FIVE

Glick and Jarrah: An Open Life and a Closed One

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Jeremy Glick made his second early trip in as many days to Newark Airport. He was supposed to have traveled to San Francisco for a business meeting the day before, on Monday, September 10, and he planned to return home on the red eye on Wednesday morning. That first morning, the Monday, figuring he would be gone for a few days, he helped pack the car for his wife, Lyzbeth, and their twelve-week-old baby girl, Emerson, who were going to spend the time of Jeremy’s absence visiting Lyz’s parents in Windham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. But there was a fire at an airport construction site in Newark on September 10, and several flights, including Jeremy’s, were canceled. So he went home, about an hour by car from the airport, and there he spent the last night of his life by himself, though he did speak to Lyz several times by phone. And then on Tuesday, September 11, he got up early and drove to the airport again, trying once more to make it to San Francisco—on United Airlines flight 93.

Like most of the passengers on flight 93, indeed, like most Americans, Jeremy Glick led a life striking for its openness. It’s not that he had no secrets. It’s a safe bet that, like the rest of us, Jeremy had a few little ones, but he lived, like most of us do, in the open. He shared his life with Lyz, his high school sweetheart, his wife, and his best friend, in a comfortable, woody house in Hewitt, New Jersey, with a view of Greenwood Lake across the road. It was the kind of house that was furnished so you could put your feet up on the furniture, with a weather-beaten gazebo up the hill in back and a dock on the lake in front where he and Lyz would lie at night and look at the stars. Jeremy was one of those naturally gregarious people who had lots of friends and admirers, as evidenced by the hundreds of letters that have poured in to Lyz since flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. There was nothing dark about Jeremy Glick. It was like his judo—he was a past national collegiate champion in the sport. You do judo with open hands, with nothing concealed, with a stress on fairness. Jeremy was what you saw, a big, six-one affable guy and a natural leader who worked hard and knew how to have a good time. There was nothing shadowy about him, nothing hidden about his agenda, no missing periods where it is impossible to know where he was or what he was doing.

And all of that is what puts him in such stark contrast with the group of dark, clandestine figures who killed him and the thirty-nine other people on flight 93 on September 11. We know so little about the four men who hijacked his plane that we can’t even be sure in some instances that we know their true names, much less the content of their minds, the state of their spirits. And that seems emblematic of September 11, a reason why the event itself was so dumbfounding. We cannot comprehend the people who perpetrated the crime, even as the people it was perpetrated against seem so guileless, almost innocent of the dark forces that destroyed them.

Glick was born on September 3, 1970, in New York City, the son of a speech therapist and a technology executive. He grew up in Oradell, New Jersey, a typical upper-middle-class suburb within the greater metropolitan region of New York City, and he did the usual things of an American boyhood. He went to private schools, the Elizabeth Morrow Elementary School in Englewood, then grades seven through twelve at the Saddle River Day School. When he was in the ninth grade, his lab partner in Mrs. Treue’s biology class was Lyz.

“He sported a big huge Afro back then, and I was kind of taken aback by it,” she said later. “He had great, curly, gorgeous hair. Later on, when he was a judo champion, he used to tell me his strength came from his hair.”

A decade and a half later, after they had been married for several years, Jeremy remembered what Lyzbeth was wearing when he first saw her that day in the biology lab, a Laura Ashley floral sundress, probably pink, Lyzbeth said.

“After the first day, he went home and told his mom that he had met the greatest girl and that he was going to marry me,” she remembered. Lyz and Jeremy were a pair almost from the beginning. Lyz was a gymnast; Jeremy was an all-around athlete. They became pals, best friends, and Lyz still remembers that when Jeremy first asked her on a date, he was so shy about it he couldn’t look at her. She agreed to go out with him on one condition, that whatever happened they would always be friends, and they always were.

Jeremy started judo at the age of six, when his parents had put him into a local martial arts academy, and he hated it at first—until he won his first competition when he was about seven, and then he was hooked. In high school, he played soccer and lacrosse and he wrestled. He would tell his friends that he used his big piled-up hairdo to mesmerize his opponents. He lived the life of a kind of good-time teenager in New Jersey, going to lots of parties, trying to get into clubs in New York even though he was underage, attending concerts by the Grateful Dead, breaking up with Lyzbeth and then getting back together with her. But there was always a special thoughtfulness about Jeremy, a kindness. After he died, Lyz got a letter from a man who was a classmate of his in elementary school who invited all of his classmates to go to his bar mitzvah. He wasn’t a very popular boy, and none of the classmates showed up—except Jeremy. Many years later, he remembered Jeremy for that gesture.

