The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (29 page)

And so, I accepted the Davids’ offer.

If these Christians want to be fools, let them
, I thought, lying in the hospital room the night Dr. David had offered his hospitality.
I will take advantage of their generosity. Then, when I can walk again, I will disappear into the night.

That had been two days before. Now, Dr. David guided my wheelchair up his front walk, flipped an expert reverse, then gently rolled me up the front steps, one at a time. Inside his spacious home, he introduced me to his wife, Theresa, a strawberry blond dynamo who immediately began to chatter as if she had known me since nursery school.

“Kamal, I have been looking
so
forward to having you here,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. “You are absolutely welcome to anything in
our home. And I am going to be right here to help you with anything you need.”

The first thing I need, infidel woman, is for you to stop touching me
, I thought.
Then: stop talking
.

But outside, I offered a pained smile. If I was going to go through with this, I had to pretend to be grateful—at least long enough to make my escape.

Dr. David wheeled me into a downstairs bedroom large enough to please a Saudi prince, and with four tall windows looking into the pine forest. A four-poster bed dressed in lacy white quilts dominated the center of the room. There were enough foo-foo pillows on it to please a queen.

Theresa saw me staring. “There’s a feather bed on top of the regular mattress. And the pillows are down-filled. Very comfortable. But if you would prefer foam pillows, I can get you some of those, no trouble. No trouble at all. Whatever you need, just say the word.”

I began to suspect that if this woman took a breath, she could talk for thirty minutes before taking another. I was now certain I had somehow angered Allah and he had sent this woman to torment me.

At that moment, Allah sent more torment: Three young children, two boys and a girl, swept into the room like tiny tornadoes.

“Kamal, these are our kids,” Theresa said. “Elizabeth, Jacob, and Caleb.”

Elizabeth, about six years old, was a carbon copy of her mother, strawberry blond with bright blue eyes. Jacob, about eight, had the same blue eyes and white-blond hair, while his brother Caleb, about two years older, had his father’s dark coloring.

“Hi, Uncle Kamal!” Elizabeth squeaked.

Uncle Kamal? Allah, help me!

Together, the doctor and his nurse-wife helped me into the bed. I sank into the feathery top and decided instantly that it was the softest, most comfortable spot I had ever laid in my life. Inexplicably, a sense of peace and security settled over me, followed immediately by a wave of guilt.

No!
I would not be seduced and defiled by these people. Their kindness was a means to an end. Nothing more.

“Kids, you keep Uncle Kamal company while we run and get him some dinner,” Dr. David said. Then he and Theresa disappeared through the bedroom door. Like troopers mounting an island invasion, the three children hopped up on the bed, bouncing on their knees, Elizabeth and Caleb on my left side and Jacob on my right.

“Uncle Kamal! Uncle Kamal!” they sang in unison.

Can you not see I am injured?

I did not want the Davids to hear me being unkind to their children, but this I could not tolerate. “I am
not
your uncle!” I whisper-shouted, stealing glances at the bedroom door.

The children ignored me, bouncing softly, chanting, “Uncle Kamal! Uncle Kamal!”

“Stop calling me that! Get off the bed, you monkeys!”

“Look at all his
Band-Aids
,” Elizabeth said to Caleb, wide-eyed. “I never saw that many Band-Aids before.”

“I
know
,” Jacob said. “Let’s pray for him!”

And with that, all three children reached for me.

I froze, stiff as a fallen tree. Glancing down, I saw their six tiny hands, pale as snowflakes, lying against my broken body. And all three children bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and began to pray that Uncle Kamal would be healed.

I was
livid
. Like a volcano on the verge. But I could not move from under the hands of these tiny infidels praying to their Christian god.

“Stop it!” I whispered. “Stop it!”

