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Let us simply list the clues: 1. He attacked the El Al line at Los Angeles airport and killed two Jews. There are at least 20 airlines using LAX. So if this was a random attack — an enraged response, say, to bad airline food over the years — the odds were at least 20 to 1 against his targeting El Al. If, however, he consciously selected El Al for attack — which seems much more likely — then is reasonable to conclude that he did so because El Al is the Israeli national airline and its officials and passengers were likely to be Israelis and/or Jews. 2. He was heavily armed but had no airline ticket or passenger pick-up that day. In other words, he went to LAX to murder people and not for some legitimate purpose. 3. He was an educated middle-class Egyptian citizen with family connections to people in the national establishment. If the FBI were still allowed to profile, it would have noticed that he fit the profile of the September 11 hijackers with almost embarrassing exactitude.. 4. His car bore the bumper-sticker "Read the Koran." Nothing wrong with that, of course. In the absence of other evidence it would suggest merely that he was a pious Muslim. But since ordinarily pious Muslims do not think it right to murder complete strangers, we may legitimately infer that he was one of that extreme "Islamist" faction known as al Qaeda that believes it entirely permissible, even mandatory, to kill Israelis, Jews and their friends and supporters such as Americans. 5. His neighbors and employees testify that he frequently denounced Israel, U.S. support for Israel, and — despite his own relative rise to prosperity as a limousine business owner (the first limousine terrorist? Alas no) — American discrimination against Arabs and Muslims. 6. And the final conclusive piece of evidence that he was a terrorist — he had once been slated for deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service but the INS changed his mind and allowed him to stay in the U.S. Boom Boom, as they say on the comedy shows. What these clues establish, of course, is merely that Hadayat was a terrorist who set out to murder innocent bystanders from political motives. There is less evidence as yet that he was acting on the actual instructions of al Qaeda, or Egyptian Jihad, or any other organized terrorist group. Some Middle Eastern sources, both Arab and Israeli, claiming counterintelligence sources, suggest that he was a "sleeper" for Egyptian Jihad and that he had twice met Osama bin Laden's deputy in California in 1995 and 1998. According to this theory, he set off to LAX on July 4 because his terrorist godfathers wanted a terrorist outrage on America's national day. That is perfectly plausible. It is also possible, however, that he was a terrorist sympathizer who quietly seethed with hatred for Israel and the U.S. and sympathy for Osama bin Laden until he decided one day to strike a blow on his own. After all, it required no great ingenuity to guess that an attack on July 4 would be especially unsettling to Americans. We shall discover which version is correct in due course. In either event Hadayat was a terrorist. Why then have the authorities, beginning with the FBI but also including the White House, wriggled and maneuvered to avoid reaching this obvious conclusion. That is the only mystery attached to this particular crime. What seems to be the explanation is that the U.S. government is less afraid of terrorists than of the American public. For the authorities the terrorists are a known factor. Their habits and "M.O.s" can be categorized and studied; their actions predicted; and precautions against their attacks mounted. But the American public is an unknown beast which the political and media elites long ago decided was racist, sexist and homophobic. Our betters fear us. If not guided and controlled, they believe, we will hit out in dangerous spasms of violence at minorities, immigrants and anyone who looks like "The Other." We cannot be trusted with inconvenient truths. In particular, we have to be prevented from launching discrimination and attacks on Muslims and Arabs in bigoted response to terrorist outrages. Hence they seek to calm our latent hysteria by keeping the words "Muslim" or "Arab" as far as possible from the word "terrorist" lest we leap illegitimately to the conclusion that Muslims and Arabs in general are terrorists. Hence Hadayat (who is undeniably Muslim) is shrouded in ambiguity by the FBI as a lone wolf figure whose motives are unknown and unknowable As I pointed out a few weeks ago, these establishment fears are grossly exaggerated. Since September 11 only 51 cases of civil discrimination and 65 cases of criminal threats and violence against Muslims were found to have merit. In a nation of 270 million people, these statistics amount to a very small backlash indeed — one greatly outweighed by the many attempts of ordinary Americans to assure their Muslim neighbors of their goodwill and acceptance. In fact only one thing is likely to provoke the unfair suspicion and hatred of Muslims and Arabs that gives nightmares to Uncle Sam — namely, the fear of ordinary Americans that their government is not taking commonsense measures to protect them against terrorism because it is afraid of offending groups from which the current crop of terrorists comes. — John O'Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review. This first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with the author's permission. |
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case of Hesham Mohamed Hadayat, my dear Watson, is one of those detective
stories whose solution is obvious to any newspaper reader but which baffles
the authorities by its mysterious complexity. 
