New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  The identification number on the van’s twisted chassis, recovered by investigators in the deep pit, led them to a rental outlet in Jersey City. There, workers reported that Muhammed Salameh, the man who had leased the van, had returned late on February 26, the day of the explosion, and tried to recover his $400 deposit, claiming that the van had been stolen. The arrest of the illegal Palestinian emigrant Salameh on March 4 led to the apprehension of three other suspects, all foreign-born Muslims. While three of the four men, Salameh, Abouhalima, and Ahmad Ajaj, circulated primarily in the metropolitan region’s Arabic-speaking communities, Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a Rutgers-trained engineer working for a Morristown chemical company and living in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey.39

  A common link between the men was their devotion to a blind émigré Egyptian cleric named Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who preached frequently at the Al-Farook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and at the Salaam Mosque in Jersey City, where he now lived. Rahman was an exile from Egypt, where he had played a background role in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar El Sadat. “We must terrorize the enemies of Islam . . . and shake the earth under their feet,” he contended during a Brooklyn sermon in early 1993. “The enemies at the forefront of the work against Islam are America and the allies.”40

  In August 1993, the work of an informant named Emad Salem enabled the FBI to indict Rahman and fourteen other Muslim men for complicity in the World Trade Center attack and also for a plot to blow up the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and the United Nations (which was considered a front for a “new government which rules the world” on behalf of America, according to one conspirator). A new era in New York’s and the world’s terrorist history, one driven by religious fervor, had begun.41

  New York’s first Arab community, largely Christian, found a home in lower Manhattan in the late nineteenth century. Not until the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened America’s gates wide for the first time since 1924, did New York and other cities acquire a sizeable population of Muslim emigrants. By the 1990s, the city was home to some 120,000 New Yorkers of Arab origin, most of them Muslims. Like other newcomers, most of the Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Kuwaitis who formed enclaves in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Sunset Park, and Bay Ridge were law-abiding, hardworking people dedicated to gaining a foothold in America and making a living. By the 1980s, their stores, coffeehouses, and mosques had brought a distinctive flavor to Atlantic Avenue, a corridor running between the gentrified brownstone districts of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Boerum Hill. Beneath a surface unity provided by Islam and the Arabic language, the Muslim community encompassed a variety of national and ethnic traditions, as well as religious and political opinions reflecting the diversity of the Arab world.

  Despite this variety, for many Muslim immigrants it was hard during the 1980s to ignore the call of jihad in Afghanistan, where Afghans and other devout fighters were resisting a Soviet incursion that had begun in 1979. Recast by the Carter and Reagan administrations and the CIA as a Cold War sideshow, the anti-Soviet war there could also be viewed as a crusade joining the United States and the Muslim world in common cause. But in the mid and late 1980s, as the war became a driving force for Islamic fundamentalism, a more strident note sounded in the exhortations of some clerics and activists. A charismatic Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam crisscrossed America, urging mosque congregations in over fifty cities to provide funds and recruits for the holy war against the Russians. In Peshawar, Pakistan, Azzam had founded the Bureau of Services (Metkab al Khidmat, or MAK) as a recruiting center. Now he established branch offices throughout Europe and the United States— in Atlanta, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Tucson, Jersey City, and elsewhere. Arguably the most important of these American MAK offices, named the Al-Kifah Refugee Center and incorporated in 1987, was located at the Al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn, the same mosque where Omar Rahman would eventually preach.42

  Some congregants at Al-Farook, including cabdriver Mahmud Abouhalima and Clement Hampton-el, a messenger for Long Island College Hospital, went forth from Brooklyn to wage jihad in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Azzam continued to spread his message, usually in Arabic. “The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan. . . . You must fight in any place you can get,” he told an audience at Al-Farook in 1988. Azzam was, in fact, a disciple of Sayyid Qutb, and he embraced a Manichean vision of a world divided between oppressive infidels and holy warriors. “Today humanity is ruled by Jews and Christians—the Americans, the British and others,” he told Kansas Muslims that same year. “Behind them [are] the fingers of world Jewry, with their wealth, their women and their media.” In 1989, however, Azzam was assassinated in Peshawar in the midst of factional power struggles. In the wake of his death, the movement Azzam had fostered passed largely into the hands of his disciple and colleague, Osama bin Laden.43

  Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, American authorities had been aware of the radicalism of conspicuous Muslim immigrants. But a combination of bureaucratic inertia, lack of coordination and cooperation between different agencies, ignorance, other priorities, and sheer lack of urgency let these individuals enter the country and remain. For example, the US embassy in Sudan and its CIA attaché allowed Sheikh Rahman to obtain a visa to the United States in 1990, unaware that the blind sheikh was on the State Department’s watch list for terrorists. A year later, while the New York office of INS was working to revoke his visa, Rahman obtained permanent residency status from the Newark INS office; he had moved from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to a new home in Jersey City and into Newark’s jurisdiction. In the summer of 1989, the FBI watched the comings and goings of men from Al-Farook, including Salameh, Abouhalima, and Ayyad, who took AK-47s and semiautomatic pistols to a firing range at Calverton, Long Island, for target practice. But the shooters discovered the surveillance, and without proof of illegal activities, the monitoring ended.44

