Transcripts For CSPAN QA 20240704 : vimarsana.com

In the news tonight, im mafia muslims are holding more than 100 hostages in Washington People washington, d. C. A muslim Religious Center and Washington City hall. Radio news man was killed in the city hall takeover and at least 11 persons were injured. The invaders demanded and got cancellations of the premier of a new movie about the islamic prophet muhammad. Later in the newscast we hope to bring you updated reports as they develop in washington. Susan you have just written a book about the siege in washington, american caliph, march 1977. What interested you in this story . Shahan it was all interesting when i found it. I did not know about this. Like a lot of people i found, did not know about this. I and counter the story in 2015 and this was right after the shooting at the magazine offices in paris. If you remember, them french magazine had published some cartoons that people found to be offensive. It led to actually, they were attacked several times. In 2015 two men entered the Editors Meeting and massacred a bunch of the editorial staff, almost half. That was a big moment for me. I worked as a journalist. I worked for magazines. I worked for daily news. I was shaken by that and by this time i was working as a daily news reporter, professor of journalism and i talked with students. I decided to write a piece at that time about this idea of the prophet muhammad, just stirring something repeatedly, it is like a recurring theme that the prophet mohammed stirs these great events. It was during that research i came across this paragraph, it was an academic study about this time the 12 gunmen in washington dc held 150 hostages and the city for two days. I was surprised. I consider myself educated in this world, covered war conflicts, i was surprised i did not know about it. The moment i read about it i was correct, the journalist in me wanted to find out what had happened and more importantly, why it happened, it became a really important question. Susan the news report was the end of day one, so in the end, more casualties . Shahan this was the third locahat the hostage takers building notch the john wilsonct building in washington dc. That had happened in the opening moments of that. There was a big gun fights in the district buildings, several people shots. The radio reporter died immediately. For the next two days this hostage situation, goes on. But nobody died in those two days. As i researched the book i did find people who died in the days, weeks, months after and i can type those to the ovens that happened between march 9 and march 11. So they would count as fatalities from that as well, but really, in the record it is really that went radio reporter who is considered a casualty. Susan we have a clip from this year, 45th anniversary of this event, our local television station retrospect, someone who was a colleague. How old was he . Shahan 24. Susan 24 years old. Wellknown. Lets let him tell the story of that day. As we were leaving the press office, he said can i come . We were like no, these are for the big boys. You have to get a little although before you can go to lunch with us. On man, this is always happening to me. No more than an hour later, he saw the commotion at the building and raced back to wh you are where the phone was already ringing raced back to whur. People have taken over the fifth floor, there was a shooting and i saw him lying in the hallway outside the press room. He said he is lying there, and there are bullet holes in his sweater but he is not moving. Maurice had just stepped out of the elevator with marion barry when he was shocked. Even today, the horror of it all, still causes me feelings of pain and anxiety. When i look back on it, the smallest things in life can make the biggest difference is in life. Had he just come to lunch with us, none of this would have probably happened. Susan what is your reaction . Shahan i interviewed over 100 people for this book and he was one of the people who is very intimately connected to the tragedy. There are so many people whose lives were touched by this. Close to 150 hostages first of all, those people. I spoke to many of them. A lot of them live with this trauma. It was a lot more severe for a lot of them, many of them were physically hurt. But, just the scars of this stayed with people a lot and to the journalist, when i spoke to him listening to him here, for generalists, this was especially painful. The one person who died during those two days was a young radio reporter who is a really promising young man, and had been working at the Radio Station, Howard University Radio Station only for a few years. Really promising from what i had read about him. There was a lot of introspection by journalist as well because journalism became the role of journalists in these two days and the way they got caught up in the whole situation, and tell the hostage takers, used the news media to kind of further their cause and their demand. Max robinson was another one who got really and tangled in the situation, another prominent d. C. Journalist at the time. So there is a lot of journalist had a lot to think about during and in the aftermath of the siege. Susan for people who were not involved, one thing they remember was marion barry getting shot. Who is marion barry . Shahan marion barry was a young an upcoming district councilman. It was a new entity at that time. It had come out of the 1970s. Marion barry was a transplant to the district but he was a rising star. He was a councilperson at this time but he definitely had his eyes on the chair of the council , Sterling Tucker was the chair at that time. And a lot of people talked about how he had his eyes on the mayor role. The mayor at that time was walter washington. Marion barry just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was getting off