Now he brushed past me. I turned and followed him, watching as he threaded his way through the crowd and took a seat high in the auditorium near an exit. After getting a fix on him, I found my own seat next to Keith and settled in to listen to Walid, who was speaking next. I knew this: the tactic of radical Muslims was to disrupt, to throw events into chaos. I was not going to let that happen here.
The blue amphitheater hummed with muted conversation until Walid took the podium. My friend opened brilliantly. The war on terror, Walid said, was not a battle between Islam and Christianity, but instead a clash of civilizations. “Radical Islamists have their own government, and they are ready to put that government in place in the United States,” he said.
About fifteen minutes into his talk, I leaned close to Keith. “You are not going to believe what just happened.” I told him about the confrontation.
“Are you serious?”
“Zak heard it, too. By his accent, I think he was Palestinian.”
Discreetly, Keith left his seat, and I watched him approach the major in charge.
The second Walid finished speaking, I found myself surrounded by a cluster of MPs, six or seven of them, all of them bigger than Dallas.
“Your manager told us what happened,” said a uniformed man wearing an impressive stack of stripes on his sleeve. “Is this man still sitting in here?”
I turned and peered up to the exit-row seat where I had last seen the young student. It was empty.
“No,” I said. “He left.”
I was describing him when one of the MPs spoke up. “I remember that individual. He seemed agitated. Hostile. I was watching him.”
The stripe-heavy MP said to me, “Could you identify this man if we took you around?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I will never forget the look in his eyes.”
But it did not turn out to be so easy. By the time we began our search, the conference attendees had dispersed to breakout sessions in classrooms flung about the campus. We tramped from building to building, wing to wing, the MPs consulting a sheet to see which classrooms had been designated for the conference. At each, an MP would crack the door and I would peer in, scanning faces. Nothing.
Finally, at about the tenth room, I saw a man. That’s him, I thought.
I paused in the doorway, the MP peering in behind me. As one, about thirty heads turned to look. I locked eyes with the student.
“I think that’s him,” I said.
The MP closed the door. “You have to be sure.”
But I wasn’t. The student who confronted me had been wearing a jacket. This man wore only a shirt. Also, sitting down, he seemed heavier.
Now the MP in charge caught up with us and pulled his men aside. He gestured urgently. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it appeared to me he was upset that our search had not yielded fruit. The MPs clustered around me again and hustled me back to an area where Zak and Walid were waiting.
“I saw one man I thought might be the one, but I was not sure,” I told them.
Walid looked at the MP in charge. “Do you have a list of the guests attending the conference?”
“Yes,” the MP said.
“Show it to me and I will tell you who this person is.”
Brilliant, I thought, and mentally slapped myself for not thinking of it. As in many eastern countries, a person’s name reveals his origin. A note of irony sounded in my brain. It had been the Palestinians who taught me to differentiate between names: in Sabra, we learned how to use last names to identify Jews, in case we had a crowd of hostages and needed to know which ones to kill first.
An MP returned with a sheet of paper and handed it to Walid, who ran his finger down a neatly typed column of names. Midway down, his finger stopped.
“This man here,” he said.
He was an exchange student. Based on his name, Walid knew instantly the man was Palestinian.
“How sure are you?” the MP asked.
“Ninety-five percent.” Walid’s finger brushed down the rest of the list until it found a second name. “Here’s another possibility, but I would say it is only a 5 percent chance that this is the man.”
Again, a knot of MPs rushed me across the campus. An MP went into the classroom and returned with the student, who glanced briefly my way. They stood a distance from me, and I could overhear snatches of the conversation.
“Did you speak to Mr. Saleem after lunch?” an MP asked the student.
“Yes.”
“Did you say to him that he had insulted Islam?”
“Yes. I do not agree with his views. This is America. I have freedom of speech.”
“Yes, you’re right. This is America,” the MP said. “But you’re at the Air Force Academy, not on the streets. Did you tell Mr. Saleem that people like him must be killed?”
“No.”
2
An investigation revealed that the student was in America on an educational visa. But he had not threatened my life directly, I was told. He had not said he was going to kill me. The student completely denied my account, was not charged with any wrongdoing, and was free to go.
Do you think he is rare? If so, do not forget the taxi driver, the pizza boy, the roofer who planned to attack Fort Dix. Do not forget Syed Ahmed and Ehsanul Sadequee, the Georgia Tech students who collaborated with terrorists. Do not forget Hamid Hayat and his plan to “wage violent jihad.”
In March 2008, my nephew called me at home from Lebanon. I was just finishing lunch, a turkey sandwich.
“You have a new religion now,” he said from miles away. It was more of an observation than an accusation.
“I am a Christian.”
“There will be a war in the family. They will never talk to you again if they find out you are a Christian.” I already knew that. For more than twenty years, I had hidden my faith from them—all except for my sisters, who loved me unconditionally.
You see, a Muslim who converts to Christianity is worse than an infidel, who, the theology goes, never experienced the glory and truth of Islam. An infidel is worthy of death—but it’s not his fault. He is therefore given a chance: before they chop off his head, he is allowed an opportunity to convert.
