Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (20 page)

David was an engineer working for Middle East Television. He lived in Israel but traveled to Lebanon daily to work. After they finished seeing the doctor, I invited them to my home for a cup of coffee, since I had just finished my shift. They accepted and drove me home. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with their family. Over the following months we became very close.

David told me one day that the Jerusalem office was looking for an Arabic-speaking news anchor for its Arabic news service. He suggested that I apply for the job. He said that the manager would be visiting Metulla the following Thursday with the new bureau chief from the United States. He invited me to stay overnight in their home in Israel and attend the evening meeting in the office in Metulla that they were having with the staff. I could meet the manager and ask for a job in Jerusalem.

At seven fifteen Thursday evening we parked in front of the office in Metulla. The whole office staff was there.

I met the bureau chief, Andrew, and Tim, the young supervisor accompanying him. I recognized Tim immediately because he was the current Arabic-language news anchor whose command of the language was not quite fluent. No wonder! He was an American, raised in the States by an American mother and a Lebanese father.

Tim was very warm and polite, not to mention tall and handsome. I told him that I watched him on TV, and that was the icebreaker. He smiled and started joking about his Arabic, which made me laugh. I said, “Since you brought the subject up, let me correct some of your more common mistakes."

The conversation went wonderfully. He asked me about myself, and I told him that I was a friend of Dave and Shoshana’s, that I had heard there was a job possibility in Jerusalem, and that I wanted to meet him and see if I could work for the company. I told him about my situation with my parents. Tim answered me more like a friend than as a manager interviewing an employee. He told me that they were going to be expanding the office in Jerusalem and would be hiring some additional people soon. Tim gave me his phone number in the office in Jerusalem and told me to stay in touch. I promised him I would. I also promised him that I would watch him every night and call him to correct his mistakes in Arabic grammar. He laughed and said please do.

I spent the following few months watching Tim at night, taking notes on his grammatical mistakes, and calling him with my corrections. My only access to a phone line was the Israeli military phone in the emergency room. I would wait for a slow time in the emergency room when all the Lebanese doctors and nurses were out, and I would discreetly call Tim. I would tell him my observations and always end my conversation with the question, “When are you going to get me down to Jerusalem to work with you on the news?"

One Friday afternoon I called Tim with my usual commentary. After a pleasant conversation Tim asked me if I could go to Jerusalem on Sunday. He said he would have a taxi waiting for me at the Metulla office. I couldn’t believe my ears. I was thrilled. I went to the Lebanese administration and asked for a week off. I had to explain to the nasty head sister what I was doing. After hurling insults at me for five minutes about how good girls didn’t leave their parents' home to go live in Jerusalem alone, she granted me the vacation without pay and threatened that my job might not be waiting for me when I got back. I thanked her politely and left.

My parents were delighted but also saddened by the news. They knew that it was a great opportunity for a better job and better pay. But they worried about me living alone and far away from them. My mother played every guilt trip she knew, from heavy breathing to chest pains to talking about how I was going to miss warm meals and folded clean laundry.

The ride to Jerusalem Sunday afternoon was the first time in my life I ever rode in a car for three and a half hours. We started in the Golan Heights; drove down to Tiberias, passing by Capernaum; continued to the Jordan Valley; then went to Jericho; continued past the edge of the Dead Sea; and finally made our way up the desert hills until we reached Jerusalem. My first night was spent at the Hilton Hotel, which, compared to the bomb shelter, was the most magnificent palace I had ever seen.

I walked into Middle East Television’s office on Monday, December 3, 1984. After a few meetings on Monday and working in the office on Tuesday and Wednesday, Tim handed me a contract on Thursday for a position as production assistant, news writer, and doing voice-overs in the news department. I went to Lebanon Friday and resigned from the hospital. It was the beginning of a new life.

Working and living in Jerusalem was the best gift anyone could have given me for Christmas that year. Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, is one of the world’s truly magical and exceptional cities. Established three thousand years ago by King David, Jerusalem is the pinnacle of East meets West. It is a combination of old and new, historical and modern, holy and secular. There is ancient beauty in the quiet solemnity of its stone walls and buildings, and a vibrant air of progress in its impressive modern architecture. It is the melting pot of the world’s Jews, who brought their multitude of cultures with them from around the world. Jerusalem is a captivating experience of smells, sounds, and sights mixed into culture, diversity, and spiritual sanctity. It made quite an impression on a twenty-year-old girl who had never been away from home alone or taken more than a three-hour car ride.

Jerusalem is known as the City of Gold because of the magnificent golden hue that its limestone walls take on as the sun sets. It is sacred to the three main religions of Western civilization, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is divided into three sections: the old city; the new city, where I worked and lived in West Jerusalem; and East Jerusalem, where the Arabs live. The old city is surrounded by the original wall built by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent between 1536 and 1541,
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and is itself divided into four quarters: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian.

It is in Jerusalem that you are able to see clearly the differences between Arabic and Jewish culture as represented by the two sides of the city. In the western side of the city you see order, structure, cleanliness, and beautiful flowers planted everywhere. I noticed this immediately having come from war-torn Lebanon. A little boy with a piece of paper trash made an effort to find a garbage can instead of throwing it on the ground. You see adults sitting benches reading books. You ride the bus in Jerusalem and hear twenty different languages.

If you walk one block into the eastern side of the city, the first thing you notice is uncleanliness. Garbage clutters the streets. A man eating a banana threw the peel on the ground instead of throwing it in the garbage can next to him. Walking down the sidewalk you catch the occasional smell of urine coming from some damp nook where two walls meet. People shove, yell, and hurl sexual gestures and language at females walking down the alleys. In my six years living in Jerusalem I never once saw an Arab man sitting with a book in his hand.