  Other clues eluded investigators. In November 1990, El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian emigrant, shot and killed the militant rabbi and former Knesset member Meir Kahane after a speech at the Marriott Hotel in midtown. Kahane, whose Jewish Defense League had itself been responsible for several bombings and a death in New York during the 1970s and 1980s, had become an outspoken advocate for driving all Palestinians out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Nosair was tried and convicted as an angry “lone gunman.” Police confiscated boxes of Arabic notebooks and cassette tapes from Nosair’s Cliffside Park, New Jersey, apartment. The material included Nosair’s musings on the need to “demoralize the enemies of God” by destroying “the pillars of their civilization such as the tourist attractions they are so proud of and the high buildings they are so proud of.” But the notes and tapes were not rediscovered and translated until after the bombing of February 26, 1993.45

  By 1997, five men responsible for the 1993 bombing were serving life terms in American prisons. The blind sheikh, Nosair, and eight others were also behind bars for the plot against the United Nations and tunnels, a plan to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and charges linked to the WTC bombing and Kahane killing. Yet jihadist attacks on American targets—the Ko-bar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole—continued in the late 1990s, as did New York’s prominence in the schemes of terrorists.

  In July 1997, two illegal Palestinian emigrants living in an apartment on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, Gazi Abu Mezer and Lafi Khalil, planned to kill Hasidic Jews (and any others present) by committing suicide with five nail-studded pipe bombs on a B train speeding under the East River during the morning rush hour. Only the quick action of their terrified roommate, an Egyptian named Abdel Mosabbah, led police to the flat where, after a struggle and gunfire, the two were arrested. Four months later, six members of Islamic Jihad, demanding that the United States free Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, massacred fifty-eight tourists and four police officers at Luxor, Egypt. Like other Americans, most
New Yorkers saw these episodes as horrific but remote, or if too close for geographical comfort, then as forgettable in the onrush of daily life. Few heeded the warning of a draft letter confiscated from Nidal Ayyad’s computer in March 1993: “We promise you that the next time it will be very precise and WTC will continue to be one of our targets.”46

  September 11, 2001, of course, changed everything. The most deadly terrorist attack in American history, it dwarfed all previous incidents, propelling the United States into war against worldwide jihadism. The assault—which saw jihadists using hijacked airliners to launch two successful attacks on New York and one on the Pentagon—also once more highlighted New York City’s primacy in the terrorist imagination. In the vision shared by al Qaeda and other jihadists, the West represented an affront to a militant Islam, which would ultimately triumph and convert the world. American support for Israel, U.S. alliances with “apostate” leaders in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the American military presence near Arabia’s holiest shrines were outrages to be ended. The jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan, bin Laden believed, had led to the collapse of the godless Soviet Union. To provoke the United States into attacking Muslim Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet empire, would be the key to the final downfall of the “far enemy.” Striking the American homeland on September 11 would accomplish these goals.47

  In bin Laden’s scenario, New York played a distinctive role. A blow against the Wall Street exchanges tantalized jihadists with the promise of paralyzing the nation’s economy. New York also became the target of a jihadist anti-Semitism, rooted in the writings of Qutb and others, that went beyond anti-Zionism to attack all Jews without distinction. Qutb, for example, had taught that Jewish “machinations and evilness” concentrated “the proceeds of all human toil into the hands of the great usurious Jewish financial institutions.” A popular apocalyptic literature circulating in the Arab world during the 1990s primed jihadists to believe that, since in New York “there are more Jews than in other places, and in it is their wealth, their banks, their political foundations which control the entire world . . . for this reason their portion will be a total uprooting.” While living in Hamburg, Germany, two of the future 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh, denounced the “Jewish world conspiracy,” based in New York City, which controlled international finance and media. New York was also a prime source and symbol of the material self-indulgence and sexual perversions favored, according to one Islamist tract, by “the children of fornication which are numerous today in the immoral prostrate West.” Driven by such arguments, federal prosecutors later alleged, Kahane’s assassin El Sayyid Nosair had probably planted a 1990 bomb that destroyed a Greenwich Village gay bar and injured three patrons.48

  The World Trade Center site, September 12, 2001, as photographed from a satellite. Smoke billows over a landscape once occupied by Fort Amsterdam, Pavonia, Black Tom, and other landmarks of earlier conflicts. USGS LANDSAT 7 TEAM, AT THE EROS DATA CENTER.

