The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (8 page)

“Many of the boys! All of the boys!” Abdul Rahman said. “Especially
that
one.” He pointed at the boy who had thrown the rock at him.

The police commander closed the distance to the boy in three long steps, drew back his arm, and delivered a rough slap across his face. A
spot of blood appeared on the boy’s lip. The commander drew back his arm and delivered another blow. Now blood trickled from the boy’s nose in a scarlet stream.

This violence shocked my sense of fairness. Did not the policeman want to hear the Armenians’ side of the story?

“
You
did this, and your neighborhood doesn’t deserve this trouble!” the commander bellowed at the boy. “You don’t know who these people are. You’re going to get yourself killed! You’re going to get your family killed!”

Suddenly, I realized the policeman was protecting the boy. All of the Armenians. He was showing the Muslim Brotherhood that he would take care of the problem, that there was no need for retaliation. With a bloody nose as a deposit, the policeman was buying this boy a future.

I was sitting in the Houston airport browsing Internet news when I spotted an Associated Press item out of Cairo: “Two lawmakers from the banned Muslim Brotherhood were arrested Wednesday, officials said, in an intensifying crackdown on the nation’s most powerful opposition movement.”
¹

State security forces, the news story said, had stripped the two men of their parliamentary immunity, accusing them of participating in the Brotherhood’s illegal activities: “Authorities have increasingly clamped down on the Islamist group since December including sending 40 of its top financiers and businessmen to a military tribunal on charges of money laundering and supporting terrorism.”
²

The Brotherhood does more than
support
terrorism
, I thought.
They are its lifeblood
.

Among the groups and factions in which I had moved as a jihadist, it was well known that most Islamic terror groups have at least some roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, or
al-ikhwān
. The Brotherhood, the Muslim imitation of European fascism, had been around since 1928, founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher. The Brotherhood has always been strongest in Egypt, but it spread rapidly through other Muslim countries, setting up its Lebanon chapter in 1936.
³

The Brotherhood is a Sunni movement with a stark and violent credo: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law.
Jihad
is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” As a young boy rescued from ethnic street violence, I drank in this teaching in all its simple, childlike clarity. The teachings of the Brotherhood gave me power, authority, and ultimately, a gun.

As a young man, I imported this credo to America. I was not alone. During the late 1970s, I was among a wave of Middle Eastern students who washed on to American shores, carried along on oil money and easy visas. We were the first wave, the vanguard, planting the seeds of
jihad
with groups like the Muslim American Youth Association (MAYA). It was easy for me to connect with MAYA because some members believed—and still believe—the same thing I did: that the Western world is evil and must be destroyed. MAYA held U.S. conferences that attracted Islamist groups who openly proclaim their hatred for the Jews, for Christians, and for America.

At a MAYA conference in 1994, a man named Bassam al-Amoush was delivering a fiery message when someone interrupted him to hand another speaker a note. “We have good news,” the speaker proclaimed. “A Palestinian policeman has carried out a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Three were killed and fifteen wounded. Hamas claims responsibility for the incident.”
⁴

The crowd erupted in rapturous chants: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar.”

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, an Islamic cleric from Gaza, founded Hamas in 1987. It is the same Hamas written about in today’s newspapers, with terrorists blowing up civilians in the Middle East and Europe. And it is the same Hamas that now has organized cells in Tucson, Houston, and New York City, as well as Columbia, Missouri; Springfield, Virginia; and Santa Clara, California.

Sheikh Yassin designed Hamas on the model of the Muslim Brotherhood.

I closed my laptop and scanned the airport waiting area. When I came to this country, there were only a handful of mosques in Houston. Today, there are more than eighty. There in the airport, several groups
of Middle Eastern men and women sat or stood in groups, the women revealed by their
hijabs,
the men by their general look.

How many Kamals are there in this group?
I wondered.

A better question: how many Kamals were in the group of young men I had seen in the Atlanta airport in 2006 chanting, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud! Jay’sh Muhammad saufa ya’ud!” Khaybar was an ancient battle in which Muhammad’s armies annihilated some Jewish tribes. The chant taunts the Jews and warns them that “the army of Muhammad will return!” Among the Atlanta travelers, I had been perhaps the only one who understood that these young men were chanting a
jihadi
death song to Jews in an American airport.

No matter how many terrorist acts are carried out by young Middle Eastern men, it is a cultural taboo for an American to sit in an airport and wonder whether the young Middle Eastern men they see are terrorists. This is why radical Islamists love America: she has replaced her generosity toward all cultures and religions with an unquestioning embrace of “multiculturalism.”