The difference between the two cultures has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with values. It is truly the clash of civilizations in its rawest form.

I worked in Benyanei Ha’Uma, “the Nations” building, a conference center and major stage theater in Jerusalem. It was also the home of Jerusalem Capital Studios, which provided production services supporting the Jerusalem bureaus of most American and international media, including ABC, NBC, CBS, Italian TV, German TV, Spanish TV, French TV, Worldwide Television News, and a few others.

I was eager and excited to learn the television business. Working for the Arabic newscast, I enjoyed the company of my new co-workers, especially a Lebanese girl named Paula, who was brought in from Beirut to be the news anchor for
World News.
Work didn’t stop when the broadcast was over. Paula and I lived together and brought work home, brainstorming different stories. Paula trained me on voice-overs, reading, and camera presence. In less than four months I began training for the position of news director. I had new friends, a much higher-paying job, and no day-to-day fear of dying.

I worked in Israel Monday through Friday and took a taxi to Lebanon on Friday evening so I could take care of my parents during the weekend. My parents kept up our old family tradition of waiting for me on the balcony so I would not arrive to an empty-looking home. They stood out there even in the rain or snow. I usually arrived home around eleven o’clock Friday nights. I would rush into my father’s shivering open arm, which hugged me as his other one held the cane balancing his wobbly body as we greeted. The stubble of his facial hairs would poke me as we kissed three times. I could tell they had been out on the balcony for some time by the chill my lips felt on my mother’s soft cheeks. I adored my parents and lived every second of my life to love and honor them. Even though my living alone in Jerusalem worried them, they were proud I was working.

After five months as news anchor, Paula decided to go back to Lebanon and abruptly announced one day that she was quitting. Tim, the Arabic office supervisor, was scrambling to find a replacement and called me into his office after the newscast and informed me, “Starting tomorrow evening, you will be news anchor for
World News.
” I was shocked at the sudden appointment, and its implications worried me. It was clear that by taking such a public job, with its high visibility, my life would change overnight. My travel between Israel and terrorist-infested Lebanon would make me an easy target for the Muslims and the PLO. While Paula was going back to live in the safety of Christian East Beirut, where Muslims couldn’t reach her, I had to travel weekly to southern Lebanon to take care of my parents, and Muslims could easily get to me to kill me. After many assurances from Tim that security measures would be provided, I hesitantly accepted the job. Being a Lebanese Christian working for an Israeli-backed TV station was extremely dangerous in that part of the world, where Muslims looked upon killing both Christians and Jews as a sacred duty. To them I was not only a Christian but a traitor.

On May 5, 1985, I became evening news anchor for Middle East Television’s
World News
broadcast, seen throughout the Middle East. I covered world events and was exposed to world media where I could evaluate information that had not been distorted by the Arabic religious, cultural, and governmental propaganda influences that Arab viewers are oblivious of. As I saw the world in a broader context without this manipulative Arab media filter, I began to see the deceptive nature of Arabic culture for what it really was. My personal experience of meeting Israeli Jews from all over the world, talking with international journalists, and being exposed to the flood of information available in the free and open Western media showed me how deluded the Arab world was in its self-absorbed manipulative thinking. I began to realize that the Arab Muslim world, because of its religion and culture, is a natural threat to civilized people of the world, particularly Western civilization. As I began reading the Koran and the Hadith, I started learning that the basic commandment of Islam is intolerance to anything non-Muslim. Islamic teaching is filled with hate against Jews and infidels. The Koran is at odds with the Bible. While Christians and Jews learn to repair the world, love their enemy, forgive those who trespass against them, and turn the other cheek, Muslims are taught to fight the infidels, to consider them the enemies of Allah. The sad reality is that even today most Westerners have not read the Koran and Hadith and have no idea about what is to be found in Islamic teachings.

As a journalist I was immersed in the news and information business, so I got a closer look at the power the media had in forming the foundation for the thinking of most people. I realized how it had been and continued to be used to manipulate and foment Arab religious animosity into social and political hatred toward the Jews, and to carry on the hatred, which since World War II has been responsible for the mass exodus of nine hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The media are now the key to brainwashing a new generation of Arabs in preparing them to fight for the destruction of Israel. This theme of Arab hatred for Jews starts almost at birth. It’s as if, as the Arabic expression goes, “They are fed hatred by their mother’s milk.” What they grow up watching on TV, reading in newspapers, and listening to on the radio reinforces what they hear at home, and vice versa. A cycle of hate and spiteful information and misinformation influences their views and opinions.

There are others who feel as I do. On December 21, 2001, the London Arabic-language daily
Al-Sharq al-Awsat
published a letter by Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, calling for a thorough self-examination in the Islamic world. “Our Culture of Demagogy Has Engendered bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and Their Ilk,” the letter said,

The mentality of each one of us was programmed upon entering school as a child, [to believe] that [Islam] is everything. Instilled in our small heads was the [notion that the Muslim] has a right
—
whatever the cause
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and that he will triumph
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even if he is armed with a stick of wood against a tank
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because he [represents] the truth and the others represent falsehood. Instilled in our small heads was the [notion] that we have a monopoly on good values. . . . They have taught us that anyone who is not a Muslim is our enemy, and that the West means enfeeblement, licentiousness, lack of values, and even Jahiliya [i.e., ignorance
—
a term used to describe the pre-Islamic era] itself. Anyone who escapes this programming in school encounters it at the mosque, or through the media or from the preachers lurking in every corner
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Luckily for the good doctor, he and this Arabic paper share the freedoms the West has to offer.