But even if he converts, he will still have to pay the jezyah, the tax levied for having been an infidel. If he cannot pay it, he must, by law, teach ten Muslim men about the horrors of his old religion and why it is false.
In centuries past, when Muslims conquered a country, instead of taxing or killing, the conquerors lopped off infidels’ right hands and left feet so that everyone would know they were vanquished infidels.
This is from Sura 5:33–34, the “Table Spread”:
Those who wage war against God and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption in the land should be punished by death, crucifixion, the amputation of an alternate hand and foot or banishment from the land: a disgrace for them in this world, and then a terrible punishment in the Hereafter, unless they repent before you overpower them: In that case bear in mind that God is forgiving and merciful.
Merciful, indeed.
Those in America who defend Islam as if it were all of one cloth like to ignore these facts. Or pretend that sura like these are relics of an ancient era, like the New Testament admonition that women should not cut their hair. But only a couple of months before my nephew called, Islamists in Gaza murdered Rami Ayyad, the manager of the area’s only Christian bookstore. Operated by the Palestinian Bible Society, the shop was located in a central part of Gaza City. Ayyad had received many death threats. Then one Saturday afternoon in October 2007, as he closed the Teacher’s Bookshop, gunmen snatched him off the street. Two days later, Ayyad’s captors dumped his body, bloody with knife and gunshot wounds, near the store. Ayyad was only twenty-six. He left behind two young children and a pregnant wife, Pauline.
His crime: he helped lead Gaza Baptist Church’s AWANA group, a kids’ Scripture memory club, and he directed the church’s summer children’s camp.
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br /> Sadly, Rami Ayyad is just one of hundreds martyred every year by Islamists whose white-hot hatred fires their killing. In July 2008 near Mogadishu, Somalia, two Muslim men approached Sayid Ali Sheikh Luqman Hussein, a twenty-eight-year-old convert to Christianity.
“Do you face Mecca when you pray?” the men asked Hussein.
“I am a Christian,” Hussein said. “I do not have to face a specific direction to pray because God is everywhere.”
A few days later, the men returned with an AK–47 and a handgun and shot Hussein to death. When his pregnant wife heard of her husband’s murder, the shock triggered premature labor, and she delivered the new child dead.
When I have pointed out incidents like these, groups like CAIR have accused me of promoting “fear.”
Am I afraid of Islam? No: I killed for it. Am I afraid of what radical Islamists will do if they continue their successful advance in America? Yes. And those who believe that America is so powerful that she is immune to such killing within her own borders are fools. It is already happening to Muslim women. And since 9/11, American authorities have exposed and halted no fewer than fourteen domestic attacks.
My nephew is among the blind. “Those things you are saying about what the Muslims do, their terrorism, is not real,” he told me on the phone. “Those who do that are muttarafeen; they are not even Muslim.”
I knew what he was saying: that moderate Muslims view groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda the way Christians view the Ku Klux Klan—as a radical splinter group that has laid claim to the teachings of a faith, but perverted them. Whether jihadists are a perverted splinter group or part of the true Muslim faith is a debatable idea. Their violence and its consequences are real.
Some moderate Muslims disagree with the jihadist and only wish to be left to live out their faith in Allah peacefully, treating the Koranic call to jihad as a throwback to a more barbaric time. In many cases, the moderates know the ruthlessness of the jihadists and are afraid to speak out against them. It is one thing to know that radicals consider you a neutered Muslim, an impotent pretender; it is another thing entirely to speak out against them and thereby mark yourself for death.
But there is still another group of moderate Muslims and many in this group have infiltrated the United States. These moderates have lives and jobs and families, but they secretly cheer on the jihadists as they do the dirty work. For example, the Holy Land Foundation was the largest charity delivering material aid to Islamic countries from America. In November 2008, five of its leaders were convicted of 108 charges of illegally funding the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.17
In the days following September 11, 2001, the streets of countries where Muslims live should have been filled with “moderates” crying out against the atrocities done in their name, protesting, “What you have done is not godly!” Instead, all over the world—including New York, Chicago, Houston, and Michigan—so-called moderate Muslims celebrated what happened to America. They reacted with joy to the news that the sword of Islam had cut down the Great Satan.
Moderate or muttarafeen, they celebrated the same, with dancing in the streets. People have forgotten that. Americans have forgotten.
Some Americans also believe that our jihadist enemy consists mainly of unsophisticated Third World savages who could never truly threaten such a technologically advanced nation as the United States. That is not true. In November 2008, six months after my nephew called, Pakistani terrorists invaded Mumbai, India, targeting tourists carrying Western passports and ultimately killing 179 people including six Americans. Before they landed in Mumbai, authorities learned, the terrorists studied satellite images of the city, carried handheld global-positioning sets, and kept in touch with their handlers via Internet, cell-, and satellite-phones. Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fiery Shia radical, is leading his country toward becoming the first nuclear jihadist state. Ahmadinejad believes he has been chosen by Allah to usher in worldwide Islamic rule. But in a 2005 speech in Tehran to leaders of the terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Iranian president did not ask his audience to imagine a Muslim-ruled America, but a world without America.