We like to think the best of our neighbors. A lot of people thought of Mohammed Atta as a fine young neighbor. That was just before he and eighteen friends killed nearly three thousand people using passenger jets as missiles. It is good to think well of our neighbors, but that does not mean we should be willfully blind to the historical demographics of
jihad.

Which is why I was sitting in the Houston airport on my way to a string of speaking engagements in the Carolinas. My topic would be the same as it was in California, Michigan, Colorado, and elsewhere: America has an enemy within her walls. People who are like I was. Islamists working as taxi drivers and grocery clerks and university professors. People who are planning attacks such as those exposed by the American government since 2001:
⁵

Hayat, an American citizen, was somebody’s neighbor. The termites are in the walls. I know because I used to be one of them. Now I am standing on the walls and shouting, “Wake up, America!” Some media and Muslim “educational” groups like to paint me as stoking “fear” of Islam. They are wrong: I am stoking fear of
radical
Islam. Given the menu of the planned violence above, perhaps it is not unreasonable to be afraid.

Had you met me before, as Allah’s warrior, you would have been.

1

The police invited the imams and me to ride with them back to the mosque in their Jeeps. I felt very important zipping through the streets, the cool wind lifting my hair.

On the way, the police commander introduced himself to me as Sergeant Eli. “You will not have trouble with those boys again,” he told me.

Then he wrote down a telephone number on a slip of paper and gave it to Abdul Rahman. “Here is the number to my station. If anything happens again, call me.”

That afternoon, Abdul Rahman drove me home in his black Fiat. On the way, I prayed fervently that he would simply drop me at a corner and drive away. I planned to present the
lira
he had given me as my day’s pay. My family did not need to know what had happened. My father would never believe me anyway.

But Abdul Rahman parked the Fiat at the curb and said, “Come and introduce me to your family.”

My heart sank. I dreaded the moment when my father would learn I had spent the day at the mosque instead of going to work, that I had been in
fights,
that the police were called. I could not even imagine his anger.

When we reached the top of the steps, I opened the door and tried to
smooth the way with false cheer. “Mama! Papa! We have a visitor…an imam!”

My father rushed to the door, my mother at his shoulder, her
hijab
shielding her face.

My father scowled at me. “What have you done?”

“He has done nothing, Sayyid Mohammed Saleem,” Abdul Rahman said, addressing my father formally. He introduced himself and gave a brief explanation of what had happened and how the imams handled it for me.

My father glowered. “I’m sorry our son has made such trouble for you,” he said. I looked down at the ground. I knew he would not believe it was not my fault.

“Kamal did not do this,” Abdul Rahman insisted. “It was these boys. You must believe me. I am his witness. And if the same boys don’t beat him again, it will be a different group next time. Maybe he should look for a job closer to home.”

“Yes, you are right, Sayyid Rahman,” my father said, and relief poured over my soul like a cleansing rain.

2

Summer seared in with fierce desert winds that sometimes blew from the south of Syria and baked the city to a shimmer. After Abdul Rahman visited my mother and father, I did not have to work across town anymore. But that did not mean I did not have to work at all. Another uncle of mine got me a job with a plumber, a competitor of my uncle’s who also worked high-rise buildings. By the time the new man, Omar al-Basha, hired me, a construction crew had already erected a building ten floors high. I was hired as a seven-year-old errand boy. I had only worked there for three months when Omar announced a key part of the job: supplying each floor of the new building with the materials the
men would need to install pipe for drinking water, sinks, and bathrooms.

Omar stood outside with a small group of men and some older boys, teenagers. “We need pipe and sacks of cement for each floor,” Omar said. “Kamal, you will help. There is the truck. Let’s get it done.”

He pointed to a rusting pickup truck that had once been painted the color of the sky. In the bed, sacks of cement sat in high stacks. We did not have elevators or conveyors of any kind. We were to carry them up, two, six, ten flights.

One of the other workers, Qassim, looked at me skeptically and then at the boss. “These sacks are as big as this boy is!”

“Do not worry,” Omar said. “Kamal will do what he can.”

At that moment, I vowed in my heart to do as much as the men. I was excited to do this manly work, to prove myself to the others. I could not lift the sacks high, but Omar lifted one for me and set it on my shoulder. Up the stairs I climbed, one foot in front of the other. I carried the first few sacks up with a pasted-on smile, making up with testosterone what I lacked in strength. But soon the sacks got heavier, and I watched tall, muscled workers crowd past me up the stairs again and again.

