He was granted “refugee” status about 20 years ago. But the Islamic State, with its Islamic appeals, overcame any gratitude he may have had toward those who welcomed him.
“Austria arrests man suspected of attacks on German trains,” by Alistair Walsh, DW, March 27, 2019:
A 42-year-old Iraqi father allegedly attempted two attacks on Germany’s high-speed train lines. Police were reportedly able to track him down through vital clues he left at the scene.
Austrian police arrested a man suspected of carrying out two attacks on high-speed trains in Germany.
The man, believed to be an “Islamic State” supporter, is suspected of having committed attacks on the high-speed rail line between Nuremberg and Munich in October and in Berlin in December, Bavarian State Criminal Police Office said Wednesday….
In the October attack, a thick wire was stretched across the tracks. It failed to cause any major damage. In December, a similar attack was reported near Berlin, which managed to crack the windshield of a train.
An IS flag and Arabic notes were found near the unsuccessful attacks. Austrian media said investigators were able to trace the printer used to print the texts, leading them to Vienna.
The public prosecutor’s office in Vienna identified the suspect as an Iraqi father of five, who was granted refugee status about 20 years ago….
CRUSADER says
“The Terrorist’s Son: A Story of Choice”
by Zak Ebrahim
— review of book (by someone else, who doesn’t describe with similar disdainful adjectives the actual terrorist mentioned in this review…just that he was “a father, who”… )
One of my favourite quotes is from Mahatma Gandhi:
“Be the Change you want to see in the World”
Zak Ebrahim is a living testament of this quote. He is the son of a terrorist, El Sayyid Nosair, a father who, in 1990, assassinated Meir Kahane, the militant ultra-Orthodox, anti-Arab rabbi and founder of the Jewish Defense League. Zak was just 7 years old. Then, from prison, his father helped plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – and was later convicted as one of the conspirators. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
TERRORISM – there is no more important subject in the world at this moment. I do not know a single person who is not appalled and frightened in equal measure by the spread of Islamic fanaticism, especially the seemingly unstoppable rise of the gang of murderers known as Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Taliban. In addition it makes most of us rage as well as weep that young people are often the innocent victims; the recent slaying of school children in Peshawar still at the forefront of my mind.
We may loathe and fear this mind-set, yet we must still seek to be informed about it. And that’s exactly what this book does. It informs. It’s a real-life example of someone who was raised by a fanatic yet came to embrace nonviolence.
Zak Ebrahim as a child, with his father El Sayyid Nosair
The last time Ebrahim spoke to his father was in 1998. Now, Ebrahim travels the country speaking out against hatred and everything his father stands for. His nine-minute TED talk was released along with the book, which was published in partnership with Simon & Schuster in September 2014. You can listen to his talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyR-K2CZIHQ
His message is that fanaticism is a choice.
“Even if you’re trained to hate, you can choose tolerance. You can choose empathy,”
he writes. Ebrahim understands the sad failing of his father. “He chose terrorism over fatherhood, and hate over love,” he explains. “My father chose terrorism over me.”
Nosair, now 58, remains in federal prison. Ebrahim’s mother divorced him long ago and remarried. He hasn’t seen his children since 1995. “He is my son, by birth,” Nosair told a Los Angeles Times reporter via email last year. “But he has disowned me and my way of life.”
Ebrahim acknowledges that he may never understand why his father chose killing over his family.
“I still feel something for him, something that I haven’t been able to eradicate – some strand of pity and guilt, I guess, though it’s thin as spider’s silk,” Ebrahim writes. “I realize now that I don’t really know my father. I never really knew him.”
