Rabbi Meir Kahane, Vindicated
No matter what you think of him, whether you hate him or love him, the name Meir Kahane is a name that will forever be engrained in the history of the Jewish people. But just this past week, fifteen years after his murder, he was vindicated on the world stage via American national television.
Rabbi Kahane, born in Brooklyn in 1932, was an author, political activist and a member of the Israeli Knesset. When concluding a speech in Manhattan, Rabbi Kahane was assassinated by El-Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian and member of an Arab terrorist cell operating in New York in 1990. Nosair was one of Sheikh Omar Abd El-Rahman’s men, who would later be convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; today, he is serving life in prison. The gun that was used to kill Rabbi Kahane was supplied to Nosair by Wadih El-Hage, who is a member of Al-Qaeda convicted of conspiracy to kill American citizens in the 1998 US embassy bombings.
With jihad being conducted around the world, and especially after the mass murder of September 11, 2001, some Jews have been attempting to remind the world of what Kahane was warning them, as well as noting that Kahane had been the first victim of jihad in the United States. Of course, when Jews who supported Kahane speak up, they generally don’t catch the attention of the liberal media, but they repeated their cry for over a decade to recognize that the slaying of Kahane was the initial attack Islamic terrorists had brought against American citizens. Finally, their cries have been accepted as fact.
The National Geographic cable television channel has just released a new four-hour documentary called “Inside 9/11”. The focus of the special is not to show devastation in New York, but to present the facts in the form of a timeline, so that people can understand what happened, who was – and is – attacking America. The documentary has received rave reviews and the cable networks consider this broadcast so important that they have made the show available for free in areas that don’t carry the National Geographic channel.
This well-made production explains what many of the Jewish people have been shouting to the world. The documentary starts with the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane and goes on to dedicate a portion of the first hour explaining how the rabbi was targeted by an Islamic terrorist. The significance is to recognize the fact that Kahane was assassinated as an act of jihad against the West, and to show that organized Islamic terror cells have already been successful in sending an operative into the United States to successfully murder someone they saw as problematic. If they did it once, they can, and will, do it again.
Nosair (who was acquitted of Rabbi Kahane’s murder, even though he shot him in front of a large crowd), was only found guilty of illegally possessing a weapon. However, a subsequent search of the murderer’s apartment uncovered 47 boxes of documents in Arabic, which proved that he was part of a worldwide terrorist network. According to the National Geographic documentary, the FBI let this evidence slip through their fingers, not thinking it was important material.
At lunchtime on February 26, 1993, a truck bomb was set off under the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. The bomb destroyed a total of seven stories of the structure. Four terrorists, linked to Nosair, were later convicted of this attack. Members of this same group would later work with Al-Qaeda and, eight years later, bring down both towers in New York and slam a plane into the Pentagon, killing over 2,500 Americans.
We have the National Geographic channel to thank for finally, after fifteen years, getting law enforcement to acknowledge that Rabbi Kahane’s assassination was an act of jihad in America – the first act of jihad. Both noted authors and former FBI special agents mentioned clearly that the murder of Rabbi Kahane was perpetrated by parties now shown to be directly linked to Al-Qaeda.
In some of his speeches, Kahane often claimed that some in the Islamic world were making plans to attack both Christians and Jews, but no one seemed to listen. At his funeral, posters declared, “He sacrificed his life for the sake of the Nation of Israel, its Torah and its Land.” The mourners exceeded 100,000, making it the second largest funeral in Israel’s history.
This past week, people understood his message when a mature and well-made television documentary on the 9/11 attacks included FBI agents stating that jihad is an active war operation against the West, and specifically the United States, and that the rabbi was not only a victim – he was right.
