My relation to suspected American terrorist Abu Mansour al-Amriki

A Bamaragua exclusive.

MEXICO CITY - Today's entry is not about travel. It's about a 10-second strangle hold that suspected American terrorist Abu Mansour al-Amriki, formerly Omar Hammami, once put on me when we were students at Daphne High School in 2001.

It's not a big deal, but today in retrospect I think it's more interesting and more telling of what was to come than some of the articles that have been posted on al.com, not to mention the fact that current Daphne High School principal Don Blanchard told FOX News that Omar never got into trouble in high school (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,546510,00.html).

It happened I think right before or right after we were supposed to serve as delegates in the Baldwin County Model U.N. of spring 2001. He would always talk about Islam in class in a way that walked a thin line, sometimes even standing up for Osama bin Laden. He was very vocal but could hardly stand it when anyone disagreed with him, often shouting at other people in the class and having to be shouted back down by our teacher to let other people speak.

I was a freshman at the time, and he was a senior. I was also a practicing Buddhist, if you can believe it, and so we had our occasional disagreements over the role religion should play in people's lives. However, our disagreements were never personal, and we actually got along alright. But we weren't actually arguing about anything the day he attacked me.

I was sitting in the back of the room talking with a good friend of mine, the only other freshman in the class, not paying attention to a discussion between Omar and our teacher at the front of the class. Then he started saying something I couldn't understand, but I legitimately wanted to know what it was they were talking about. My way of getting to that was immature, but I didn't realize that a. He was speaking Arabic and b. He was quoting the Koran.

"What's that? Labelelala?" I asked looking across the room at him with a smile.

His calm face turned sour and before I had even noticed it he was on his feet and running around desks toward me. I stayed in my seat just staring at him having no idea what he was about to do. Then he put his hands around my throat, clamped down as tight as he could so that no air was coming in or out and just stared me right in the eyes. I didn't put my hands up. Even though I was a freshman, Omar was actually half my size. I just stared right back at him while everyone else in the class was shouting at him to stop.

He let go after maybe 10 seconds and stormed out of the classroom. The teacher went and found him and the principal was brought in. Omar was suspended for three days and then came right back to class. I remember when he came back to school he came up to me, or was maybe told to come up to me, and apologized. We had this conversation in front of the teacher, and at the end of it as we started to walk away, he turned to me and pretended to come at me again with his arms half-way out. He did it with the same smile on his face that now people across the world are seeing in Abu Mansour al-Amriki's propaganda videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87CEciLBRqM&feature=related). I responded with a very awkward laugh, and that was the last we ever said of it.

We avoided any real conversation with each other the rest of the semester, then he graduated and the next fall went on to become president of the Muslim Student Association at the University of South Alabama, just weeks before 9/11. It was that event and his role in the Muslim student community that first got his name on the front page of the Press-Register, and much of what he said at the time being sympathetic towards the victims is now being referenced in almost every article you see.

At the time, I was never sure if my feelings about Omar, or al-Amriki, had more to do with Islam, which I was fairly ignorant of, or if it really was that Omar was in the process of developing a very dangerous personal philosophy based on his own interpretation of the religion. It appears now, as the U.S. government is looking for Omar somewhere in Somalia, that maybe his case really is the latter. I never could have imagined he would take it as far as he allegedly has, but that looks to be exactly what has happened.