the elevator on the fifth floor of the district building when he had gone up the elevator with a Security Guard because there was also already some kind of trouble brewing they had learned over the radio. But he stepped out of the elevator and was a blast from shotgun that had been fired by one of the hostage takers. It hit him in at the left side of his chest and he fell to the floor. The same blast that took out the radio reporter, marise williams. Marion barry fell to the floor immediately, bleeding from his chest. There were three people actually on the floor at that moment. Bleeding. One was a Security Card Security Guard, at the other end of the hallway was marion barry. He was the only one that moved. And he was able to crawl into the Council Chambers and that is where he was evacuated. Later that same day, he did manage to make a press appearance on his hospital bed in the front page of the Washington Post the next morning was a picture from the siege that had happened or that was happening, it was ongoing and one of them was marion barry and the left side of his chest exposed and a bandage, talking to the press. A lot of people i spoke to told me that that is when he launched his mayor campaign. That is when he decided this was a moment that all eyes are going to be on him and in that moment he decided he was going to run for mayor and he did. Susan all of the descriptions of your book called the story complex and it is a complex story. Lets go to the centerpiece. The lead hostage taker, someone by the name of how my folk hamas police. Hamaas khaalis. Shahan during this time, all of the action that is happening and i try to recreate that, my book is also about the sequence of events that led up to this and that was an important part of this story. I did not want to create a tiktok of what had happened, i wanted to understand why this all occurred and that was a story i try to make not too mpx. Hamas of do collies Hamaas Khaalis lead this group to take over the three buildings. Susan how old was he . Shahan 54 at that time. He was born in gary, indiana and my book begins with his time in the u. S. Army. He was in a vase in arizona getting a psychiatric evaluation. End of base in a base in arizona getting a psychiatric valuation. He does leave the army and become a pretty successful jazz musician. He moves to harlan and gets there just as bebop is developing and he finds pretty good success. He tours in europe with a jazz band. But in that harlan just seen is where he also finds islam. The black nationalist movement that was headquartered in chicago but had built temples, he ends up at one of those temples and becomes a disciple of the leader of the nation of islam Elisha Mohammed and rises through the ranks of that organization quickly. In the meantime he got a bachelors degree from city college, attended jewett courses, so attended graduate courses. But he then breaks away and creates his own group. Susan i want to go back to the discharge from the army because you said this mental capacity question dogs him throughout his life. Whether or not he was playing for system at the time. Never really reconciled as to what the truth was. Shahan yes, and this was an important question for negotiators when they were negotiating the siege. They wanted to desperately find out if they were dealing with somebody who is irrational. And who was all there, and who could be expected to behave in a certain pattern of behavior. He was an exceptionally charismatic and the word manipulative was used by some of the people who had interacted with him. He was a charismatic leader, he also knew how to manipulate people and bring them around to his cause whatever that may have been. And then he was in later decades he ended up in another psychiatric facility. Every time he was in trouble with the law is when his psychiatric faculties what arise and he avoided federal charges based on this, he avoided getting deployed to europe during the Second World War based on this. And being mentally unwell, if he was, always kind of i always had to balance that against his real ability to manipulate situations and his genius at it and also his charm at being able to get people to give him what he wanted. It was a question that lingers and by the end of his life, it was a question that was kind of lost. He ended up in the system and people no longer really even had those records and at the end of his life he had a lot of psychiatric evaluations, but at the end of his life nobody thought he was in any way unwell. Susan another theme is patriotism. Shahan yes. He was born in the midwest, gary indiana. He served in the u. S. Army. He enlisted before the draft and the Second World War but then he had a period of dissolution with america when he joined the nation of islam. Their creed was one that really casts america as a nation and not a positive light at all. But when he got out of that organization, he really under the of his new master, he really embraced this idea of america as the Perfect Place. America as the land that really will deliver. But also in his religious imagination. That america was the Perfect Place for islam and for his new religious cause. That is something he really held onto, and that is something that got him into trouble with the nation of islam. Until the end of his life even after all this had happened, he ended up back incarcerated and all, he really stood by this idea that everything he was doing was to serve america. Even the events of march 1977, even the hostage taking, was his desire and attempt to get america a chance and to protect america almost. In his mind this all worked out. He truly did believe that. Susan so his break with the nation of islam and is critical to the ultimate events. Why did he break with them . Shahan he broke with them from the records i was able to obtain, the fbi had kept track of police kept track