Irvine, California
The TV news trucks left the curbside at 5 Willowrun as fast as they
came, leaving the apartment complex pretty much undefiled. No
police tape bars approach to the little residence, the FBI having
carted off all the computer equipment and other potential evidence.
Someone affixed an envelope to the front door, though nobody’s
morbidly curious enough to step up to read what might be written on
it. Was someone furious that the limo driver who lived there didn’t
show up for a regular run to the airport?
Indeed, no lookyloos congregate near the place, not one, Irvine
being a blasé, cosmopolitan sort of neighborhood (nobody
calls it a community except politicians and UCI eggheads who fret
that it’s not one). There’s just a small pickup truck parked, as if
driven on the left side of the cul-de-sac, in front of the place.
And of course: the now newsworthy American and Marine flags draped
over the balcony just above Hesham Mohamed Hadayet’s front
door.
Those banners, which an upstairs neighbor put on display after
Sept. 11, are said to have inflamed Hadayet for the past ten
months, sufficient anger for him to grab two handguns and a knife,
stuff extra ammunition into his coat pockets, drive 45 miles up the
405, park in front of the Tom Bradley terminal, waltz up to the El
Al ticket counter at LAX, and start shooting.
Sure.
Excuse me, but people in Irvine get enraged by second-hand
smoke, more housing developments, and the prospect of another
international airport being built close enough to put limo drivers
out of business. Some might even hate conspicuous displays of
patriotism. But they fume and write letters to the editor. They
don’t commit acts of murderous mayhem and, yes, terror.
Sometimes they’re victims of dark terror — like one of my
neighbors, nice guy, an Egyptian-American whose fate placed him on
board an Egypt Air flight awhile back, the one that nose-dived into
the Atlantic just outside of New York when a copilot developed a
similar case of rage. And sometimes they’re preposterously tolerant
of the world’s bad guys.
A dozen years or so ago, Irvine’s hubristic socialist mayor,
Larry Agran, started promoting what he called “municipal foreign
policy” — the idea that the Constitution should be ignored while
the nation’s mayors paved the way to world peace. At the height of
the Nicaragua unpleasantness, on a Memorial Day if memory serves,
Larry squired a Sandinista athletic team around City Hall.
For such stunts he was defeated in the 1990 election, the same
splendid June day that Czechs voted out a half-century of Communist
rule. (I remember because I witnessed it all in Prague.) A great
day for global democracy. All but two years later, burying the
ignominy, Larry ran for president, getting himself arrested for
trying to crash a Democrat debate in New York City. Forgetfulness
being one of Irvinites’ charms, Larry has managed to get himself
back into the mayor’s chair where, this Fourth of July, the very
day one of his non-voting constituents motored up to LAX to make a
mess of thousands of travelers’ plans, he was hosting a delegation
of Chinese Communists.
We do love our diversity here in Irvine. Come, sit around one of
our many neighborhood swimming pools, partake of the delicacies of
any number of ethnic fast food places — and you’ll marvel at the
foreign accents. Stroll across the university campus — and you’ll
imagine yourself warped to someplace across the Pacific. Go to
church. If it’s not a megachurch like the renowned,
non-denominational “Mariners,” it’ll likely be Korean or Taiwanese.
Our polyglot cast might just drive a Pat Buchanan over the top, but
most of us — including those who vote for the noble Congressman
Chris Cox — rather like the cosmopolitanism.
Alas, Hadayet naturally gravitated to it as well. We all now
know how he felt at dusk every Friday, when presumably he had to
brake his limo to allow wide-brimmed pedestrians their ritual walk
to Temple. An associate did say he hated Israel and paid
preternatural attention to violent events in the Middle East. Could
he not find proper Muslim apparel for his wife when he shopped at
the Mervyn’s kitty-corner from his not-so-upscale and atypical
dwelling?
His wife. It develops that her presence here kept him in the
country — he was here on a six-month work permit — just as the
INS was about to deport him in 1992. How? By winning an INS
“diversity lottery,” surely the first most Americans have heard of
that cute iteration of diversity perversity. Someone ought to tell
the benighted migras that Irvine doesn’t need fiat diversity, thank
you.
Anyway, the ingrate did send her and the kids back to Egypt just
a fortnight before he slew two El Al employees and El Al security
ended his sick spree. That would suggest premeditation. The
homicide/suicide act blatantly apes the Palestinians’ favorite
provocation, the one that takes place with such depressing
regularity inside Israel.
And hadn’t the Arafat-linked Al Aqsa brigade, just days before,
sent out a directive to attack U.S. and Israeli “installations”
across the globe? Isn’t an El Al ticket counter just about the most
obvious synecdoche for Israel one can find in this country?
Certainly all this caught the FBI flatfooted. Impulsively,
though he did wait long enough for a perplexed L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn
to show up as his armpiece at an airport press conference, the
Bureau’s local spokesman downplayed any thought that Hadayet acted
in concert with the Evildoers. Investigators, he lectured impatient
newshounds, hadn’t been able as yet to categorize this holiday
headache as a “hate crime,” an “act of terror,” or anything other
than “coincidence” — the coincidence presumably being Hadayet’s
proximity to the El Al counter.
Isn’t it lovely to have such recently minted categories to sift
through? Nor had Hadayet, the helpful G-man assured us, shown up on
any watch list. So how do you get on a watch list anyway? By
committing terror? And aren’t those sleeper cells we heard so much
about post-9/11 — aren’t they by definition so stealthy as to be
off a watch list?
As for Hahn, the antithesis of Rudy, clearly he wanted to smooth
nerves in and around the City of Angels, first declaring this was
not terrorism, then retreating to the position that the very nature
of violence is terror, or some such obfuscation. He called for
pushing LAX’s security zone back to the curb … no, back beyond
the parking structures … no, probably all the way back to the
landmark “TOTALLY NUDE” theater that greets air passengers on
Century Boulevard.
All the while, Gov. Gray Davis, fresh from picking up beach
litter at nearby Playa Vista, commandeered a local police station
and made it his “command post,” whereupon he would hold his own,
more crisis-themed news conference. On Friday, carefully planned
for the cameras, Davis took a telephone call from Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, who thanked the embattled governor for
supporting Israel. Of course they were now able to talk, briefly
and unsubstantially, about the day before at LAX, and Davis
naturally kept the crisis-management image primed.
Memo to Ariel Sharon: You may be forgiven Ramallah and even
Sabra and Shatilla. But stay the hell out of the California
governor’s race. If Gray Davis is re-elected, anything that leads
up to it is, truly, an act of terrorism. You would be complicit
with Hesham Mohamed Hadayet. You want to meddle? Do something with
Irvine Mayor Larry Agran. Hire him away to run your waterworks or
something. He’s never been out of the country. He might love
it.