Jeremy entered the University of Rochester in 1988, where he eventually earned a double major, in English and philosophy, but in his sophomore year, his family ran into some financial difficulties that forced him to drop out and earn some money. Ray Zaykowski, Jr., who met Jeremy when they were both freshmen in the athletes’ dorm at Rochester, remembers Jeremy at the age of nineteen getting initiated into the world of real work—unloading cargo trucks at night, for example. When Jeremy had saved enough money to go back to school, he returned a more serious young man, determined to excel academically and athletically.

He did, and perhaps nothing illustrates his toughness more than judo. Busy with college and other sports, he didn’t even practice judo for about six years until, in his last year in college, he took it up again. His friend Zaykowski thinks it was because, having dropped out for a while, most of his friends had already graduated and he wanted something else to do. “He did everything on his own,” Zaykowski said, “trained, everything.” After just a year, he turned up at the national collegiate championships in San Francisco, and he won the title. And then he was modest about it. Lyz says that there is a cabinet full of trophies that Jeremy won over the years, but he never put a trophy on display.

After Rochester, Jeremy went to work in New York, finding himself drawn naturally to the sales departments of several companies. Lyz went to Colorado to get a master’s degree in anthropology, and the two of them burned up so much money on airplane tickets and long-distance phone calls that it was clear they’d go bankrupt if they stayed apart. Finally, it was Thanksgiving of 1995. “I called him up and I said, ‘You’re going to come out here and drive me home,’ Lyz said.” He did. For a while they lived in New York. They got married in Upstate New York near Lyz’s parents’ home in Windham. They had everything, the old stone church, the horse and buggy, the cloudless day in a season that had been rainy. They went on a honeymoon in Indonesia—Komodo Island and Bali. Jeremy went to work, ending up at Vividence, a web marketing company, and the couple lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But every weekend, they found themselves leaving the city to indulge their love of the outdoor life, hiking, waterskiing, camping, and they decided they’d be happier in the country, preferably in a house on a lake. That was when they moved to their simple brown house across a small neighborhood road from Greenwood Lake.

And there they were living when Jeremy left on September 11 for a quick sales meeting in San Francisco. They had two dogs, pugs named Eloise and Maxine, and just twelve weeks before flight 93, Emerson was born—named by Jeremy, the philosophy major, after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson came a month early and so she required hourly feeding, and Jeremy cheerfully took the 8 P.M. to 2 A.M. nursing shift so Lyz, who also had a job, could get some sleep. He used a little tube that was attached to a milk bottle on one end and to Jeremy’s finger on the other, and Emerson got her milk by sucking on the finger.

“He just knew what to do,” Lyz says. “Even if I got up at two in the morning, and Jeremy had been taking care of her all night, he’d stay up with me if she was having difficulty latching on or something. He couldn’t have been more in love with her.”

There is a photograph on Lyz’s wall that tells it all. It shows Jeremy in a plaid shirt, tall and solidly built holding tiny Emerson in his large hands and looking slightly skyward, as if to heaven. In fact, Lyz points out, he was examining some spiderwebs in the rafters of the porch. But never mind. Jeremy had a sense of humor, and he was a man who always knew what he wanted, and he had the wisdom to appreciate his good fortune. He and Lyz were planning to raise Emerson so that she would identify with two traditions, his Jewish one and her Christian one. He had plans, for a big family, for lots of early mornings on the lake, before it got crowded. But Emerson will never know her father in person. She’ll know him through the letters that people wrote to her mother after he died, letters that show how many sides there were to him and how much he was liked.

There were forty innocent, unsuspecting people on flight 93, going from Newark to San Francisco, and there is nothing secretive or clandestine about any of them. Alan Beaven, born in New Zealand, was an environmental lawyer with an office in San Francisco, a hardworking, stylistically casual, old-fashioned man who wrote his briefs in longhand and didn’t carry a cell phone. John Talignani, bespectacled, tweedy, a thrice-married baseball memorabilia collector, had been a bartender in a Manhattan restaurant and could tell stories of shmoozing with the likes of Donald Trump and Dick Clarke.1 Christine Snyder was an arborist and landscape designer whose silky blond hair fell over her shoulders. Beaven was off to San Francisco to work on a deal, and after that he was planning to move on to something else in life—going to India with his family to do volunteer work there. Snyder was going to Hawaii, where she worked and where her husband was waiting for her.

