Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (18 page)

Their bias was shocking. The media reported a one-sided story, focusing only on the Palestinians and Muslims whose lives had been destroyed by Israel. I thought, What about our lives, which had been destroyed by the Muslims and the PLO? What about the massacres, slaughter, rape, and torture of Christians and the destruction of our churches by Muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar"? What about Lebanese democracy now under the thumb of the Syrians? What about the people of Lebanon, who were so open-minded, tolerant, and fair? What about the hatred, intolerance, and bigotry of the Palestinians who were given refuge in Lebanon, and then destroyed and terrorized what was once the beacon of culture, education, and modernity in the Middle East?

While the Arab channels were broadcasting a hatefest demonizing Israel, Israeli television was showing the humanitarian aid that was given to the Lebanese. We were able to watch Jordanian, Lebanese, and Israeli newscasts one after the other. The Israelis aired interviews of officials talking peace and the initial negotiations with Lebanon over a peaceful coexistence. Even though they also aired stories about their bombing of Palestinian camps, they never gloated about their successful attacks, as Arab news anchors did, as they smiled when reporting Israeli casualties. They reported balanced news that showed Israel in both a good and a bad light. The Israelis also showed positive stories of Lebanese rebuilding their lives, reopening their stores, which had not been in business in years, and resuming their daily lives. Israel showed stockpiles of weapons given to the Muslims and Palestinians by Iran, the USSR, and Syria.

Two momentous international events had occurred during the seven years that my family and I lived in the bomb shelter. First was the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement of 1979. In exchange for full withdrawal from the Sinai, which Israel had captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, Egypt “normalized” relations with Israel. Although it has turned out to be a very cold peace between the two countries, the accommodation between Israel and the most populous and powerful state in the Arab world effectively eliminated the possibility of a major war between Israel and the Arab world.

The second event, which had the most profound effect on Lebanon and the world, was the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Prior to this time, although there was friction and sometimes fighting among the various religious communities in Lebanon, they all saw themselves as Lebanese. After the Iranian Revolution, Muslims throughout the world began to see themselves only as Muslims, with a religious duty to wage a holy war, a jihad, to make Islam supreme over the entire world. Fundamentalist hate ideology began to take hold in different parts of the world, inspired by the Iranian mullahs. Islamic terrorism began to escalate around the world. According to these radical Islamists, any civilization or culture that did not submit to Islam must be destroyed. In Lebanon, this led to the decline of the moderate Amal Shia militia and the rise of Hezbollah, the modestly named “Party of God.” Hezbollah is made up of Lebanese Shia Muslims, but it is financed and supported by Iran and Syria. From its inception in 1982, Hezbollah has been as dedicated to the destruction of the United States as it has been to the domination of Lebanon. With the rise of Hezbollah, the turmoil in Lebanon mutated from a civil war over the future of Lebanon into one of the fronts in the worldwide jihad of radical Islam. Hezbollah today is one of the most lethal terrorist organizations in the world, with insurgent training centers spinning off terrorists worldwide.

Throughout Lebanon, talking politics was the national pastime. I watched men visiting my dad talk and noticed how they disagreed, and I compared their behavior to what I had observed in Israel. In Lebanon, the more people disagreed, the more they shouted and yelled and called each other insulting names, as if that were going to make their point more valid. I would contrast that with conversations I heard at the hospital between Israeli families who disagreed on many issues. Even though they passionately disagreed, they never called each other degrading names.

The more people visited us and the more I heard them talking, the more I realized how shallow and uninformed they were about Israel and Western culture. Of course, the main conclusion of every conversation was that the Lebanese war was an American-Israeli conspiracy, and if America wanted, it could stop it in three days. Both the Christians and Muslims believed this. This belief was repeated over and over by politicians at every opportunity in the Arabic media. The people believed it because they had no other perspective, as I’d had in Israel. The irrationality of the belief in conspiracy theories and lies presented by leaders and governments with hidden agendas is important to understand. People’s subjective reality is far from the real situation. They believe ridiculous ideas, and logic simply isn’t part of their thinking, which is why Western liberal reasoning isn’t going to work.