Ebrahim today
As I type this review in my Dubai study, with the doors and windows open, I hear the call to prayer. It is beautiful. It is melodic. It is one of the most distinctive elements associated with living in the Middle East. And as I listen and ponder this book, I think again about the above quote of Muhatma Gandhi. Fighting evil with evil won’t help anyone. An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
Ebrahim’s original, urgent message is fresh, groundbreaking, and essential to the current discussion about terrorism.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1145789378
End of Book Review
————————————————————————
“I am the son of a terrorist. Here’s how I chose peace” | Zak Ebrahim TED Talks speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyR-K2CZIHQ
medforth says
Germany: MSM blamed Islamist terrorist attack on Intercity Express on political right-wingers+++
On the 7th of October on the line between Nuremberg and Munich in Bavaria a thick wire rope was stretched over the tracks between two power pylons by using a lashing strap and several metal straps at a height of four to five metres. The Inter City Express ICE on the Nuremberg-Munich line was damaged and thousands of passengers were in mortal danger. A police spokesman: “The perpetrators put the passengers in danger of death”. On Christmas holidays, of all days, a second fatal ICE attack took place in Berlin, which was hardly reported in the German media.The German mainstream media then tried to put the blame for the attempted mass murder on “right-wing copycats” in the usual Reichstag fire of 1933 style – immediately before the state elections in Bavaria and Hesse.
For example, the left-wing radical “refugee” weekly newspaper “Die ZEIT” circulated:
“Attempted steel cable attack on ICE may have right-wing motivation.
Hanover (AFP) The attempted attack on an ICE with a steel cable in Bavaria at the beginning of October may have had a right-wing extremist background. We think it is possible that it was a radicalized individual perpetrator from the extreme right who wanted to provoke a mood against refugees shortly before the state elections in Bavaria”, an investigator told the newspapers of the editorial network “Deutschland”.
Read more:
https://searchlight-germany.blogspot.com/2019/03/germany-msm-blamed-islamist-terrorist.html
CRUSADER says
Well, in a way, aren’t Islamists / Salafists
“right wing nuts”?
Totalitarian, exclusionary, militant, bigoted, closed-minded, supremacist.
Jay says
Crusader — what planet are u living on?
elee says
Well said CRUSADER. Yes, Islam”ists” are right-wingers who owe their modern resurgence to the careful subsidies and nurturing of Adolf Hitler. And yes, the current left/jihadist alliance is deeply ironic.
That being said, I’m not interesting in baiting back and forth between “left” and “right.” Those keen on that sort of thing will doubtless continue. I’d rather work together to save western civilisation.
CRUSADER says
Worst aspects of Left and Right eventually meet up at the extremes of each other, and start to resemble each other. Intolerance usually is the meeting place for them.
Islamists will work with anything if it means absorbing anything into Islamist power web
to use and abuse for Islamist ends….which is to enforce Shariah on the whole world.
(That’s not the world I’m wanting to be part of, Jay. I plan on staying rooted on this planet long enough to do some good in defending Western civilization as long as its classical liberal values remain intact. Those values were developed with modernity from Protestant Reformation and a deep appreciation of the Classical World of the West, as well as the striving which grew out of the Crusading period.)
revereridesagain says
He’s not used to these modern inventions in the dar al harb. After all, a thick wire would easily stop a camel.
Kay says
After 20 years, he still has no human feeling for those who took him in nor loyalty to his new country.
Atrocious how the press mislaid the culpability as medforth explained above.
Savvy Kafir says
I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer trust any Muslims, no matter how long they have lived in the West. Certainly none of the bearded, military-age Muslim men who now stroll around my town as if they have some right to be here. And they are made to feel extremely welcome and wanted by the local university that hires them and admits them as students — clearly in preference to all other applicants.
CRUSADER says
Can you imagine a Muslim melding with a Millennial?
Anjuli Pandavar says
SK, “I no longer trust any Muslims”
—
Better late than never. This is the *only* sensible position to take for as long as “Muslim”, on the one hand, and “Qur’an and Sunna” on the other, remain inseparable. And inseparable they shall remain since the latter defines the former. *Anyone* who declares themselves a Muslim can at any moment do as the Qur’an and the Sunna command them to do.