But about the hijackers and the murderers of Glick, Talignani, Snyder, Beaven, and the other passengers and crew we have some solid facts, something like a biography, though a brief one, about only one of them. And this is the presumed leader of the group, Ziad al-Jarrah. What we know about him, moreover, makes it seem as though, in very different circumstances, he would even have had a few things in common with Jeremy Glick. Like Glick, Jarrah was born into affluent circumstances, Glick in 1970 into a middle-class family in New Jersey, Jarrah in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon in 1975. His father was a government official, his mother a schoolteacher. The two of them, Glick and Jarrah, both loved sports—swimming and basketball in Jarrah’s case. Jarrah seemed a modern boy in a country, Lebanon, that was always the most secular, the most European, the most urbane, and one of the most moderate of the Arab countries, a country with a strong cosmopolitan middle class. The Jarrahs themselves were Sunni Muslims, but they believed that education was more important than religion, and they sent Ziad to a Christian school in Beirut, evidently because they wanted him to have a modern education, rather than an Islamic one. Later, when he was of an age, Jarrad drank alcohol, he had girlfriends, he did not go to the mosque. In fact he had a girlfriend right to the end, a Turkish woman he met in Germany to whom he wrote a good-bye letter on September 10.

“No one in the family has this kind of radical belief,” an uncle, Jamal Jarrah, said. He meant by the phrase “this kind of radical belief” the kinds of views that suicide terrorists would have. He was expressing skepticism that his nephew was the kind of person who would have made a martyr out of himself while killing others. The Jarrah family comes across like one of those ordinary, socially conservative American families whose son or daughter has inexplicably joined the Hare Krishnas, spending their time in airport waiting rooms chanting and asking for alms, when the family’s ambition inclined more toward law or medical school. Who knows what self-defeating rebellion lurks in the hearts of children?

The Jarrahs are from Al Marj in the Bekaa Valley, a lush region where most of Lebanon’s fruit and vegetables are grown. One of Ziad’s relatives there was a banker, another a senior customs broker. Samir, Ziad’s father, had a high post in the Lebanese social security system. It is difficult to see what would have turned Ziad to extremism, though the Bekaa Valley, for all of its verdant beauty, is a stronghold of the Iran-supported, virulently anti-Western, bitterly anti-Israeli and anti-American Hezbollah, or Party of God. Perhaps he picked up some nascent fury, some political radicalism, as a result of the tumult in Lebanon that followed the Israeli invasion of the southern half of the country in 1982, an invasion that had been preceded and was followed by terrible, sanguinary conflicts among Lebanon’s several ethnic and religious groups.

Still, like Mohammed Atta, Jarrah showed no inclinations early in his life of becoming a Muslim extremist. Every weekend during his high school years in Beirut, he returned home to Al-Marj to be with his cousin and best friend, Salim. When he graduated in 1995, his family allowed him to pursue what had become his dream, which was to study abroad and become an aeronautical engineer. There are some indications that he actually spent some time in the mid-1990s in the United States, driving a car for a car service company in Brooklyn, New York. A Brooklyn apartment lease bears the name Ziad Jarrah, and landlords in Brooklyn have identified him from his post–September 11 photographs, though his family says he was in Beirut at the time.

That Brooklyn lease could have belonged to another person named Ziad Jarrah, and the photo identifications could be mistaken, but there is no question that the Ziad Jarrah who turned up on flight 93 on September 11 left Lebanon to begin a student career in Germany in 1996. He went together with Salim to Greifswald, a city on the Baltic Sea near the Polish border, to add German to the French and English that were already in his store of foreign languages. He spent his first year in Europe studying German with a language teacher named Gudrun Schimpfky, who told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that Jarrah was “just a lovely, kind young man.”2 It was then that he met his girlfriend, a Turkish student named Aysel Senguen. When, after a year in Greifswald, Jarrah went to Hamburg to begin studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Applied Sciences, Senguen went to the city of Bochem to study medicine.

