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Palestinian-American Rapper Fired For Terrorist Lyrics
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Friday, 15 July 2005
 An unsigned Houston rapper has recently been fired from his job at George Bush Intercontinental Airport for his lyrics that embrace terrorism and applaud 9/11.
21 year-old Bassam Khalaf calls himself "the Arabic Assassin" on his unreleased CD, Terror Alert, which lyrics about flying a plane into a building and descriptions of himself as a "crazy, suicidal Arabic ... equipped with bombs."
According to Newsday, Khalaf was employed as a baggage screener at the airport until last week when the regional Transportation Security Administration (TSA) office in Dallas found out about his web sites.
Khalaf reportedly has Web sites that feature raps threatening to fly a plane into a building on Sept. 11, 2005.
The Houston-born artist says he's not really a terrorist and his lyrics are a marketing move. He cited Eminem's "My Dad's Gone Crazy," which talks about blowing up everything on the map except Afghanistan and says: "There's no tower too high, no plane that I can't learn how to fly."
"Controversy sells," the Palestinian descendant said. "It brings a lot of attention. Everybody wants to label all Arabics terrorists just because a couple of people messed up. Well, I'm going to play along with that character. I'm going to let you think I'm one."
The reasons for his firing are, according to a TSA termination letter, "authorship of songs which applaud the efforts of the terrorists on September 11th, encourage and warn of future acts of terrorism by you, discuss at length and in grave and alarming detail various criminal acts you intend to commit, state your belief that the U.S. government should be overthrown, and finally warn that others will die on September 11, 2005."
"We have eyes and ears in the workplace," TSA spokeswoman Andrea McCauley said. "Once we discovered these Web sites, we fired him."
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