The Killing of Rabbi Kahane: Jihad in America

A Man of Little Consequence

As Nosair lay in a New York City hospital bed recovering from the bullet wound in his neck, police in New Jersey were combing his Cliffside Park apartment. In addition to his writings on the subject of international jihad, they also found, scrawled on the back of a bank calendar, what would later be described as "a hit list," containing the names of two federal judges, a U.S. congressman deemed to be overly pro-Israeli, and the name of a former assistant U.S. attorney. None of it raised much in the way of suspicions among the cops.

Nor did the cache of assorted tracts containing instructions on bomb making, the trove of cartridges for high-powered assault rifles, the collection of driver's licenses in assorted names, the fake passports or the yellowing newspaper articles on Sadat's assassination.

Perhaps, observers would later say, it was a more innocent time. America had never before been targeted at home by terrorists, and the cops had little reason to suspect that the slaying of the radical rabbi was anything other than an isolated act. The whole notion that it might have been part of a larger conspiracy was, to the cops at the time, preposterous. As one federal investigator put it at the time, "either the man is a lone nut or he's a lone nut and someone whispered something in his ear, knowing that he'd do it." The only other option, the investigator added derisively, was "there's an enormous international conspiracy."

That possibility seemed remote, and so the New York City police and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office decided to handle the case as a routine murder. But even that was fraught with problems, authorities would later complain. No one in New York had ever heard of Nosair, but everyone knew about Kahane. His provocative rhetoric and the underlying sense that the radical rabbi was not only hostile to Arabs but to blacks and other minorities in the city was well-known, especially his mantra advocating Jewish vigilantism in New York "every Jew a .22," he used to say.

The prosecutors knew that it would be no easy task getting a jury to feel sympathy for the slain rabbi. They also knew the physical evidence in the case had been handled sloppily, and that there was skepticism among jurors about the fact that Kahane's family, in keeping with Jewish law, had refused to permit an autopsy. But the prosecutors were shocked when a jury in Manhattan on December 21, 1992, acquitted Nosair of second-degree murder charges, convicting him instead on charges of assault and illegal weapons possession.

The conviction was enough to send him to Attica, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. He was sentenced to 22 years. But it wasn't enough to stop Nosair or his comrades in the struggle for radical Islamic supremacy from continuing to plan attacks against the United States.

In the months following Nosair's arrest, his stock rose dramatically within the radical Islamic movement in the United States and beyond its border. Though the majority of American law enforcement officials still believed him to be a lone assassin, there were some who knew better. Rudolph Giuliani, for example, a former federal prosecutor who was about to become mayor of New York, a position he would hold in 2001 during what was arguably one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, had warned that Nosair was part of a larger conspiracy.

But there was little impetus in those days to take a hard line with Nosair or any of his associates and so, for the next few years, jailers at Attica regularly waved through Nosair's friends on visiting days at the prison. During these face-to-face meetings, the group, including Abuhalima and Nosair's brother, Ibrahim Elbrawgone, hatched a scheme to bring the United States to its knees. The group's plot was to attack New York City's bridges and tunnels and other landmarks, among them the World Trade Center. As the months dragged on Nosair berated his friends for taking so long to begin the reign of terror. He even instructed his comrades to seek a fatwa, a religious ruling from the Blind Sheik in a bid to expedite the coming war. By late winter of 1993, however, the plans, it seemed, were coming together.

In a telephone conversation with his wife around that time, Nosair was reported to have said, "What will happen in New York, God willing, it willbe because of my prayers."