But they did not stop. I looked at Elizabeth’s face and saw a tiny smile. She seemed in rapture, floating off to her alien heaven to make an inquiry on my behalf. Jacob and Caleb had their eyes screwed shut, and their lips moved earnestly, fervently. And without warning, a word filtered through my anger like springwater through cracks in a stone wall: purity.

I flashed back to the rooftop prayer of my childhood when I had come naked before Allah under the tea saucer stars, petitioning heaven with my whole heart. A child’s heart. A heart without vanity. Without treachery or deceit. A heart that wanted only to please the object of my worship.

In these children’s faces, I saw that boy I used to be and, for a mo
ment, mourned. That boy was gone. The man who had replaced him was trained only to deceive, to fight, to kill. But now, through the hands of the innocent, a force washed over me that I had not been trained to resist: love. This love was huge and overpowering, but it did not require of me my blood or my strength or my hatred. It required only my surrender.

And from the mouths of these little children, I heard that this love had a name: Jesus.

4

When I accepted the Davids’ invitation, I expected their house to be crawling with the spirit of the
jin.
I pictured myself lying in some kind of sickroom, tolerating their kindness and warding off their darkness while counting the days until I could return to my brothers. But from that first day, the Davids’ house seemed full of light. Not a light I could see, but a light I could feel.

I did not like it at all.

The children’s prayer had only hit me at a weak moment, I reasoned. My body was broken; perhaps my spirit had sustained damage as well. Besides, they were cute kids. Anyone can be lulled by cuteness, which is why jihadists sometimes used children to carry bombs.

Then the Davids hit me with another weapon: Southern hospitality. Theresa cooked like a woman possessed by Betty Crocker’s ghost. Everything from stroganoff to exotic goulashes to fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. Theresa and the kids served me three meals a day in bed. I had not eaten so well since my mother’s
yaknah.

After a couple of weeks, I was able to sit comfortably in my wheelchair without putting too much strain on my neck. Many evenings Theresa or Dr. David would wheel me into the living room and the whole family would sit down to watch TV. The room was huge, but warm, with a big stone fireplace and a grand piano, which little Elizabeth could
already play. I listened as the family talked about family things. Jacob was a champion swimmer in his age group, so there were lots of ribbons and trophies to discuss. Caleb was a ball-sport man—soccer, baseball—and there in the living room, the family relived the best moments of his games.

All the while, I watched them, calculating. And I became very confused. All my life, I had been taught that Christians were thieving dogs. But these people had not stolen from me; they had taken me in and cared for me. I had taken people in, too. Hundreds of people like Antonio. But I had lied to them in order to win them to Islam and with an agenda to turn them against their own people, even their own families.

Sitting in the Davids’ living room night after night, I questioned for the first time in my life the teaching I heard sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, and at
Masjid al Bakar
at the feet of Abdul Rahman. This Christian family did not match the picture my childhood tutors had painted of sinners and whoremongers, of greedy zealots interested only in the conquest of Muslim lands. Instead, they became a living testimony, people who loved to laugh, who cried at sad movies, who were goodhearted enough to risk everything they had to help a stranger. In fact, the more I was with the Davids, the more I came to see that Abdul Rahman and Abu Yousef fit the enemy image burned in my brain more than did these people did.

If that weren’t enough, once a week a group of about forty men came to the house for a meeting. It was a chapter of a larger group, Dr. David told me, called Christian Businessmen. I was invited to sit in on some of the meetings. The men talked about their business successes and struggles, offering each other tips and strate-gies. At the end of each meeting, they always spent a lengthy time praying for one another. And each time I joined the meeting, they prayed for me.

These men actually stood, joined hands, and gathered around me in a circle. I wanted to believe that they were sincere. But that would go against every teaching held dear, everything I believed to be true about this life and the next.

Do you not know I hate everything about you?
my heart screamed reflexively.
Do you not know that I especially hate it when you smile at the name of Christ?

As they prayed that my neck would be healed, I prayed silent curses upon them. It was what I had done all my life. It was the very
purpose
of my life.