of khaalis soon after he joined the nation of islam the fbi started tracking him closely. The fbi had a lot of records, thousands of pages of records on him. So the sequence of events that led him to break away from the nation of islam she went to chicago to the headquarters and was working directly under Elisha Mohammed. In some ways he was almost along with malcolm x, Elisha Mohammeds right hand. He was the National Secretary of the organization, but handling Elisha Mohammeds personal business, travel. He broke away in a courtroom setting in the nation of islam temple where Elisha Mohammed ruled against one of the members. Khaalis thought it was an unfair ruling and decided to pick a fight with the leader of that organization and he was ejected quickly. He had already been butting heads with a lot of people in that organization. He was a large personality and he coveted that and desired that leadership role in the organization but that was a very tight group of people at the top of that organization. A lot of people had identified him as trouble in that organization. Khaalis was an outsider and he took that ejection personally. When he found his new spiritual master who showed him the ways of more traditional islam, he very quickly he always positioned himself in opposition to the nation of islam. His new religious beliefs were always a way to attack almost the nation of islam. Susan tell me about the bengali was on who became his next mentor and what was that appeal to khaalis about him . Shahan actually, i found this was actually a pretty driving community. Muslims from the bengal regents of british india. Region of british india. A lot of these people were coming on british vessels and were see men traveling across the world and a lot of them ended up in a u. S. Sports, especially new york. A lot of them jumped ship. And they developed a really driving community in harlingen during the 1940s and 1950s. Khaaliss spiritual leader was from that community and he practice, he was a faith healer, he also worked as a cook at a restaurant, a very mysterious and mystic person. I was able to get his immigration file and able to find out a lot about him through that. I was able to track down some of his relatives and descendants who are in the u. S. Now. He is really mutually beneficial encounter when k haalis found this man. He was telling him the nation of islam, the largest most Important Organization in the u. S. At that time which khaalis had broken away from. He found a really young, charismatic young man who had been at the top of the nation of islam and was ready to help him bring his message to more people. So these two men partnered in the late 1950s and through the 1960s until he died. And they developed this organization together. Susan was the goal challenging the nation of islam . Shahan a lot of their plans were built around dethroning Elisha Mohammed and taking leadership of american islam and that is part of the reason why the title of the book is american caliph, this is not the only thing going on for the leadership of america of islamic america. Susan khaalis develops his own set and start recruiting members. Kareem abdul jabbar. How do they associate and what did he do within that . Shahan that is the name that khaalis gave 2 who was with the milwaukee buccs. When they met he was still at ucla. It was a very exciting prospect. Khaalis and cream abduljabbars father Kareem Abdul Jabbars father knew each other. After khaalis master had died, khaalis was adrift for a while. At this time, Elisha Mohammed was really rising with one of his proteges, e boxing champion muhammad ali. Once again, it happened and almost in opposition to that whole the namic happening in the whole dynamic happening in the nation of islam. He spotted him on tv wearing appended during an interview. Wearing a pendant during an interview. He called Kareem Abdul Jabbars father who who did not know about police pams police them khaalisplans. They quaked they clicked quickly. He just ground himself and khaalis teachings. Susan is it safe to say that khaalis could not have done what he did to build to build this Group Without Kareem Abdul Jabbars backing . Shahan he was instrumental in developing the junta Fee Organization hanafi organization. Soon after they meet they sign a really lucrative Kareem Abdul Jabbar signs a lucrative contract. He was taken by the islamic message and was a true believer. He found it to be a good balance to the more militant attitude of the nation of islam. He found khaalis teachings to be patriotic and reasonable. A lot of them were based in love for all humanity regardless of race. And kareem like to those ideas. He decided that he would april of operation basically. Bankroll the operation basically. They moved the headquarters of the organization from harlem to washington dc and they found a Beautiful House on 16th street here in washington d, five miles up the street from the white house and the Shepherd Park neighborhood. It was a very nice mixed neighborhood at that time. A lot of Howard University folks, and journalists, a lot of welltodo black and white people and they established the junta fee headquarters hanafi headquarters there. And members of the hannah fee Community Still live there. Hanafi Community Still live there. The heart of American Power in some ways, that is when his organization really takes off and that is where he begins really challenging the authority of the nation of islam and is able to put up a fight for the supremacy of american islam. Susan january 18, 1973 the competition between the nation of islam and khaalis group he comes up blood feud. What a difficult chapter to read in your book. What happened . Shahan and a difficult chapter to write. I put that chapter off for a long time. It was a horrific crime. At the time, the morning after it was called the bloodiest mastic year massa