Unlike Atta, who gave voice to his increasing radicalism, and who was cold, uncommunicative, vaguely hostile, Jarrah seems to have made friends easily and to have been liked. His landlady in Hamburg, Rosemarie Canel, doesn’t remember him having a lot of visitors, and Senguen told the German police that Jarrah never talked about Atta or any of the other suspects in the September 11 attacks. His family members, including Salim, now a successful businessman in Greifswald, agree that he was on flight 93, but they deny that he could have been one of the hijackers. In their opinion, he was just another passenger, a victim like the other passengers and crew.3

The FBI on the other hand identified Jarrah not only as one of the four hijackers but as the hijacker-pilot of flight 93, and the evidence is convincing on this. Jarrah took flight training in the same town in Florida as Mohammed Atta and Mahmud al-Shehhi, another of the presumed hijacker-pilots. He rented an apartment in Florida together with a Saudi who seems to fit the terror profile perfectly and is believed by the FBI to be another of the hijackers. Like the other suspected hijackers, he took rigorous fitness training in Florida in the months prior to September 11. In Jarrah’s case, the fitness training included lessons in street fighting. In addition, while he was still in Germany, he behaved oddly at times. There are periods of time that are not accounted for when, possibly, he was off in Afghanistan getting Al Qaeda training, though this is unproven. It could perhaps be chalked up to coincidence that he lived in Hamburg, Germany, at the same time that Atta and al-Shehhi were living there. It might, at a stretch, even be seen as coincidence that he then turned up in the same city as Atta and al-Shehhi in Florida and that all three of them took flight training. But it’s hard to believe that he just happened by coincidence to be on a plane that was hijacked on the very day that Atta and al-Shehhi were hijacking other planes.

So, yes, despite the absence of proof and despite his family’s certainty of his innocence, Jarrah was one of the hijackers of flight 93. And while we don’t know why exactly, we can be pretty certain that sometime between growing up in the Bekaa Valley in the 1970s and 1980s, the years the international jihad movement was being built in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Jarrah became a dedicated and obedient terrorist.

Less is known of the other three hijackers of United flight 93 and what they were doing in the years prior to the planning and preparation of the attack. The FBI lists them as Ahmed Alhaznawi, twenty, Ahmed Alnami, twenty-four, and Saeed Alghamdi, twenty-five, and all of them are Saudis—or, as the FBI puts it in the case of Alghamdi, he “seems to be Saudi.” According to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, Alhaznawi and Alnami came from impoverished regions in the southwest of Saudi Arabia, the provinces of Asir and Baha near the border with Yemen. These have always been regions of religious dissent and extremism. Many of the schoolteachers of Asir and Baha are Egyptian members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman Zawahiri’s organization.4

Alnami’s father, interviewed in the Saudi press, said that his son left for a pilgrimage to Mecca a year and a half before September 11, and never came back. For the four months prior to the September 11 attack, they had even lost telephone contact with him. Alhaznawi is from Baljurshi, the capital of Baha Province, where his father is a prayer leader. As for Alghamdi, so little is known about him that the FBI lists eleven aliases and four different dates of birth for him, ranging from November 5, 1960, to November 21, 1979, which would seem to make the age listed in the FBI information very uncertain.

