Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [125]
Zabelka may have been a “radical priest,” but he was still a priest and still very faithful to the Catholic Church.
“I’ve been reading some of your comments about the Church and the Pope in the Voice, and I’m just worried about you. And your soul.”
I laughed. “George, you don’t have to worry about me or my soul. I’m doing just fine.”
“But it seems that you’ve left the Church.”
“Let’s just say I’m a recovering Catholic.”
That did not go over well.
“Would you do me a favor and pray with me right now?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. I just want to make sure you are going to be OK.”
“I’m going to be OK. And I pray when I need to.”
“Just say the Lord’s Prayer with me right now.” He began: “‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’”
“George—stop. This isn’t necessary.”
“. . . ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth…’”
“George! Stop! This is creeping me out!”
“Don’t say that about the Lord’s Prayer, Michael,” he said, interrupting the Lord’s Prayer. “I think you need this.”
“I don’t need it. I don’t want it. And I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”
He became silent. He looked at me. He said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. The silence was excruciating.
“It’s important you carry on,” he said when he finally spoke. “It’s important to do what you do. But you can’t do it without the Church. You need the Church and the Church needs you. You need to go back to Mass. You need to find a place within the Church where you can find peace.”
I realized he was talking about himself. I realized that he still blamed himself for what happened on Tinian Island, and that were it not for the Church, for his faith, who knows what would have become of him. For every whipping he’d given himself over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had the Catholic Church there to give him a chance to redeem himself. He was still a priest. He could still do good with that, and maybe in his mind, if he did enough good, he would be forgiven on Judgment Day. I looked at this old man and understood the demons he still carried with him. I wasn’t offended that he thought I needed some sort of “saving.” It was an easy thing to forgive him for.
I spoke.
“‘Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, forever and ever. Amen.’”
He smiled. “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No, George,” I said kindly, “it wasn’t.”
“Good! Now, what do you want me to do for next week’s paper?”
Abu 2 U 2
ABU NIDAL HAD A CHRISTMAS PRESENT for me. He was going to kill me.
It wasn’t like he wanted to kill me specifically. It was more like we drew names. Or perhaps he was just planning a sick game of Secret Santa.
But he and I, for better or worse, had an unplanned rendezvous one morning during Christmas Week, 1985, at the Vienna International Airport.
And I lived to tell you about it.
Abu Nidal was the most feared terrorist in the world in the mid-’80s, the Osama bin Laden of his time. He was even feared by Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Having broken away from Arafat a decade earlier, Nidal formed the Fatah Revolutionary Council, or as he preferred to call it, “The Abu Nidal Organization.” Nidal believed Arafat to be too soft on Israel. He was opposed to any concessions whatsoever and believed that striking military targets was a waste of time—he thought all efforts should be aimed at civilians. He just wanted to kill Jews—and any Palestinians who wanted to sit down and negotiate with Jews. He was like that.
What led Nidal to this career path seemed evident in his childhood. His real name was Sabri al-Banna, and his father, Khalil al-Banna, was one of the richest men in Palestine, owning thousands of acres of fruit groves and exporting that fruit to Europe. It was said that 10 percent of the citrus fruit that went from Palestine to Europe came from the al-Banna family trees.
The British partitioning (such a polite word!) of Palestine and the subsequent creation of the Israeli state—and the various wars that followed