To treat Muslims as if they were not Muslims until they do as the Qur’an and the Sunna command them to do, e.g., perpetrate mass murder, and only *then* treating them as adherents of the Qur’an and the Sunna, namely, Muslims, is an *open invitation* to mass murder on our streets. Even then we *still* deny that their being Muslim has anything to do with the Qur’an and the Sunna. There are supposed to be such things as “peaceful Muslims”. This is a contradiction in terms. There are only Muslims who act on the Qur’an and Sunna they revere, and Muslims who do not act on the Qur’an and Sunna they revere, *and there is no way of telling one from the other until they act*.
So why is the onus on us to make an impossible distinction and risk our own lives in the bargain? Why is it not up to them *to prove to us* that they reject the Qur’an and the Sunna so we can all live without fear of getting killed. Of course rejecting the Qur’an and the Sunna means ceasing to be Muslim. Is that our problem? We’re not the one’s with the murderous creed. Why is that too much to ask? Is demanding of them to disavow the Qur’an and the Sunna more heinous than the mass murders waiting to happen?
I’ve made these points before on a blog that got shut down, where I often met with the objection that no Muslim will apostatise (or “apostatise overnight”, as Maajid Nawaz and his sidekick Sam Harris put it). Firstly, QED! Secondly, they will have confirmed themselves irredeemable dangers to society *and must be dealt with exactly as we deal with irredeemable dangers to society*. We should not have to take *any* risk, let alone pay any price, on their retaining the option to turn mass murderers at any moment. *They* are the ones with the murderous creed. *They* should pay the price for adhering to that creed, the *full* price. *None* of it should fall on anyone else.
Savvy Kafir says
I agree. Our lives, and our societies, should not be put at risk by allowing Muslims — ANY Muslims — to live among us. It is madness! We owe them nothing but our disdain.
As I’ve stated here many times, the only real solution is to rid the West of Muslims, entirely. Anything less will eventually fail, and result in the Islamization of the West. And, in the meantime, many more cases of innocent infidels being raped & murdered & maimed by implacable savages who never should have been here in the first place. They all need to be shown the door — at gunpoint. There could be NO better use of Western military and police forces.
And I don’t care if some of those Muslims are nice people. It’s impossible to reliably sort them out, or to predict which of those “nice, moderate, secular Muslims” will decide to take their religion more seriously and begin making war on us.
And we will never get them to apostatize quickly enough, in large enough numbers, to make any real difference. The hardcore Allah junkies will always call the shots for Islam, in any country plagued by Muslims.
somehistory says
If my memory is correct, the story of the attempted murders was related here on Jihad Watch.
The notes and the flag should have pointed in the correct direction then. And recognized as ‘terror’ and not just “possible terror.”
The culprit was likely terror-minded for the 20 years, just allowing himself the right opportunity to make his move. The formation of isis made him bolder, but not more successful.
Such gratitude he showed to those who took him in. Such love he showed for his family…engaging in terror is always good for the children, is it not? (for any who don’t realize, I am not serious about the benefit to the kids)
Who can ever be sure that a “refugee” taken out of the stans of islam, does not still have the islam of the stans in the refugee… enough to want to create death and destruction?
elee says
Gee, I seem to have said this elsewhere once or twice……every Muslim is a sleeper, unto some number of generations that we don’t know yet, and we don’t know their wake-up signal. Hey westerners, they’re trying to kill us, let’s learn something about their cult and culture. We should never cease being compassionate, but that compassion needs to come with a realistic level of surveillance.
A_M_Swallow says
I believe a Muslim could be a sleeper for say 2 years but 20 years requires something (or someone) to have woken him up. Find that someone before he wakes other Muslims up.
CRUSADER says
Islam is more widely emboldened and enabled now, as contrasted to 20 years ago.
Just look around and see. Quite common place now.
Muslims are either already activated, or sleepers waiting to be activated…
….or they do seek something else, and they can convert to Christianity, as they already are
familiar with its terminology to some aspect. But can they convert in enormous numbers
without detection by the Salafists? Are there enough Salafists to destroy the world, as it is?
gravenimage says
Austria: Muslim migrant, an Islamic State supporter, arrested for trying to derail German trains
…………..
Horrifying but not surprising.