As I wrote this book, there were days when I wished I had never gone down this road. Often, I would open up Google News or some other Internet feed and find that I had once again been branded a fraud or a mercenary.
“Terrorism pays,” one writer quipped, accusing me of being in this for the money. I wish I could have shown her my bank account.
People who had never met me, never bothered to hear my story from my own lips, were ready to say that not only had I never been a terrorist, but that I had never even been a Muslim. And that was when I was only doing a few speaking engagements.
What will happen when the book comes out? I asked myself.
The answer: Professors, theologians, and historians will come out in force to try and discredit me.
For example, my real name is not Kamal Saleem. When I began speaking out against radical Islam, a number of professors and journalists began speculating on my real name, thoughtless of the fact they were endangering my family in Lebanon. Apparently, when you make your living destroying reputations with unresearched words, it is not of concern whether your words will endanger real people living in places where murder in the name of religion is tolerated.
This is another reason I did not speak out the instant the World Trade Center towers crumbled: because I feared for my family, still living in Lebanon. I am not just an infidel, but an ultimate infidel. Not just a former Muslim, but a former terrorist, too. I must be killed. And whoever kills me gets a prize.
Perhaps that means that something my father told me as a boy has become in some small way prophetic: “I wish you were a girl,” he spat, glowering over me in my mother’s kitchen. “That way I could get rid of you, because I know you are going to be a thorn in my side.”
I am not a particularly well-educated man, but I have a story.
I am not one of America’s great patriots, scientists, innovators, or soldiers. I did not invent an alternative energy source or discover a cure for cancer. But I can tell my story. It includes a lot of my failures, a lot of my wickedness. But when bin Laden hit the World Trade Center, it turned out that my story also had a purpose: To say, “Wake up, America! You have a good heart toward foreigners, but it will be your death if you do not recognize your enemies and face them head-on.”
My story has proven itself a thorn in the side of many who like to pretend that all Muslims are good Muslims and that anyone who warns against radical Islam is a radical himself.
Let us stop pretending: Many Muslims are kind and gentle people, but about one in ten, according to scholars who study jihad, have declared war on our way of life, and it is not a war that we can watch on CNN. As Americans, we must examine the patterns of jihad and be constantly on our guard at home and abroad.
Beware of attempts to establish Sharia law in your town, such as happened in Minneapolis. There, in response to Muslim cab drivers who did not want to transport Orthodox Jews or people carrying alcohol, the airport authority suggested that some taxis be marked as “Sharia” cabs so that passengers fitting the “no ride” profile would not have to face rejection. The idea did not catch on. Yet.
Beware of attempts to establish Muslim prayer rituals in public schools, such as happened at Carver Elementary School in Oak Park, California. There, Muslim students were allowed fifteen minutes of daily prayer, led by a staff member, a practice not allowed for other religions in public schools.
In warning Americans about such things, there is no gain for me personally. I had a good career in information technology that I quit to write this book. I will not be famous, but infamous. Whether you become infamous by speaking out, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, or famous, like Sir Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, the Islamist sentence is the same: death by fatwa. Ali, and Theo Van Gogh, who teamed up to make a ten-minute film documenting the abuse of wo
men in Muslim societies, were both targets of the same death threats. Van Gogh is already dead, shot eight times in 2004 on an Amsterdam street by an Islamist zealot who then nearly cut Van Gogh’s head off with a knife.
People who are like I used to be do not get tired. They do not give up. They do not run out of money. And they do not run out of hate.
I am fifty-one years old, living the back stretch of my life. I am not the young man I used to be, shouting and screaming and waving a gun, attempting to change the world on the strength of my hatred.
But that young Beiruti boy who gazed through his dreaming window at the spot where the moon kissed the sea still lives inside me. That rooftop boy who cried out to his god under the shimmering stars grew into a man who still prays—not to a god of war, but to a God of peace.
I pray for my family’s safety. I pray for this great country. And I pray for you, that you would never meet a man like me.
Appendixes
People
Abdel. The owner of the Beirut gift shop where Kamal worked.
Adnan. Kamal’s neighbor and childhood friend.
Ahmad, Omar. The founder of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic, which claims to be the largest Muslim civil liberties organization in the United States.
Ahmed, Syed Haris. Georgia Tech Student who cased and videotaped the Capitol and World Bank for a terrorist organization in 2006.
Ahmed. One of two adult fedayeen (Palestinian freedom fighters) who escorted Kamal and other recruits on a mission to transport weapons to the Palestinians.
Ali ibn Abi Talib. The cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. Ali is regarded as the first imam and the rightful successor to Muhammad. The disagreement about Ali’s place in the Muslim landscape split the Muslim community into the Sunni and Shia.
Ali, Abu. A Shia convert to Sunni and the leader of Kamal’s first mission.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 30