But lying in the high four-poster bed at night, I thought of the prayer meetings I had attended at radical mosques around the world. We never prayed that our enemies would be healed. We cried out to Allah to hand us victory over them, that he would give us their land, their wealth, their women. At Sabra and in other camps, we cursed the Jews, the Christians, and the Americans, and prayed fervently that Allah would allow us to cover our hands in their very blood.

But these Christian men did not care whether I was from Tanzania or India or Boise. And never once did they try to force their religion on me, as I had forced mine on others, sometimes at the point of a gun.

They never said, “You are Muslim. You are a foreigner. You are different from us and don’t deserve to live.” Instead, every time they came to visit, each one of them wrote a check or left an envelope with cash. And within three months, my medical bill was completely paid. I did not understand any of this. I could not make these contradictions add up in my mind.

The Air Force Academy lecture hall was a huge amphitheater with seats rising in semicircular rows from a ground-level stage. The room was modern, with booths for electronics and projection equipment near the top rows of seats. I did not know it then, but organizers had switched the venue at the last minute to ensure better security. As conference attendees filed in and filled in the rows, I noticed at least a dozen armed guards posted along the outermost walls, and at intervals along the steps that led from the bottom to the top of the hall. Some wore handguns in holsters; others carried rifles.

Zak was scheduled to speak first. But he was so weakened by his diabetic episode the day before that his knees buckled twice on the way to the podium. During his talk, he gripped its edges to support himself and kept cutting glances my way. His hooded eyes transmitted to me a clear message:
I am not going to last long up here.

It was true. Fifteen minutes into his talk, he thanked the audience for their attention and shuffled off the stage. Now it was my turn. As I took the podium to polite applause, I looked up into the auditorium. Uniformed cadets and officers filled most of the seats. Sprinkled in between were international guests—students from overseas universities, including schools in the Middle East.

The night before, I had stayed up until 1
A.M
. going over my speech. I
wanted to make clear to the audience how a boy could be raised a killer. I wanted to share some of the things my mother had taught me, like the time she told me, “If you kill a Jew, your right hand will light up before the throne of Allah, and you will go straight to heaven.”

Also, she taught me that to kill a Christian you must have a reason. “If he spits on your hand, you can retaliate,” she said. “Kill him in self-defense. But for a Jew, you do not need a reason. That he is a Jew is enough.”

When your mother loves and cares for you, when she is hardworking and devout, when the people in the neighborhood straighten up in her presence, then you believe whatever she teaches you in the family kitchen. I never doubted her. Not once.

The night before the AFA event, these scenes replayed themselves in my mind, accompanied as always by the ghost-senses, the smell of baking baklava, the scent of olive oil, the sound of the berry tree scratching on the window.

Now I took the podium and began to tell my story.
My
story. Not the false one that the newspapers had attributed to me.

I told of growing up in Lebanon, tutored in the ways of
al-shaheed,
the martyrs for Allah…

…of dreaming at age six that I caused Allah, a rigid, stone-faced god, to laugh with delight as I lopped off the heads of infidels with my mighty sword…

…of being recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood and introduced to the PLO at age seven…

…of carrying small arms and ammunition into Israel, carrying a knapsack and disguised as a Bedouin boy…

…of undertaking a life whose central pulse was the hatred of Jews and Americans…

…of coming to America to destroy her from the inside out.

“I loved Allah with all my heart,” I told the AFA audience.

I shared from the Koran the
sura
that says that if Muslims refuse the call of
jihad,
Allah will replace them with better Muslims; and another
sura
in which even the stones and trees say, “There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!”

During my talks, I always watch my audience. I can tell immediately
who is with me and who is not. At the academy that day, I heard whispering from the gallery. Low in the amphitheater, I saw two Middle Eastern men, and next to them, two women who could have been Middle Eastern, but might also have been Pakistani. All four glared at me and whispered loudly among themselves. High in the amphitheater, I saw two slim blond men dressed in civilian clothes. They were doing the same thing.

