Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (9 page)

Muslims have become a sensitive issue in our American society, with demands and expectations, and a group to watch out for and be careful with. There are barely 6 million Muslims in America today out of a total U.S. population of 300 million, yet their presence has been seen and felt throughout every state in America. Stories of Islamic terrorist cells, Islamic charities linked to funding terrorism, Islamic mosques, and Muslims demanding more rights and acknowledgment are beginning to dominate the news. Islamic communities are harboring terrorist cells within. Their mosques are teaching hate against infidels both Christian and Jewish. They are placing demands on American corporations to provide prayer time for Islamic employees on the job. Dell Computers has already caved in to the pressure put forth by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) regarding this issue and now allows its Muslim employees prayer time on the job.
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Our radio and TV talk show hosts are watching their tongues when criticizing even the radical Islamic element of the religion lest they be fired or sued, just as Michael Graham was fired from ABC radio for linking Islam to terrorism.
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The Islamic community throughout the world is outreproducing Christians and Jews almost seven to one.
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It will be a matter of a few generations before they can get voting power to challenge state laws and change the Constitution of the United States. Islam is already the fastest-growing religion in Europe. Driven by immigration and high birthrates, the number of Muslims on the continent has tripled in the last thirty years. Most demographers forecast a similar or even higher rate of growth in the coming decades.
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It is important to note that the world’s fastest-growing Muslim populations are found in Europe and the United States, where they are the second- or third-largest religious communities.
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This is the beginning of America’s and the West’s war with radical Islam. This demographic shift is an exact duplication of what happened in Lebanon and is already having a huge effect throughout Europe. People like me, who come from the Middle East and have seen how the radical Islamic agenda started and spread in Lebanon and ultimately destroyed equality among religions and changed the fabric of Lebanon, see and read the writing on the wall in America and the West today. Americans need to listen: their country is at stake. I lost my country of birth to Islamic fundamentalism and don’t want to lose my country of adoption to the same fate.

As a young child in southern Lebanon, I was largely unaware of the political and religious winds and how they would blow and change our lives. I noticed that we had stopped visiting our relatives in Beirut, but my elderly parents didn’t like traveling all that much anyway. Their reluctance to travel stemmed from something that people in the West will probably be surprised by. In Lebanon everyone carried a national ID card that identified not only our religion but also what sect of that religion we belonged to. It proved to be something that could mean the difference between living or dying. Incidents were being reported of Muslims setting up checkpoints and stopping cars to check IDs. Sometimes, if the Muslims saw that a car’s occupants were Christians, they would order everyone out of the car and then shoot them all. They didn’t kill us because they were Communists and we were capitalists. They killed us because we were Christians. They would shout” Allahu Akbar,” “God is Great,” as they sprayed Christians with machine-gun bullets. These became known as “identity card killings."
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News of such atrocities spread fast, and fear along with it. Most Christians in the county had stopped traveling by late 1974, becoming virtual prisoners in their homes and villages.

Sensing increasing instability and a fearing a breakdown of social institutions, my father had his savings withdrawn in cash from the Bank of Lebanon. He hid the money in our beds at home. His plan was to use it to move us all to America and start a business if the need arose. That would have been in line with what happened to most persecuted Christians in other parts of the Arab world. When things get tough, leave. It is something the spread of Islam has relied on for centuries.

One cold, windy November night in 1975, as winter began taking hold on Marjayoun, there were no customers at the restaurant. Papa closed early, sent his employees home, and walked to our house fifteen yards up the hill behind the restaurant. In anticipation of his arrival my mother had already set the table in the family room and turned up the kerosene heater. The heaters used in Lebanese homes came in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a round metal reservoir for kerosene attached to the heater by a metal feeder tube. A knob on the tube allowed one to adjust the flow of kerosene much as a nurse controls the drip for an IV in a hospital. The kerosene simply dripped inside the stove and burned with a yellow-orange flame on the bottom of the heater. A metal chimney pipe about six inches in diameter went from the stove up through the ceiling. The stove usually sat in the middle of the room. In southern Lebanon, this is what passed for “central heating."