As days passed, I became more disgusted with my culture. I began to compare my place as a female in Lebanese society to that of females in Israeli society. I recall a day when my cousin’s husband, Shahine, came to drive my mother to the hospital, since we did not have a car. I was determined that I was going to have a good day. I was wearing a pair of shorts that Lea had given me, with a matching T-shirt and sandals. I felt beautiful, loved, and privileged to have met people like her. When Shahine walked through the door, I welcomed him with a big smile and told him how much we appreciated his help in driving us to the hospital. I asked him if he would like a cup of coffee before we left, and he said, “No, thank you. I have to get going."

I called my mother, who was already dressed, and informed him that we were ready. He looked at me with shock and said, “Aren’t you going to get dressed?"

I said, “Oh no, I don’t feel like dressing up today. We’re only going to the hospital. This is cool and comfortable."

"I think you should go change.” He said it like an order.

I said, “No, I am comfortable, I am not going to change."

"I will not drive you to the hospital looking like a slut. Go put something on that will cover your legs."

My mother intervened at that moment and asked me to go change. I said, “No way. If you don’t like how I am dressed, you go to the hospital by yourself. I don’t think I look like a slut. I wore this for three weeks in Israel. Nobody treated me like a slut."

Shahine screamed, “This is not Israel, this is Lebanon! If they don’t have any morality over there, we have some."

This supposedly educated, not religious, middle-aged Arab man, and a family man at that, had decided I was not worthy of respect just because I wore shorts that showed half of my legs. Rather than worry about important things like my education, my values, my intellect, my character, and what I was going to accomplish in life, he was concerned with ancient tribal ideas of our family’s honor, which depended on my sexual propriety. My poor mother was embarrassed and hurt. She insisted that I change because she needed me with her at the hospital. She was almost begging.

Feeling angry and degraded, I walked into my room to change my clothes. I started crying. If not for my mother, I would never have given in. Is it any wonder that Americans have gone to the moon and Israel became the strongest, most intelligent country in the Middle East? Arabic lack of development is because of Arabs like Shahine who spent their time worrying about nonsense. I swore that I would leave Lebanon as soon as I could, especially after the victory smile on Shahine’s face telling me that now I looked worthy of respect. I couldn’t understand how somebody could be judged on her appearance instead of her intelligence and what she had to offer her country and the world.

During the first few days I was in the hospital in Israel I earned the respect of everybody who came to know me. I helped many people by using a language that I had taught myself in a bomb shelter while watching TV programs. I checked people out of the hospital, translated for doctors, ran errands, changed people’s clothes, and took them to the bathroom, none of which I had ever done before. People respected me for what I had to offer, for the attitude I had, and for going out of my way to help others, even my enemies the Palestinians.

I did not belong in Lebanon. I had no fond feelings toward the country. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I felt more at home in Israel, the place that had given me a glimpse of Western civilization. I related to the people there and the way they respected each other. Civilization can exist only where both culture and society respect and protect the rights of individuals, where self-improvement is encouraged, and where mutual respect is demanded, regardless of gender, religion, or ethnic identity.

Civilization is a collection of behaviors that people live by. It is a respect for education, for human beings. It is the desire for the improvement of self and the broadening of the mind without differentiating between a woman and a man. Civilization is the result of citizens who have been nurtured and encouraged to reach the ultimate goal of bettering themselves and others at every level. I did not feel civilization in Lebanon. The people there respected the shrewd, con artist businessman who made his wealth taking advantage of others. Bullies and corrupt politicians were respected, put on a pedestal as powerful. One thing that both Muslim and Christian cultures shared was their lack of respect and equality for women. A girl was never encouraged to continue her studies and have a career of her own if she chose to. Five friends of mine dropped out of college during their third year because they got married. It was time to have children and be wives. They would never be able to work, so education served as only a good addition to increase their value on the marriage market.