  For all these reasons, New York’s skyline, with its arrogant skyscrapers broadcasting the power of money and secular values, needed to be humbled and leveled. The collapse of the Twin Towers and the successful attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 seemed to confirm the beginning of a new epoch for holy warriors, one fulfilling the vision of an ignorant America drawn into the death trap of Afghanistan and the eventual conversion of the world to Islam and the vanquishing of all “Jews and Crusaders.”49

  For all its lurid novelty, the new vision offered by jihadists like bin Laden recalled older fantasies. Bringing the miseries of war home to a smug, comfortable enemy population had been a goal of the city’s assailants from Robert Cobb Kennedy in 1864 to German propagandists in 1918 to Ted Gold in 1969 to al Qaeda hijackers in 2001. New York, seemingly invulnerable symbol of America in all its power and conceit, was supposedly rendered vulnerable to apocalypse by the very values and forces that made and sustained it. For the Virginian Edmund Ruffin in 1860, that force was the free labor system that had created the North’s insupportable inequities of wealth and power; his fictional vision presented a New York consuming itself in a cataclysmic class war. For Adolf Hitler, Jewish capitalism and American decadence would collapse in a sea of flames on Manhattan, courtesy of the Luftwaffe.

  September 11 was not the first time, moreover, that the city had been targeted in order to eradicate its threatening fascinations—whether in the form of “tasty flesh,” financial power, cosmopolitan sophistication, or unfettered expression. In their plans to annihilate (or at least chasten) New York, militants seeking purity in their own lives attempted to exorcize the seductive demons of capitalism, pluralism, permissiveness, and/or imperialism.

  None of these visions of the humbling of New York are interchangeable, and only a few of them have actually cost lives. The cataclysm of September 11, 2001, was an event unique in its tragedy, horror, and magnitude. Yet the recurring echo is there, a byproduct of New York’s role as the signature city not only of America but also of nineteenth-and twentieth-century modernity.

  Epilogue

  New York City and its people are resilient. They have adjusted incrementally to an urban culture reshaped by war in the twenty-first century as well as in earlier centuries. Bomb-sniffing dogs and gun-toting officers wending through train terminals, metal detectors and ID checks in office lobbies, long lines at airport check-ins: all have become part of the accepted background static of our daily urban lives. One has to live in and with the city, after all.

  This persistence is healthy and life-affirming, but it is also a form of sanity-saving denial. For if the shock, numbness, and urgent grief that New Yorkers felt after 9/11 have largely faded, a lingering vulnerability has not. If history is a guide, New York City will be attacked again in the future as it has been in the past; the difference is that future attacks hold the prospect of being indiscriminate, and perhaps more deadly. Only bad luck and blunders kept Najibullah Zazi and four other al Qaeda operatives from bombing the New York subway in September 2009 and Faisal Shahzad from setting off a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. Nor has al Qaeda rescinded its post–9/11 threat to use “nuclear and biological equipment” to kill “hundreds of thousands” of Americans. Navigating on foot through a dense rush-hour crowd in Penn Station or Grand Central, one finds it hard not to have fleeting visions, quickly pushed away, of what another attack might bring. Anxieties lie just below the surface, even as most New Yorkers ignore the suggestion of the city’s Office of Emergency Management that they compile a “Disaster Plan Checklist” and contemplate the possibility of evacuation or “sheltering” in the event of terrorism or natural catastrophe. The demise of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders may bury the fears deeper, but they still exist.1

  New York’s experience of war affords another lesson. The recurrent challenge to New Yorkers has been how to tell enemies from friends in a city of varied, often insular micro-communities. The challenge has been to distinguish spies, saboteurs, and terrorists from their seemingly identical but innocent neighbors. But it has also been about how to balance freedom and diversity against the need for security and survival.

  The lessons of the city’s legacy in this regard are not especially cheery. Repeatedly, New York communities—black, Catholic, loyalist, German, Jewish, leftist—suffered for the sins of a few; ethnic and political antagonisms fueled sweeping accusations of disloyalty that tainted the innocent majority as well as the guilty minority. This legacy has echoed through the city’s recent history and its ongoing public concerns. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, for instance, many New Yorkers and other Americans opposed the plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero, arguing that the center’s location represented an affront to those lost on 9/11. Given the horrors of 9/11, and the still unhealed wounds of that day, anger and aversion were not surprising reactions to the proposal. But too often in the ensuing debate, fear, ignorance, wholesale stereotyping, and bigotry—embodied in allegations that the center woul
d become an “Islamic Supremacist Mega-Mosque” for terrorist sympathizers or even a base for nefarious anti-American plots—stood in for temperate, discriminating scrutiny. The fact that telling friend from enemy can be a murky business does not exempt New Yorkers or other Americans from the ongoing need to try.2

  The inevitable paradox of New York, and of America, has been that the very thing that makes them vulnerable—their heritage of taking in the peoples of the world—has always been their strength as well. Robert W. Snyder, a historian who was engulfed in the dust cloud near the collapsing South Tower on September 11, managed to duck into a nearby food court with two other men. There, “we were helped by one man who probably came from the Middle East, another who might trace his family to Ireland, and women with roots in Africa and Latin America. . . . There might have been a Muslim among us, but we never got around to asking each other’s religion. All we did was recognize each other as human beings who needed help.”3