Free The Terrorist’s Son by Zak Ebrahim Page B

rites of passage line up before me. I go to parties for the first time. I get drunk for the first time. I pretend I’m going to buy a soda and actually just smoke a cigarette in the 7-Eleven parking lot. I buy a car. A car . The quintessential symbol of freedom! I mean, it’s a terrible, terrible car—an old Ford Taurus with stickers and decals that won’t come off. Still, I worship it so much that I lie in bed at night thinking about it, like it’s my girlfriend or something. Truthfully, my bad-boy experiments are all timid and short-lived. My real rebellion is that I’m starting to question everything my father stands for. From the moment I put on my Rhino Rally safari suit, I meet tourists and coworkers of every description, which is so liberating that I can hardly put the feeling into words. I’m taking every fundamentalist lie I was ever told about people—about nations and wars and religions—and holding it up to the light.
    When I was a kid, I never questioned what I heard at home or at school or at the mosque. Bigotry just slipped into my system along with everything else: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone . Pi equals 3.14. All Jews are evil, and homosexuality is an abomination. Paris is the capital of France. They all sounded like facts. Who was I to differentiate? I was made to fear people who weredifferent and kept away from them as much as possible for my own “protection.” Bigotry is such a maddeningly perfect circle—I never got close enough to find out if I should fear them in the first place.
    Because my father was obsessed with the Middle East, I was constantly reminded that Jews were villains, end of discussion. And gays? When I was fifteen, three Afghan men were found guilty of sodomy, and the Taliban decreed that they were going to bury them under a pile of rocks and then use a tank to push a wall down on top of them. The Taliban’s version of mercy was that if the men were still alive after thirty minutes, their lives would be spared.
    This was the sort of dogma that had been seeping into my brain since I was born, and it was only being reinforced by the strains of anti-Semitism and homophobia in American culture. Lately, though, there’d been an unlikely new voice chipping away at the lies: Jon Stewart.
    I always loved The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn, and when they announced that Stewart was taking over, I was indignant in the way only a teenager can be: Who is this guy? Bring back Kilborn! But, in Tampa, I watch Stewart obsessively and insist my mother sit on the couch alongside me. Stewart’s humor is like a gateway drug. He makes it seem cool to probe and to question and to care—about the antiwar movement, about gay rights, about everything. The man hates dogma. I’vegulped down so much so-called wisdom in my life that Stewart is a revelation. Frankly, he’s as close to a reasoning and humane father figure as I’ll ever get. I stay up late just waiting for him to decipher the world for me, and he helps adjust a lot of the faulty wiring in my brain. It seems only fitting that my new role model is Jewish.
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    The Rhino Rally job is phenomenal. A total blast. It turns out that, buried beneath my self-doubt, I’m a bit of a ham. This becomes clear when I put on the headset microphone and get behind the wheel of the Land Rover. All guides follow the same basic script, but we can improvise as much as we like, as long as nobody breaks an arm or files a complaint. For each tour, I pick a “navigator” to sit beside me. If anybody wants to do it too badly—there’s always some kid whose hand rockets into the air before I’m even done explaining the job—I never pick them. I want people who are friendly and unsure of themselves and who look as if they can take some teasing. It never occurs to me to care what God they pray to—although, to be honest, if