The three hijackers in this sense can be understood not as individuals but as representatives of a clear pattern to the September 11 attacks. Three of the presumed leaders of the attacks—Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah—were, respectively, from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon. The presumed leader of the fourth hijacking, Khalid al-Midhar, is of unknown nationality. But all of the lower-ranking figures in the attacks, those who arrived in the United States late in the plot and who served as its infantrymen, its foot soldiers, were young men from Saudi Arabia. There is no information available showing how the first group got into contact with the second group. There is no record, for example, of Jarrah contacting Alhaznawi, Alnami, and Alghamdi, who were his fellow hijackers of flight 93, or arranging their travel to the United States. But it is highly likely that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda chose some recruits they had in their training camps in Afghanistan and sent them to the hijack leaders who needed manpower, and while there is no definite proof of this, it is a credible theory because 1) there was no shortage of such recruits and 2) videotape of one of them, Ahmed Alhaznawi, announcing his martyrdom, was later found in Afghanistan by American troops. Even after months of post–September 11 investigation, the authorities had released no information demonstrating that any of the other fifteen Saudis had received Al Qaeda training in Afghanistan, but almost surely they did. Their role in the plot suggests it and, as we will see, the travel itineraries that brought them to the hijacked airplanes in the United States are consistent with earlier travel to Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Moreover, whoever the foot soldiers were and however they were recruited, trained, and assigned to their tasks in the September 11 plot, the fact that they were all Saudis in turn suggests a political phenomenon of global import. Saudi Arabia, despite its enormous wealth in oil, its extensive welfare system, and the pro-Western position of its government, has furnished a large share of the young men drawn to the calls of Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden, young men eager to do jihad, even to give their lives for it. Saudi intelligence estimates that as many as twenty-five thousand Saudis received training abroad since 1979. Saudis have been involved in many of the major terror attacks against the United States since 1996, in Saudi Arabia itself, in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen. The belief of many American officials is that Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its disaffected young men to join the jihadists abroad as a way of deflecting attention away from the problems of corruption, dictatorship, nepotism, and poverty inside the country. Or, as Martin Indyk, an assistant secretary of state for Middle East policy during the Clinton administration, said, “The Saudi policies made the world safer for Saudi Arabia and the Saudi regime.”

But there is something beyond expediency in the Saudi role. That Saudi Arabia was the largest pool from which bin Laden’s foot soldiers were chosen reflects not only that the Saudi government welcomed an outlet for discontent that might otherwise have been directed inward; it also reflects Saudi Arabia’s own long tradition of Islamic strictness. It is not just that Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam itself, but also that it has been the center of Islamic revivalism of a sort that is entirely compatible with the Islam of the international jihad. Saudi Arabia is a country where sharia has been applied for years, where thieves’ hands are cut off, where adulterers are stoned, and where the practice of any other religion is a crime punishable by death. It is the birthplace of a brand of strict Islam, known as Wahhabism, after a Saudi reformer named Mohamed Ibn abd al-Wahhab who in the nineteenth century became religious adviser to the House of Saud, the tribe that put most of the Arabian peninsula under its control.

Wahhab, in turn, was inspired by a much earlier fundamentalist figure, Ibn Taymiyya, who lived in what is now Syria in the fourteenth century when the homelands of the Middle East were threatened by the Mongol invasions. Ibn Taymiyya called on Muslims to reject the rule of the Mongols even though they too were Muslims; his argument was that the Mongols had devised their own system of rule and did not observe sharia, Islamic law. Ibn Taymiyya called for a return to the pure, unsullied, uncontaminated roots of Islam, as formulated by the Prophet and other eighth-century forefathers as the basis of an authentic Muslim revival, and among his most important principles was a strict, unyielding application of the law. “Every governor,” he declared in his best-known book, The Book on the Government of the Religious Law, “must be inexorable in the application of the Legal Penalties and inaccessible to pity, because religion is at stake.”5

Other, more recent Islamic revivalists were also inspired by these ideas, among them the Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna who founded the Islamic Brotherhood in 1928, and Sayyid Qutb, the later Islamic Brotherhood leader who was executed by the Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1966. Among the elements that Qutb added to fundamentalism was its powerfully anti-foreign and especially anti-Western flavor. In this sense, much of the fundamentalist movement in the Middle East has been a reaction against the perceived humiliation of a once supremely great civilization fallen prey to the imperial power of outsiders—first the Ottoman Turks, then British and French colonialism, then the Zionists and American armed forces.

“The emergence of the construct we call Islamic extremism, with its penchant for defiance, resentment, and violence, has its roots in the history of the Muslim sense of decline and its unhappy encounter with the dominant West,” Abbas Amanat, the chairman of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University, has written.6

Certainly, the Islam of Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and the other leaders of Al Qaeda is derived from that of Ibn Taymiyya and Wahhab, al-Banna, and Qutb, not only in its emphasis on the duty to kill the enemies of Islam wherever they can be found, but to kill Muslim rulers who do not rule in accordance with sharia. Indeed, there is testimony showing that the example of Taymiyya was very much in the minds of Al Qaeda’s leaders as they planned their campaign against the United States. One Al Qaeda defector Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who told his story to the FBI, remembered one instance in the Sudan when bin Laden and some of his followers were having a discussion on the question of civilian casualties during war, specifically whether it was permitted under Islamic law to carry out an operation if innocent bystanders would be killed. One of the men, known as Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, brought up Taymiyya, al-Fadl said.

