My Year Inside Radical Islam (32 page)

We rushed out to the street where the students had gathered. There was a red SUV parked nearby with the tailgate open. The speakers were pointed toward the rear of the car, and they were blaring the news. In the confusion, there were a lot of false reports: bombs outside the Supreme Court, a dozen hijacked airplanes.

I looked around at the other NYU students, some of them close friends. They looked scared and confused. I saw one guy, blond with pale skin, leaning on a cast-iron fence, his head buried in his arm, bawling. They didn’t see this coming, and they had no idea why it had happened. I felt that I had a better idea. This, after all, was essentially what I had been praying for during all the time that the mujahideen had been in my
du’a.

I thought of the end of my first semester of law school, when I had gone out with the other students in my section. I envied my classmates then for the fact that they didn’t have to think about the issues that radical Islam had thrust upon me. But now, on September 11, as the north tower smoldered and eventually crumbled, I realized that my old world had been vividly brought to them.

I called Pete shortly after 9/11. It was one of the typical calls that many Americans made to their Muslim friends after the attacks. I wanted to make sure he was okay, and that people on the streets weren’t openly calling for his blood. (As though such vigilante justice could ever find a home in Ashland.)

He sounded shaken up when we talked. “I haven’t been able to do anything for days,” he said. “I can barely eat. You know me, terrorism makes me real upset.”

I had never known that about him, but he did sound upset now. I had no reason to doubt his sincerity.

The 9/11 attacks provided the ammunition for another of Pete’s Rube Goldberg schemes. Although Pete would undertake it a few days after I spoke with him by phone, I wouldn’t learn about this one for a couple of years.

Pete sent a letter to the White House, the State Department, and prominent members of Congress arguing that “[t]his unusual time calls for unusual answers and unusual actions to cope with these heinous crimes.” He wrote that the key question was who carried out the 9/11 attacks—and to that extent, Osama bin Laden’s knowledge of the inner workings of terror was invaluable, and it would be a tragic loss to kill him without getting information from him.

So Pete argued in his letter that bin Laden should be interviewed by a four-person team. One of the people on the team should be an American-born FBI agent who is a Sunni Muslim of Afghan descent. Two of the team members should be American-born Christian FBI agents who know the Bible well enough to quote from it. And the final member of the team would be “a U.S. citizen, not an FBI agent, a Muslim male who understands the Afghani, Pakistani, and Saudi cultures and traditions, the intricacies of Muslim sects and laws, and knows the language.” That fourth person, who would serve as the team’s leader, would be . . . Pete Seda himself.

The team would go into Afghanistan to interview bin Laden. “If bin Laden did not do it,” Pete wrote, “then he should be willing to have these discussions. Under Islamic law, he has to help his Muslim brothers and sisters by helping expose the enemies of Islam. And whoever did this is an enemy of Islam. If it is brought up to him that Muslims are suffering globally because of this . . . he will have to respond.”

Another grandiose plan. Pete never changed. As usual, nothing ever came of it.

I shuddered when I heard that the law school would hold a town hall forum for students that Friday to discuss the attacks. I already knew what NYU’s outspoken leftists would say. But I couldn’t keep myself away from the forum.

It seemed that everybody felt the need to express their feelings about 9/11. Middle Eastern and South Asian students understandably wanted to know if they would be harassed or profiled, and how their lives would change. NYU’s hard left feared an upsurge in patriotic sentiment and nationalism, and needed to express their concerns about people taking a simplistic black-and-white approach to the attacks rather than “thinking critically” (“critical thinking” was code for realizing that the United States bore the ultimate responsibility for the 9/11 attacks).

I had worked for a Wahhabi charity that stood in solidarity with the enemy ideologically. I myself had become radicalized. Yet while I knew that NYU aspired to be a “safe place” for dialogue, this aspiration was one-sided. It was a “safe place” for those who thought the United States had brought 9/11 upon itself, and not for those who disagreed.

I knew this prior to NYU’s town hall meeting, but went anyway. Some NYU professors spoke, saying nothing interesting or insightful, before the floor was opened to students. The student speeches were exactly what I had anticipated. Somebody talked about how this was because of U.S. support for Israel over the Palestinians. One woman gave a long-winded and incoherent speech. Flights were just now getting off the ground again, and she began by saying, “It’s important to take a critical view of why this happened. I want you to take a look around and see what’s going on in this country today. There are people of Middle Eastern descent who are, right now, being profiled in airports across the country.” The awkwardly named World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, had reached its conclusion just before the 9/11 attacks. After Arab states hijacked the conference by turning it into another occasion to attack Israel, the United States walked out. The speaker referred to this also, trying to show how all these factors fit together, amounting to U.S. culpability in 9/11.

Eventually I stood up. When the moderator handed me the microphone, I said, “Let me just say that I love this country. And one of the things that I love most about this country is its freedom of expression.” It was an attention-grabbing opening—one that would also be appropriate for any of the America-bashing speeches of the day. It would be typical for the other students to talk about how they love the country’s freedom of expression before making use of that freedom of expression to excoriate America.