I pressed on: “At the assault camp, I learned to hate the Great Satan. The PLO showed us propaganda movies in which Christians and Jews acquired Muslim blood to use in their religious ceremonies. These films told us that the Americans were poisoning our water and air in order to destroy our world. We watched sex movies and were told these were made by the Americans and Hollywood Jews to corrupt the holiness of Islam, to take our women, and to introduce into our world every kind of evil.”

The Middle Eastern group began shaking their heads. Their whispering grew louder.

“We sang hate songs calling for the destruction of the infidels. Part of the lyrics talked about building a ladder to glory out of the skulls of Americans and Jews,” I continued. “And every Friday at the noon prayers, we cast violent curses against America, her leaders, and their seed and called for the spilling of their blood, that they would die by the sword.”

The hall became quiet as now it seemed that even my critics were in shock at what I was sharing. I told them how groups like the Islamic Thinkers Society, which has some common ideology with al-Qaeda, supported
al-Muhajiroun
, demonstrated on a New York street corner in exercise of their “free-speech rights.” While stomping on and tearing up an American flag, they publicly laughed at Americans for being stupid while they used their constitutional rights to argue that the Constitution should be replaced with Sharia law and the country ruled by a new Islamic caliphate.

I told them how Omar Ahmad, founder of the “moderate” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith…[but] should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

I heard whispering again and looked up to see the blond men with their heads together. Glancing to my right, I saw an MP staring hard at them.

Next, I shared how I came to America and preyed on the weak and the poor, speaking in various mosques and universities, raising funds for the cause of
jihad.
And then I spoke more from the Koran itself, the holy book where I learned my deadly philosophy:

Sura 2:191—“Kill the disbelievers wherever you find them.”

Sura 9:123—“Murder them and treat them harshly.”

Sura 9:5—“Fight and slay the pagans, seize them, harass them, and lie in wait for them with every trick.”

Sura 8:12—“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads.”

Now I addressed the audience with force: “Wake up, America! You must arise! You must wake up to the issue of radical terrorism.”

A brief shower of applause rolled over the whispering like a wave.

“In the mid-1980s,” I continued, “I had an accident and met three American men who loved me and showed me kindness that completely changed my life. Today, I wish to expose the hatred and evil from which I came so that I can make Americans and the West truly understand the threats that face our great nation and the free world. When Walid, Zak, and I believed and fought for Islamic fundamentalism, we were willing to die for the prize of
jihad
. Today, we come with a new truth. Now we love this country and live for her, standing and fighting for America as Americans.”

We ate a buffet-style lunch with the cadets that day, served in another building a short walk from the auditorium. Afterward, I walked back through an open breezeway with Zak, the chilly sunshine pushing against the edge of the shade. The walkway was filled with conference attendees headed back to hear the next speaker, who was scheduled to begin in minutes.

Even in the throng, I could feel someone crowding me from behind. Then a man was at my right ear, his left shoulder pressing into my right one.

“Hello.” His breath was on my neck. Cadets and officers pushed past us.

I turned slightly to see an unsmiling face.

His eyes,
I thought.
Palestinian
.

“You call yourselves Arabs,” the man said. “Then you must speak Arabic.”

On my left, Zak laughed. “Of course, we speak Arabic. What are you saying?”

We continued walking, approaching the stairs leading down into the hall. The man kept his shoulder pressing into mine.

He spoke again, his words now in Arabic, clipped and low. “I disagree with everything you are saying. Everything you said is a lie.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off.

“You insult Islam and you mock Muhammad. You are the enemy of Islam.”

Zak had already started down the stairs. I stopped and turned to this man, the crowd surging past us.

“Can I speak to you?” I asked him.

“No, you have already said enough,” he replied in Arabic. Then he lowered his voice.

“People like you should be killed,” he said.