One of my friends wanted to become a doctor. Her brothers and family would laugh at her when she started talking about it. And we Christians considered ourselves an educated and sophisticated society because our boys went to the Sorbonne or Oxford to finish their education. We thought we were civilized, but we were acting like any other society that strongly discriminated against women.

Life in southern Lebanon improved greatly for us. The Israelis were able to drive away the radicals and bring peace to the areas they invaded. However, the PLO was turning Lebanon into a terrorist base, as the Taliban would do in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. The world was not thanking the Israelis then, as no one thanked the Americans for driving out the Taliban from Afghanistan and giving people back their lives. No one thanked the Israelis later when they took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear plant in Iraq in 1982. And people don’t think Hussein had any plans for nuclear WMD? Thank the Israelis for cutting that effort short. Now the same nuclear efforts are being made in Iran. Whenever Israel had the foresight to see what was happening concerning terrorist activity and did something about it, the whole world got upset. If the world had paid attention to the Islamic terrorists that Israel has been fighting for over fifty years, the whole world would not now be plagued with acts of terror against innocent civilians.

The Israeli siege of Beirut went on for ten weeks while the United States conducted negotiations between Israel and intermediaries in contact with Yasser Arafat. Arafat agreed to the expulsion of PLO gunmen from Beirut on condition that the thousands of Palestinians left behind in refugee camps would be protected by an international military force. The first contingent of the UN Multi-National Force (MNF), 350 French troops, arrived on August 21,1982. The remainder of the MNF (800 Italian troops and 800 United States Marines) arrived August 25, and the expulsion of Palestinian gunmen from Beirut was completed.

On September 14, 1982, newly elected Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel was assassinated by a massive truck bomb. As a spontaneous act of retaliation against the PLO, Christian forces attacked the Palestinians.

Two of the most publicized massacres in Lebanon is the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. The notorious Sabra and Shatila camps were havens for all the terrorists on earth. From the Baader-Meinhof Gang to the Japanese Red Army Brigade, every terrorist organization at that time had some connection to Sabra and Shatila. In addition, kidnappers, drug dealers, and all sorts of criminals found refuge inside the camps. Lebanese were terrified of just the names of these two places.

The massacres during the Lebanese civil war were horrible. But mentioning Sabra and Shatila alone—about four hundred dead, not thousands—without mentioning the tens of thousands of victims of the Lebanese civil war is unjust and cruel to the memory of the dead Lebanese. One hundred thousand civilians were killed, 60 percent of those in massacres perpetrated against Christians. Palestinian militiamen started the killings in 1975, long before the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. Beit Mellat, Deir Achache, Damour, Saadiyate, and many others were peaceful cities and villages where hundreds, if not thousands, of Lebanese were killed on their own land in their own country by armed foreigners, mostly Palestinians and Syrian Muslims. Of course those poor villagers could not afford the millions or billions of dollars that the PLO was paying for worldwide propaganda. So their tragedy remains mostly unknown, except among their families, their fellow citizens, and members of the local Lebanese news media.

The crimes perpetrated against unarmed civilians in Sabra and Shatila should not be excused. But then why not mention the “War of the Camps” of 1985-86, when for more than six months, armed Shiite elements from the Lebanese Amal militia supported by Shiite units of the Lebanese army surrounded Sabra and Shatila, then populated mostly by civilians with few armed elements. The Shiite militias bombarded the camps with heavy artillery and tanks, cut off power and water, and prevented food and medical help from reaching the camp population. It was far crueler than the 1982 attack. So where is the Palestinian and Arab outrage? Why ignore these abuses, which actually lasted much longer, and with more victims and more tragedies, than the 1982 ones?

Is it because the perpetrators were Shia Muslims? So crimes against humanity are now forgiven?