Zak was the son of one the terrorist El-Sayyid Nosair, one of the masterminds of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He tells the story of being raised to hate and how he chose a very different path. Zak Ebrahim was 7 years old when his father, El-Sayyid Nosair, killed the leader of the Jewish Defense League. While in prison, Nosair helped plan the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He was born in pittsburgh, pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for him.
After his father’s incarceration, Ebrahim’s family moved over 20 times, haunted by and persecuted for his father’s crimes. The older he got, the move he grasped the horror of this father acts. when Ebrahim was 7 years old, his father shot and killed Rabbi Meir Kahane, the then-leader of the Jewish Defense League. He and his mother both changed their names in an effort to separate themselves from his father. Zak does not have to follow the ways of the father, he says as he ends his talk. Ebrahim stand here as proof that violence is not inherent in one’s religion or race.
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I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against bigotry. I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father’s actions. He was being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in him toward the suffering of others, and it comes very unnaturally to him to people who are kind in any other way than how i would want to be