Al Qaeda's Valedictorian
It took less than 72 hours for jurors in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal courthouse to convict 24-year-old Ahmed Omar Abu Ali--born in Houston, raised in the northern Virginia suburbs--on nine counts of membership in al Qaeda, conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, and conspiracy to assassinate President George W. Bush. The verdict was handed down last Tuesday, November 22, and sentencing--Abu Ali faces life imprisonment--is scheduled for February 17.
And how did America's premier news organizations react to the verdict, you ask? With a big, lazy yawn.
Don't get us wrong: Abu Ali's hometown paper, the Washington Post, found room on Wednesday's front page for Jerry Markon's 987-word piece reporting the conviction. And if you looked hard enough in that day's New York Times, you'd have been able to find, buried on page A20, David Stout's 821-word article on Abu Ali. But other than that . . . zilch, nada, zip.
Which left us scratching our head. Because just a few months ago all of America's premier news organizations couldn't say enough about the case. There was for example the March 7 Time story by Daniel Eisenberg--"Is prosecution [of the war on terror] getting too aggressive?"--which said Abu Ali had been brought up on "questionable charges." And there was the February 24 New York Times editorial pronouncing that the "case seems to be another demonstration of what has gone wrong in the federal war on terror." The kid just didn't seem like a terrorist. After all, Eisenberg wrote, "in many ways," Abu Ali "had a fairly typical American upbringing"--which is to say, he spent his youth "playing soccer, tutoring other kids, passionately cheering on the Washington Redskins and even dreaming of one day becoming President of the U.S."
And the kid is pretty darn smart, too--as countless talking heads and news articles pointed out when Abu Ali was extradited back to the United States from the Saudi jail in which he had been imprisoned since June 8, 2003. "A Virginia high school valedictorian is now accused of trying to assassinate President Bush and of helping al Qaeda," is how MSNBC host Dan Abrams put it. Indeed, reported CBS correspondent Jim Stewart, "the only thing that appears certain" in re United States of America v. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is that the defendant "was one of the smartest students" in class, and "graduated valedictorian." A friend told AP: "He was very wise, very mature for his age."
Now, we're unsure why a high school valedictorian can't also be an international terrorist. And we're especially unsure of this, considering where Abu Ali went to high school: The Islamic Saudi Academy in Falls Church, Virginia. Last February, New York senator Charles Schumer asked the Justice Department to look into the funding and links to terrorism of the academy, the former comptroller of which, Ismael Selim Elbarasse, having been arrested in August 2004 for his ties to Hamas. Two years earlier, another alum, Mohammad Usman Idris, was charged with perjury before a grand jury in another terrorism case. Funded by the House of Saud, the school reportedly uses textbooks stating, among other things, that Christianity and Judaism are "false" religions.
"High school valedictorian." Sheesh. What did Abu Ali write his senior essay on? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
My Oh Maya
Arnold Beichman, The Scrapbook's Palo Alto correspondent, writes from his perch at the Hoover Institution with a reminiscence, followed by a terrific idea:
"It was a beautiful spring evening in 1987 in Moscow," writes Arnold. "U.S. ambassador Jack Matlock was presiding over a reception at Spaso House, as the ambassador's residence is called. Butlers were circling the drawing rooms, balancing carved silvered trays on which champagne flutes were sparkling. Delicious Russian hors d'oeuvres-- zakuski--were being speared off crowded platters. Mikhail Gorbachev had been the Soviet leader for only two years, and his intentions were clouded in mystery. Nobody really knew what perestroika and glasnost meant.
"I was small-talking with Matlock in a far corner of the drawing room about the meaning of Gorbachev's new policies, but I noticed his eye kept wandering to the entrance where stood his wife Rebecca. Matlock was behaving as if he were awaiting an epiphany. He was.
"Matlock had invited to the reception the celebrated Russian prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, a Jew by origin. Would Plisetskaya be allowed to attend the reception? Under Gorbachev's predecessors, Andropov and Chernenko, a U.S. Embassy invitation to Plisetskaya would have been regarded as, in Bolshevikese, a provokatsia, a provocation, and she would not have been sent. But Gorbachev was the new boy in the Kremlin, a protégé of Andropov, so let's see what he's made of.
"Suddenly, as if someone had pounded a gavel, conversation stopped. There she stood--Maya Plisetskaya, 60 years old at the time, Russia's world-renowned première danseuse. (She was born in Moscow on November 20, 1925, joined the Bolshoi Theatre in 1943, and danced there for half a century.)
"I remembered all this," Arnold continued, "when I read last week that Plisetskaya danced once more at the Bolshoi to celebrate her 80th birthday. Agence France-Presse described her as 'sensual and untamed.' But she is more than that. 'No other prima ballerina in the history of dance has succeeded in remaining the center of attention for 60 years,' according to Tatyana Kuznetsova, a ballet critic. As the AFP reporter correctly noted, she had a 'personality that neither her artistic detractors nor Soviet authorities succeeded in bridling.'
"French argot has a word for those of us, 30 years of age and over: croulant, from the verb, crouler, meaning 'to crumble.' Maya Plisetskaya ought to be invited over here by President and Mrs. Bush to do a little ballet at the White House as an inspiration for us croulants."