“Today I’ve heard other students exercise their freedom of expression by talking about how the U.S. brought the attacks upon itself. I understand that there are a lot of things that NYU students don’t like about the U.S. or its foreign policy, but I want to remind people of the bigger picture. I’ve noticed a tendency to assume that the terrorists, in attacking us, are attacking all the things that the average NYU student hates. But the attacks are also aimed at those aspects of the U.S. that most people here love. The attacks aren’t just over our foreign policy. They’re also about the fact that we don’t execute homosexuals; that we don’t make women wear burkas and treat them as second-class citizens; the fact that we have the freedom to question or reject religion, and to practice it as we see fit. You can skewer the U.S. all you want. But I fear that in doing so, a lot of the students here misunderstand the larger context.”

After the town hall meeting ended, a few people came up to me and thanked me for my speech. I was somewhat surprised when I passed by Stephen Schulhofer, a very left-of-center professor with whom I had taken a criminal procedure class the semester before. He nodded and said, “I appreciated what you said.”

The response to that speech was atypically positive. I received a much different reaction a few days later in my federal courts class.

My federal courts professor, Barry Friedman, wasn’t sure how he should respond to 9/11. We had a class e-mail distribution list where he sent out a message shortly after the attacks talking about how anxious he was to get back to class. This was understandable. In the face of a tragedy like 9/11, it’s natural to want to get back to one’s routine. But the 9/11 attacks fundamentally changed our lives, presenting us with a set of problems and moral dilemmas that none of us had anticipated. It was natural to want to get back to our normal routines and schedules, but I thought we would have been better served by time to regroup and assess how our lives had been altered, against our will.

While Professor Friedman wanted to return to our routine, he also wanted to be sensitive to students by asking if anybody had anything that they wanted to say to the class. I listened to a few student speeches. They were coded, speaking of the need to view the attacks through a “critical lens,” referring cryptically to U.S. misdeeds.

I had been following the discussions about 9/11 on various NYU leftist e-mail lists, such as that of the National Lawyers Guild. A great deal of weight was given to the “quick reaction” that MIT professor Noam Chomsky penned the day after the attacks. He began by conceding that the 9/11 attacks were “major atrocities,” albeit atrocities that “do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people.” Chomsky then opined that the proper response to 9/11 was to try to enter the minds of the perpetrators:

I was interested, at the time, in the irony of statements like Chomsky’s. On the one hand, he urged Americans to “enter the minds of the likely perpetrators.” This is sound advice: it’s advisable in any conflict to know what your enemy stands for. But on the other hand, Chomsky made no real effort to enter the minds of the perpetrators. Instead, he simply projected his own grievances against the United States onto them.

I was hesitant, but decided to address the class. Knowing what was being said in various NYU circles and knowing full well that the student comments had amounted to calls for Western self-flagellation and admissions of guilt, I wanted to offer a different perspective. I walked up in front of the class and turned toward the other students so I could see them when I spoke. I heard someone laugh. Getting out of my seat and walking in front of the class probably seemed presumptuous (none of the other speakers had done so), but wasn’t meant to be.

Trying to explain why I had chosen to address the class, I began by saying that I had once been Muslim. It wasn’t a good way to begin. I provided no context, no background. I didn’t mention Al Haramain, nor did I mention that I had once believed in the global jihad. All my classmates and professor saw was this Jewish-looking kid getting up, claiming to have been Muslim once, and lecturing to them about the current world crisis.

I said basically the same thing that I had said at NYU’s town hall meeting. I said that I was disturbed by some of the anti-American views I saw expressed around campus, on e-mail discussion lists, and otherwise. I said that there was much that is good about the United States, and part of taking a critical view of the current conflict is to understand what the enemy stands for, not just to project our own problems with the United States onto them. While my speech to the class was similar to the remarks that I made at the town hall forum, it was more disjointed at a time when the audience was more hostile.

When I finished speaking, some of the other students glared at me. I knew that I had upset some of them. A few days later, I ran into a woman of South Asian descent on the street outside Vanderbilt Hall. We had been acquaintances since my first year of law school, when we were in the same class section. When I greeted her, she told me she didn’t want to talk to me. “I was upset by some of the things you said in class about un-Americanism,” she said.

She meant anti-Americanism, but I wasn’t surprised that she remembered my remarks as more McCarthyite than they had been. Her refusal to speak to me burned more than she realized, and burned more than it should have. It burned because I had once been so intimately involved in left-of-center politics. Some of the tendencies I now saw from NYU students had been my own tendencies when I was a campus activist. Since the far-left bases so many of its positions on principle rather than practical outcome, it generally views most issues as black-and-white moral choices, and perceives those on the other side as possessed by some moral defect. Here, those who favored a military response to the 9/11 attacks were seen as flag-waving jingoists—the kind of people who would appeal to concepts like “patriotism” while undertaking a bloodthirsty push for war and revenge. I was placed in this category for the rest of my time at NYU.

Another part of what burned was realizing that the school’s aspiration of providing a “safe place” for dialogue about the attacks was false. This “safe place” amounted to embracing a stock narrative of 9/11: on the one hand, you have the vast majority of Americans calling for blood. On the other, you have some thoughtful liberals who want to look deeper at the root causes of the attacks, and who may be reviled for doing so. NYU’s goal was to make students feel comfortable expressing the liberal position. My background did not fit this stock preconception: the conversion to Islam, the radicalization and the long slow climb out, the potential problem of apostasy. I knew that NYU was not, for me, a safe place to talk about this.

I never came to terms with my time at the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation while at NYU. As I moved further into the legal profession, I preferred simply to pretend that it had never happened. But in my first job out of law school, I found it impossible to do so.