“He said anybody around the tartar, he buy something from them and he sell them something, you should kill him,” al Fadl said. “And also, if when you attack the tartar, if anybody around them, anything, or he’s not military or that—if you kill him, you don’t have to worry about that. If he’s a good person, he go to paradise, and if he’s a bad person he go to hell.”7

These ideas, which even rationalize the killing of bystanders, are what the Islamic scholar Fouad Ajami calls a new force in the Muslim world. “It’s called takfir, which comes from the word kaffir, an unbeliever,” he said. “It’s the idea that you can declare somebody an apostate. This was something new. Generations of Muslims in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries never heard of a takfir where you get up in the morning and declare somebody your religious enemy. But it’s an idea that began to infect political life. It’s the idea that killed Sadat.”

“This is how the great jurists were outflanked and discarded,” Ajami contended. “The new radicals said, ‘We have access to the scripture and we don’t need the great jurists who, in any case, are hired guns.’ These new activists said, ‘Not only are the rulers impious and unbelievers, but so are the jurists.’ They took Islam to these new mosques that arose everywhere. The religion became portable and the insurgents hijacked it and took it where they wanted to go.”

There were many among these “hijackers” of Islam. Among them, for example, were the founders of the Islamic religious schools, or madrasahs, set up in the border regions of Pakistan courtesy of donations from wealthy Saudi Arabians. Established in accordance with the strict doctrines of Wahhabism, they catered both to Pakistanis and to the sons of the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who had become semipermanent residents of Pakistan, living in tent cities and shantytowns on the outskirts of Peshawar. The madrasahs became gathering points for poor boys with not much in the way of prospects elsewhere. They were taken care of in the school, fed and clothed and educated. They sat on the floor at low tables, looking like dutiful students elsewhere. They memorized the Koran and they were instructed to hate the enemies of Islam and to love jihad. They were taliban, which means “student” in Pashtun, the dominant language of northwest Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan, and eventually they would serve as foot soldiers in the Taliban movement that would take over most of Afghanistan in 1996.

Among the other “hijackers” of Islam were the radicals who grouped themselves first around Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar and, after his assassination, Osama bin Laden. With the defeat of the Soviet Union, bin Laden was soon to want to seize on opportunities to expand his operations to the enemies of Islam elsewhere, and to build an international organization on the foundation laid by Abdullah Azzam. His pool of recruits came initially from the thousands of Arab-Afghans who had gotten at least some basic military training in Afghanistan during the course of the anti-Soviet war.

In Jordan some of these former Arab-Afghans founded a group, Jaish Muhammad, that officials say took aim at King Hussein, whose family claims descent from the Prophet Muhammed. In Algeria, they were among the founders of the Armed Islamic Group, the most radical to emerge after the military government canceled elections there in 1991, fearful that the Islamic parties would win and take power. Known by its French initials, GIA, it began by blowing up military targets and escalating to wholesale massacres of Algerians who did not believe in the jihad. Eventually—though, it seems, possibly not until well into the 1990s—there were cells in Europe, in England, Belgium, Spain, and, most important, Germany, where students from the Middle East like Mohammed Atta mingled with Islamic militants and radical preachers in the mosques and in their bare apartments, plotting to do glorious deeds for Allah.

And then there were those, like Mahmud Abuhalima and el-Sayyid Nosair, who went to the United States, where they mingled with other Arab immigrants at the Al Kifah centers in New York and Texas. They prayed at mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City, New Jersey, where Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman preached, and some of them began to make plans to attack the country they saw as the root source of evil in the world, the pillar of support for the corrupt, reactionary, un-Islamic regimes they hated back home.

And finally, though we don’t know details of their lives, there were men like Ahmed Alnami, Ahmed Alhaznawi, and Saeed Alghamdi, who emerged from the Saudi religious netherworld to wreak havoc in the United States on September 11. We don’t know exactly what any of them were doing in the 1980s, but it seems very possible that when Jeremy Glick was becoming a judo master in faraway America, they were being schooled in the hatreds that would lead them to be on the same airplane as Jeremy Glick and the other passengers on flight 93 and to cause them to die.