Who is El Sayyid Nosair?
Well, I know him. I spent an awful lot of time around him. I know all about his background. So what if, upon being asked that question, I told you, “Oh, Sayyid — yeah, he’s an engineering student from Egypt who became a mechanic for the New York State courts.”
You might respond, “Wait a second. Wasn’t he the guy who murdered Meir Kahane (founder of the Jewish Defense League) in front of a room full of people at some hotel in Manhattan?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, well — but that was nearly 20 years ago.”
“And didn’t he, like, shoot a 70-year-old man who tried to block him from getting away?”
“I suppose.”
“… And then shoot it out on the street with a cop while about a thousand people buzzed around?”
“Technically speaking, it was a postal police officer, but I take your point.”
“Wasn’t Nosair pals with that big red-headed Egyptian guy whose picture they used to show on TV all the time?”
“Sure, Mahmud Abouhalima. He was a cabdriver from Brooklyn.”
“A cabdriver from Brooklyn? Wait a second. I remember this now. This Mahmud guy was here on some immigration scam, right?”
“Well, ‘scam’ is such a divisive term. He was legally in our country: he had a work permit under the Agricultural Workers Program.”
“Agricultural worker? In Brooklyn?”
“Er, yes, okay, but that just underscores that we have to do something to bring these people out of the shadows — ”
“Hold on. Didn’t Mahmud end up bombing the World Trade Center? Didn’t he work for that blind sheikh who kept telling everyone to kill all the Americans?”
“You mean Omar Abdel Rahman. Well, actually, he was a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from one of the world’s great universities — became a professor and a renowned expert in Muslim law. I don’t know why you keep dwelling on ancient history that distracts us from the real issues …”
Such inanity is not far from last week’s Philadelphia debate, when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos displayed the audacity of hope that Barack Obama might try to explain his friendly relationship with Bill Ayers, a terrorist.
A terrorist, Stephanopoulos elaborated, who bombed the Pentagon and the United States Capitol, among other targets.
The T-word, though, would not pass Obama’s lips.
Look, he responded, “this is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago.”
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