Father Knows Best

Surely, the most important, interesting � and, yes, heroic � figure in the whole Christmas Day Northwest airliner affair was the would-be bomber�s father, the Nigerian banker Alhaji Umaru Mutallab.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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Times Topics: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

Mutallab did something that, as far as we know, no other parent of a suicide bomber has done: He went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and warned us that text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent, and possibly dangerous, radical.