Because we didn’t have central heating as most Americans know it, the family room became the center of our lives in winter. It served as the bedroom, dining room, living room, breakfast nook, and, since it was the room with the TV, the entertainment room.

My parents followed a nightly ritual. Since it was winter, and the heater would go out at night, they tucked me in between two wool blankets covered by a big heavy comforter and another wool blanket over that. They sat one on each side, and we said our prayers, thanking God for that day’s blessings. I thanked God for things that happened to me at school, for my friends, for my parents, for our food, and for my health. Then they sang me a lullaby. I could smell Mama’s perfume on her neck as I snuggled and gave her little kisses that made her hold me tighter. Her hair tickled my face as she moved, and I could hear the smile in her voice. I could feel Papa’s big fingers running through my hair and the stubble on his cheek as he gently kissed me. Our nightly ritual closed with their telling me, “We love you higher than the skies, deeper than the oceans, and bigger than the whole wide world."

I felt no greater love could ever exist.

My parents then went into the family room, where they sat sipping arak, the traditional Lebanese liquor, and quietly discussing the restaurant business and the events of the day. An angry wind whistled through the grapevines outside my window. The TV signal faded in and out as the antenna on the roof swayed back and forth. For their evening snack, my father laid paper-thin pita on top of the kerosene heater, filling the room with the smell of toasted bread. The electricity would blink out for a few seconds now and then because of the high winds. As the room would go from light to pitch black, all you could see were little flickering lights on the ceiling from the design on the kerosene heater. Instead of being frightening, it added a cozy flair to the smell of toasted bread, the fragrance of freshly cut herbs, and the anisette aroma of the arak. All was right in the world, and I was becoming drowsy, about to drop off to sleep to the sound of my parents' voices. Their conversation went from how delicious our new batch of olives was, to the problem with the old patisserie refrigerator, to the new chandeliers my father was thinking about buying for the restaurant this coming spring as a part of the new decor he had in mind.

Suddenly, a very loud boom with a bright light shook our house as if lightning had struck our front yard. My parents jumped up in shock. Papa rushed through the living room and out the front door, with my mother right behind him, to see what had happened. He went to the edge of our long balcony and stood there, peering out in the darkness. He couldn’t see anything, but the smell of explosives and burning was strong. Mama begged him to come back inside, but he refused to listen. Suddenly there was the muffled sound of multiple rockets being launched in the distance. Mama instinctively grabbed Papa by his shoulder, and they both ran toward the door.

They were barely inside the door when a rocket hit the balcony exactly where they had been standing. The force of the explosion picked both of them up off the floor and threw them across the room. Many more rockets exploded in quick succession in and around our house.

One came through my bedroom window. A deafening noise followed by fire, heat, and blinding light erupted in the bedroom. It was as if the gates of hell had opened wide and I was falling into the abyss of fire.

The explosion blew me out of my bed and into the corner. The blast was so loud and the flash so bright that I thought I’d never hear or see again. As my bedroom disintegrated around me, my mind was flooded with television images of explosions and destruction in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. I remember thinking, “Tonight is Marjayoun’s turn.” This was a horrifying realization for a ten-year-old. I woke up from the dream of a perfect childhood and found myself in a hellish nightmare.

I was pinned in place, trapped under rocks and cinder blocks from a wall that had been knocked down by the explosion. I felt the iron grillwork of the window lying directly over my body, which was under the rocks. From where I lay on the floor, I could see fires burning around the room, including on the bed where I had been sleeping. But the air was filled with smoke and dust, and so it was mostly dark.

I couldn’t feel my right arm or move the fingers of my right hand. I could move my left arm, which I had raised to protect my face from the explosion, but when I moved it, I felt as if I were in a shower, with hot water pouring over me.

