Has anyone seen Conan O’Brien recently?
We’re only asking because a recently free al Qaeda terrorist bears a striking resemblance to the TV funnyman. Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, al Qaeda’s number four man, was reportedly released from a Syrian prison last month in retaliation for U.S. officials’ harsh words towards the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Nasar was captured in Pakistan in 2005 and is suspected to have been transferred to Syria under the CIA’s controversial “extraordinary rendition” program.
What else do Nasar and O’Brien have in common? We looked through each man’s Wikipedia page to see:
–Both men are “late Boomers,” the younger siblings to the tie-dyed hippies we normally associate with the generation. Nasar was born around 1958, while O’Brien was born in 1963.
–Both men stayed local for college; O’Brien went to Harvard after growing up in Brookline, while Nasar, the University of Aleppo in his hometown of Aleppo, Syria.
–Both O’Brien and Nasar edited influential journals in their field — O’Brien at the Harvard Lampoon, Nasar at Al Ansar, a jihadi publication aligned with the Alergerian Armed Islamic Group.
–Nasar and O’Brien both broke into their careers early, with Nasar hooking up with a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot group in 1980 and O’Brien joining the staff of HBO’s “Not Necessarily The News” in 1985.
–Each man also had a professional breakthrough in 1987. O’Brien joined the staff of “Saturday Night Live” In New York, while Nasar joined the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Despire these similarities, there is one major difference between the two men’s careers: Though both are writers by trade, only Nasar has ventured into the long-form format, with the 1,600-page treatise “The Global Islamic Resistance Call.” O’Brien has not yet attempted a work of this magnitude.
