On Friday night, the Egyptian-born religious leader and terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, died in an American prison. Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of the sheikh for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, reflects on his blood-soaked career:
Before there was an al-Qaeda or an Islamic State, there was the Blind Sheikh, known to his worldwide following as “the emir of jihad.” And he bears much of the responsibility—he would think of it as the credit—for what followed him. Indeed, Osama bin Laden credited Sheikh Abdel Rahman with the fatwa that approved the 9/11 jihadist attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered. . . .
Abdel Rahman was [deeply influenced by such contemporaries as] the Shiite jihadist icon, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Notwithstanding their theological differences, Abdel Rahman, [a Sunni], perceived in Khomeini the possibilities of Islamic revolution and the exploitation of what he saw as American weakness—particularly by Hizballah, Khomeini’s forward jihadist militia that, among other atrocities, killed 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks in 1983. . . .
Abdel Rahman also revered Sayyid Qutb, his fellow Egyptian and a Muslim Brotherhood hero long imprisoned and eventually executed by the hated Nasser regime. . . . Qutb . . . infused his teaching with visceral anti-Semitism, portraying the Jew as the instantiation of all that is anti-Islamic and treacherous. Abdel Rahman drank deeply from this noxious well. [Indeed, he] became most notorious for issuing the fatwa relied upon by the jihadists who murdered the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat at a military parade in 1981—for the unforgivable offense of making peace with Israel. . . .
[Abdel Rahman’s] acolytes included Sayyid Nosair, Mohamed Salameh, Mahmud Abuhalima, and Nidal Ayyad—to name just a few. . . . In 1990, Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane, the controversial founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. On February 26, 1993, Salameh, Abuhalima, and Ayyad, along with Ramzi Yousef, carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center—a plot long in the making, much of which was planned during visits to Nosair at Attica prison in upstate New York.
Read more on National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445052/blind-sheikh-dies-terrorist-evangelist