Qassim passed me up three times. The final time, he glanced back and said, “You should move faster, little one. You are being paid money just like us.”

All morning long I trudged up and down, until my shoulders sagged under the weight of the sacks. I tried to think of the raise I had gotten. Omar was paying me more than my uncle—twenty-five Lebanese
lira
a week, about four American dollars, which I hoped would make my father happy. But mostly, I thought about school. I thought about my mother. I thought about Marie and Eli and playing seven stones.

By lunchtime, I felt as if my shoulders would slide off my body. White dust coated my face and arms. I sat down by the blue pickup and ate a sesame cake my brother had given me the night before. Chewing it in the hot shade, it tasted like cement.

After lunch, Omar said, we would begin moving pipe. Again, we had no machines. Instead, we were to pass the pipes up from the ground
vertically, from man to man, hand over hand on the unfinished balconies.

“Kamal, go up to the ninth floor to the center balcony facing the main street,” Omar said. “The pipes up there will be small and light, only for drinking water.”

The breeze had shifted; it now came off the sea instead of the desert, and the air was cooler. Still, my shirt was soaked. A thin mud of sweat and cement coated the back of my neck. Up the stairs I went again. Crossing the bare concrete floor, I slowed when I reached the balcony because I saw that it had only a low rail, exactly as high as the top of my thighs.

Beyond the balcony’s edge, I could see down on many rooftops of the older part of Lebanon that extended toward the sea. Leery of the low railing, I took one step, then another, until, at the middle of the balcony, I lay down on my chest and peeked over the edge. Up here, the air was cooler, the sea breeze set free from the labyrinth of alleys like doves from a cage. Far below, I could see Omar directing some of the workers to begin carrying pipe to the foot of the building. Hundreds of cinder blocks were stacked in rows down there, awaiting transport to the upper floors. Two cement-mixing machines churned near a pile of gravel.

“Ready!” came the shout from below. I stood and waited. I did not look down again. Omar had told me to reach out and grab the pipe and raise it hand over hand up to the next balcony.

“Kamal!” Now the voice came from above. I looked up to see Qassim grinning down at me. “You will be fine! The pipe for these floors is light.”

I nodded, but did not smile. I did not like Qassim. And the balcony was so high.

The voice from below again: “Here it comes!”

More quickly than I would have thought, a single thread of long, silver pipe rose before me like a snake before an Indian charmer. I reached out and grasped the metal tube and, hand over hand, kept it moving straight up. Qassim was right: it was not so heavy. And, almost at once, he had grabbed the load from above, relieving my arms.

“See?” he called down. “I told you. No problem.”

Pipe after pipe appeared before me, and I passed each one up, only
briefly bearing the weight from the man below me, before Qassim took it from me in turn. But after many pipes, my shoulders remembered the cement sacks and began to ache, then scream. Soon, I felt lightheaded and my breath came in short bursts.

“Hold on!” The voice from below. The pipes stopped.

A thick summer heat replaced the cool breeze, as if the sea had stopped breathing. Minutes passed. The rooftops shimmered before me. My mind drifted to Marie and Eli again. What were they doing right now?

“Ready!”

The next pipe that appeared before me was not silver, but dark, dully reflecting the sun. I reached out to grab it, but overbalanced. My feet slipped. My mind flashed to the concrete blocks below.
The mixers. The gravel.

My thighs rotated over the balcony’s top rail.

Mama!

I let go the pipe and pinwheeled my arms.

Allah! I will see Allah!

My head and arms tipped out over the long drop, then something jerked my collar back hard. Suddenly I was sitting in the center of the bare balcony, heart pounding.

Qassim came from behind and knelt before me. “Are you okay? I came to check on you, my young friend.”

I blinked back tears. He ruffled my hair. “We are almost finished. Come…I will help you.”

Qassim did not return to the tenth floor. Instead, he moved to the edge of the balcony, pulled the next pipe over the rail and began forming a stack. Petrified and still sitting exactly where I had landed, I watched the sheen on his skin, his shoulders flexing in the heat. Glancing down at my own skinny arms, a thought came to me:
I should not be here. Maybe it would be better for my father if I were dead.

When the pipe stopped coming, Qassim turned to me with a wink: “We will move it upstairs tomorrow,” he said. “Just don’t tell Omar.”

