The Kamikaze Kid
I don't think there's all that much in the Arab father angle on the Charles Bishop story, other than the obvious psychological one. There are some odd points in this Guardian article, however:
Some East Lake students remember that, after September 11, Bishop would refer cryptically to being of Arab extraction - a detail police are still unable to confirm, since his father, Charles Bishara, appears to have vanished without trace... "Sometimes when I'd ask him where he was from, he'd make jokes about being from Afghanistan," recalled Geoffrey Mackey, who attended another Florida school, Dunedin Academy, with Bishop. "Or he'd say 'I'm a Muslim!'" But then, Mackey said, "he'd correct himself and say, 'No - I'm from Boston'."
They're also saying that this kid's suicidal urges could have been caused by the acne medication, Accutane.
Everybody agrees it doesn't sound like an Al Qaeda operation. (Sending little kids on suicide missions-- that sounds more like an Arafat mission; even so, I'm sure it wasn't.) It's a sad, weird story.
So the kid was troubled, maybe accutane-addled, and perhaps had some kind of Arab-fixation related to his absent father-- but how does that mean it's not "terrorism?" Of course it is. So much for "homeland security." As Ken Layne puts it:
Why does Do-Nothing Tom Ridge insist this has "nothing to do with terrorism"? Somebody commits a terrorist act -- a suicide crash of a hijacked plane into an American skyscraper -- in support of a terrorist war against the West. It doesn't matter if the kid acted alone (which it seems he did) or if the kid went crazy (which of the Saudi hijackers wasn't crazy?). It's a terrorist act. Deal with it, Tom. Or go back to goddamned Pennsylvania.