21. The President Who Mistook His Assassins For Parade Performers
October 6th is a day of national commemoration in Egypt, to celebrate the successful crossing of the Suez Canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. By the time the eighth anniversary rolled around in 1981, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had been in office in 1973 and enjoyed a huge bump in popularity and prestige, as a result, was becoming quite unpopular. In addition to an economic downturn, Sadat had entered what was viewed by many Egyptians as a controversial rapprochement with Israel.
The thaw culminated in a peace treaty, the 1979 Camp David Accords. It won Sadat a Nobel Prize and applause in the West, but many of his fellow countrymen and Arab neighbors saw it as a sellout. Their numbers included Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik” later convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who issued a fatwa against Sadat. When the fatwa was carried out, Sadat thought his approaching killers were performing an officially scripted part of the 1981 October 6th parade.