My mind dissolved in unfocused panic. I screamed, and kept screaming for my mother, but I couldn’t hear my own screams. The blast had numbed my ears. At first, all I could hear was a constant ringing, so loud it was painful. Like in a dream, slowly I began to hear myself screaming, as if the voice were coming from someone else far away, getting closer and closer. Then it was there—my own voice screaming, “Mama! Mama!” I didn’t know if anyone could hear me. I kept wondering, “Who is pouring hot water over me?"

Finally, after
what seemed an eternity, I heard my parents calling my name. They sounded frantic. I could hear Mama screaming: “God! Please. Oh God, please.” They kept yelling my name, asking where I was. I could only vaguely hear them. I tried to yell loudly enough for them to hear me, but I was exhausted. Half of my bedroom wall was sitting on top of my chest. I gathered all the breath I could and screamed, “Come help me. I can’t move."

I don’t know how long it took for my parents to get to me. It was very dark except for the flicker of flames burning in the rubble. We called out to each other until they located me in the corner of my bedroom. When Mama found me, she kept saying, “Stay put. Don’t try to move.” She called to Papa that she had found me. I could hear him saying, “I can’t hear. I can’t hear. I can’t hear anything."

A long time went by as I lay there helpless in the darkness while Papa and Mama struggled to dig me from the rubble. Their voices were fading in and out, and sometimes I felt as if I were floating. It was as if I were there but not there at the same time. I had an unbearable taste in my mouth. I thought that it was probably from the hot, muddy water that I still felt pouring over me. It was in my eyes and in my nose. Sometimes I swallowed a big gulp of it, and it made me want to throw up. I think the nausea helped to keep me awake. My parents kept reassuring me, “You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay.” It was comforting to hear them say that, but I was still terrified.

When they finally succeeded in removing me from the rubble, my mother took my legs and my father lifted me from under my arms. They had to climb over more rubble to carry me out of the room. I screamed when I felt something poke into my back. They strained to lift me up higher. My father was seventy and my mother was sixty-five, and it was very difficult for them to move me, but they had to hurry because we had to get to a safe place before more rockets came.

They carried me to the dining room because it was the most secure room in the house, located in the center and somewhat protected by the surrounding rooms. While my father laid me on the cold floor, neighbors gathered around.

I was frightened by a sudden brightness shining in my eyes again like the bomb flash, followed immediately by my mother’s screams. I was even more frightened when I blinked and the brightness in my eyes turned from white to red. I thought the explosions were starting again, but the sudden light came from Papa’s flashlight, and Mama’s screams came from what that light revealed. My head and neck were covered in blood. My hair was matted with it. Papa’s eardrums were torn, but his vision was intact. As he raised my arm searching for my injuries, blood gushed out of a gash in my forearm. One piece of shrapnel had entered my arm, and another had cut into my wrist. Blood spurted out of my wrist about six inches into the air. It wouldn’t stop.

We had nothing resembling a first-aid kit at home. Even if we had, I don’t know how they would have found it in the confusion and destruction. It was a miracle Papa found the flashlight. He went to the storage room and brought some kerosene to pour on my wound to make it stop bleeding. It was an old wartime remedy he had learned when the Turks occupied the country. I screamed as the liquid covered my ragged flesh. It felt cold and hot at the same time, and the fumes made the room smell worse. In the midst of their panic my parents did not think to put pressure on my upper arm to slow the bleeding. Even though the kerosene trick worked, my wounds desperately required medical attention.

We heard a soldier yelling nearby, checking to see whether anyone was critically injured and needed immediate transportation to the hospital. My father told him that I had been wounded but that he didn’t think the injury was critical. The soldier then said he would get help later, when the shelling subsided. My father thanked him and waited eagerly for things to settle down so help would come and get me to the hospital. I guess he figured it would be safer, both for us and for the soldiers who would transport me, to stay put for a while instead of driving to the hospital under a rain of bombs. So my father waited patiently.