3

Omar let us go home early that day. I trudged along the hot, narrow streets, exhausted and ashamed, wanting desperately to fall into my mother’s arms and tell her what had happened. White cement dust still covered me. I could feel and taste the grit in my teeth.

Pushing open the front door, I smelled the blessed scent of
yaknah
and rice, and heard my mother call to Amira: “Bring the oil…no, the big jar….”

“Mama?” I said, coming around the corner into the kitchen.

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Kamal! Why are you home early? Did you run away from work?”

“No, Mama. They let us go home early.”

“Will they pay you for a full day?”

Tears welled in my eyes, and my mother frowned.

“Kamal, I don’t have time for your complaining today. Your uncles are coming for dinner and there is much to do.” She turned away. “Amira! I said, bring the oil!”

Behind me, my brothers crowded through the front door.

Fouad: “Mama! Azzizz paid me extra today.”

In the kitchen, pots banged.

Mother: “Good,
yah ibny.
Give the money to your father tonight.”

A cabinet door slammed.

Amira: “I can’t find the big jar, Mama.”

Ibrahim: “
Move,
Kamal! Why are you always standing in the way?”

After my uncles left that night and my family had gone to sleep, I slipped through the door from the living room and out onto the roof, my sanctuary, a refuge for my heavy heart. All through dinner, I had kept quiet, my eyes downcast. I wanted someone to notice me and someone did.

“Kamal, what’s the matter with you tonight?” my father snapped.

I lifted my head and looked around the table. “At work, I nearly fell ten floors. A man saved me.”

A beat passed. Then laughter burst out from all sides of the table. “Another tall tale?” Father said. “I think you are allergic to work!”

My uncles laughed even louder. Only Amira had looked at me quietly, concern in her eyes.

Now, a clear night stretched over me, a black velvet dome, each star the size of a tea saucer. A crescent moon gleamed like freshly poured silver. The sea had come alive again, its cool breath floating across the rooftop, carrying the faint taste of salt.

Then I did something no good Muslim would do. I stripped off all my clothes and knelt before Allah. I came in my nakedness, desperate. My father had turned his back on me. I had become my mother’s milking cow, dispensing money instead of milk. I felt dirty and unworthy, left with only one hope. I raised my hands before my face toward the eastern sky, palms upturned to receive a scrap from heaven. Tears streamed from my eyes, blurring the stars. My heart cracked inside my chest and I cried out: “Allah! Allah! If you are not for me, who will be?”

4

The day Abdul Rahman came to my house, he invited my father to attend
salat
at the mosque that evening, and my father accepted. I went with them. I also attended the following evening and the one after that, and kept going, nearly every night. My father did not. But both my parents seemed happy to let me go alone; whether it was for spiritual instruction or to keep me from underfoot, I do not know.

Now that I did not have to worry about the bullies anymore, I walked through the neighborhoods after work. At first I was afraid to do this, but Abdul Rahman encouraged me to take a stand.

“If you show fear to your enemies, they will always try to intimidate you,” he said. After a few trips I noticed that the boys who had attacked me before now hurried to the other side of the street when they saw me coming. Even Iskendar, the Kurd who had speared me with the devil’s eyes when he was supposed to be apologizing.

The teaching at the mosque was like the teaching at my mother’s
kitchen table, only brought to full flower. True Muslims, the imams said, were to complete the conquest Muhammad had begun, to establish a global
calipha
, or world dominance. The imams taught us that the life call of the devout Muslim is to become a missionary zealot. To do the world a favor and rip it from its sin and lust and idolatry, whether by conversion or by death. If we did not, we learned, Allah would someday judge us.

We also learned about the value of forming cells of committed “brothers” and the importance of joining a small enemy against a greater enemy. We learned the doctrine of
al toqiah
, or lying to our enemies for the sake of Islam. And we learned that all our enemy’s property—his women, his children, his money, his house—belonged to us. We were to sleep with the enemy’s women and populate the world with faithful Muslim children.

“No army should be more powerful than the army of Allah!” one imam or another would shout from the pulpit, sometimes brandishing a stick or a sword. “No nation should be richer than a Muslim nation. And in whatever nation you live, you must call for
Shariah
law!” Religious law, the law of Islam. I did not know the word
theocracy
then, but that is what the imams meant.

In response, we shouted the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Allah is our objective! The Prophet is our leader! The Koran is our law!
Jihad
is our way! Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope!”