, an Army sergeant who made it back to New York from Fort Bragg, N.C., every chance he got, there was Mohammed Salameh and Nidal Ayyad and Mahmud Abuhalima, Mahmud the Red, he was called because of the red baseball cap he wore with the emblem of the National Rifle Association embroidered on the crown. Clement Hampton-El was there as well. He stood out. Unlike the others, who had all been born in Egypt, or in the Palestinian territories, Hampton-El was an American black man who had converted to Islam, but he donned the same uniform as the others, the drab T-shirt with a map of Afghanistan emblazoned on it and a logo that read, "A Muslim to a Muslim is like a brick wall."

It didn't matter to the men that they were from different parts of the world. What mattered was that they had all surrendered to Islam, to a particular strain of Islam that preached jihad above all else. The word had a slightly different meaning back then. In 1989, Afghan rebels, many of them devout Muslims who subscribed to the same revolutionary and violent doctrines as Nosair and his friends, had recently driven Soviet invaders out of Afghanistan and were continuing to battle the Soviet-installed government in that country. They were doing it with the covert help of the U.S. government, then locked in the twilight of its Cold War struggle with the "Evil Empire," as former President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the USSR a few years earlier. Though most Americans paid little attention to the radical Islamacists in the 1980s, among those few who did, there were some who thought it might seem naive in hindsight that they were romantic rebels fighting the good fight.

Even fewer Americans recognized possible links among the radical Islamacist fighters of the Mujahadeen and the terrorists from a variety of groups, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, funded and supported by states such as Syria and Iran, who were waging a proxy war against Israel. For most Americans, there was no obvious link between the noble warriors from Afghanistan and the shadowy killers who had blown up a U.S. Marine barracks a few years earlier in Lebanon, killing more than 250 young Americans.

Besides, in the minds of most Americans, America itself was the safest place in the world. The convulsions that gripped the Middle East and portions of Central Asia could never affect the United States.

To most Americans, there was nothing nefarious about a handful of men, most of them of Middle Eastern extraction, getting together at a local target range to squeeze off a few rounds after morning prayers.

But as authorities would later learn, the men were actually preparing for the coming war. Using U.S. Army training manuals and other documents spirited out of Fort Bragg by Ali, the men were studying strategy and tactics. Their objective, as Nosair would later write, was "to destroy the top infidels" and "all those who waged war against Allah and his messengers."

Mikhail Gorbachev (AP)

Within a year, Nosair would try to turn his rhetoric to action. In 1990, authorities now say, he made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev when the reformist Soviet leader was in New York for a visit. Later that year, authorities say, Nosair participated in an attack against another target with the bombing of a Greenwich Village bar frequented by gay men, a target he viewed as a monument to Western decadence. In both cases, he escaped detection.