Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (10 page)

As I lay on the floor with my head on my mother’s arm, I kept hearing her say that I was going to be all right. Someone had rolled fabric over my wrist to absorb as much blood as possible. I was getting very dizzy as the minutes passed. The rockets and artillery shells continued to fly back and forth between the Lebanese army outpost up the hill from our house and the Muslim position across the valley. Our neighbors had come up to what was left of our house, insisting on being with us. Everyone felt safer together, so we all huddled together on the floor behind the dining-room wall. I remember looking up at the sky and seeing balls of fire flying over us—there was no longer a roof over our heads. The sounds of explosions came so quickly that they reminded me of popping popcorn, except the pops were deafening. In the middle of it all, we lay helpless. I don’t know how we survived the night in the cold and wind in the broken shell of our home.

By seven the next morning, soldiers had begun walking down to our house from the military base up the hill. When they saw my injuries, they sent for someone to take me to the hospital. I was afraid to go to the hospital because my traumatic experiences of being in a hospital after a car accident a year earlier were still fresh in my mind. But around eight thirty in the morning we were rushed into the emergency room, which was full to overflowing. My father carried me in his arms. I was crying, both from pain and from my fear of doctors and hospitals. Mama held my hand as they laid me on a bed. The doctor took one look at my wound and his jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe that they were just now getting me to the hospital. He yelled at the nurses, who rushed to get scissors and the instruments needed to extract the shrapnel from my arm. He told my parents to hold me tight and not let me see what he was doing. I screamed as he cut my skin to the bone where the shrapnel was embedded. Without an adequate anesthetic, the pain was the worst thing I had ever felt in my life. Either the doctor thought there was no time to give me a general anesthetic, or he thought that dabbing some local painkiller on my arm would do the trick. It didn’t. He didn’t seem to hear my screaming as he worked to remove the jagged pieces of metal. Mama cried uncontrollably, as if she shared in the agony I was going through, as she held my head tightly against her neck. The only thing the doctors said to me was, “Another ten minutes and it will be over.” I think I heard this about five times every ten minutes. Finally I was so weak I couldn’t scream anymore, and I fainted.

I woke up later on a bed, with a needle in my hand and a bag of blood hanging over my head. The doctor had cleaned my arm and sewn it up. My parents were next to me. Mama brushed the hair from my forehead as Papa assured me that the worst had passed. He seemed to be talking a lot louder than usual. I was a bit relieved when he told me that the doctor had said I would be all right, but I cried and begged them to take me home immediately. I wanted to get away from that place. I was frightened whenever a nurse walked into the room to check the blood bag hanging over my head and connected to my arm because I had lost so much blood. I was afraid of anyone dressed in white.

The days in the hospital seemed endless. The doctors must have had me on some sort of painkiller, because I was always drowsy and slept a lot. Whenever I woke up, my mother was right there. She really did love me higher than the sky, and deeper than the ocean, and bigger than the whole wide world.

The destruction of our house was big news in town because we were the first victims of the war that had now come to southern Lebanon. Since my father was one of the most respected community leaders and spent much of his time at the hospital with me, my room was crowded with visitors coming to check on me and offer their condolences. From all the talk going on around me at the hospital we learned what had happened on that terrible November night.

The multiple explosions that had rained down on us were Katyusha rockets, launched from Elkhiam, the Muslim town across the valley. The Shia Muslims of Elkhiam were staunch Communists and allies of the PLO. We would come to know their Katyusha rockets well. The Palestinians and their leftist Muslim allies seemed to have an endless supply. Once primitive World War II-era rockets, these have developed over the years to become very effective in laying waste to large areas. Fired in rapid succession from multiple tubes on a single launcher, they carpet an area with high explosives in seconds, creating widespread devastation.

The first rocket the Muslims fired to check their aim that night hit its intended target, the army base up the hill behind our house. But the force of the rocket’s firing tilted the launcher down a fraction of an inch, so the rest of the rockets fell fifty yards short, landing in and around our house. It was luck for our town that the Lebanese army base above my house didn’t take the full brunt of the bombardment and was able to return fire. That was the only thing that prevented the combined forces of the PLO and the Muslims from overrunning Marjayoun that night. The Muslims' poor aim was good for Marjayoun, but bad for us. It changed the course of our family’s life and my future.

I spent the next few days in a fuzzy, semiconscious state. I wanted to get out of the hospital and away from the doctors and nurses. I would carry an intense fear of hospitals and people in white coats for many years to come. After I threatened to run away if they left me there, my parents talked with the doctor, and arrangements were made for me to sleep at home at night and come back to the hospital during the day so the staff could check my progress and change my bandages.

Leaving the hospital was a relief, but I would not have been so happy if I had known what kind of life awaited us. Half of our once beautiful home was gone, and what remained was severely damaged. The living-room and family-room walls had collapsed. Blood from my injury was splattered all over my bedroom—on the walls, on the carpet, on the twisted metal of my bed’s headboard. I had lost so much blood that it had dripped from the mattress onto the floor, covering an area half the size of the bed. The edges of my mattress were burned from the fire that accompanied the blast. The only part of the mattress that wasn’t burned was the area soaked in my blood. It was a miracle that I was still alive. As we surveyed the house, we realized that my father would have been killed if my mother hadn’t forced him to come back inside with her. Yet if they hadn’t gone outside in the first place to check out what had happened, both of them would probably have been killed in the room with the heater. The table where they had been sitting was buried under rubble. For us to have survived at all could mean only one thing: there was some higher power out there that didn’t want us to die yet. That was all my young mind could comprehend. The next seven years would be miserable, the days endless, and the fear of losing my life more real than the air I breathed.

To a ten-year-old, all this—the civil war and the attack against us— was bewildering. Just as people asked “Why do they hate us?” after 9/11, one evening I asked my father, “Why did they do this to us?” He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say. “The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us.” This hate was not because we had armies in the Middle East or because we supported Israel or for any of the reasons people easily turn to today. It was because we were Christians, infidels.

As a child, I was just too young to understand all the political implications, but I understood one thing: people wanted to kill me simply because I was a Christian. As I grew older I would discover more by watching television, and seeing the massacres, kidnappings, suicide bombings, and destruction inflicted by Muslims against non-Muslims worldwide. I would hear the hatred and bigotry espoused by mullahs in mosques televised throughout the Middle East and eventually throughout the world. Today I live on another continent eight thousand miles away from Lebanon. I sat watching television with my American children on September 11, 2001, crying as I heard the screams of family members looking for their loved ones buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center. It was my children who now looked at me and asked: “Mom! Who is Osama bin Laden and why does he call us infidels?"

Different generation, different nationality, different continent, twenty-five years apart. Same enemy: radical Islam.

By the time I returned from the hospital, every aspect of our lives had changed radically for the worse. My father had bought corrugated metal and used it to replace the walls that had fallen down in our family room. He put clear plastic sheeting on what was supposed to be a small window between the metal sheets. I lay in the family room on a torn metal couch. It was a very dark room. Winter made it gloomier, since we lived in the mountains and barely had a sunny day for three months in the wintertime. It was freezing cold despite running a kerosene stove in the middle of the room. The metal walls adopted the temperature of the cold mountains more than the meager warmth radiating from the little heater. The nights were scary, as the metal sheets would bang and rub against each other in the wind. The plastic sheeting on the window would breathe in and out depending on the flow of the wind. Perhaps the worst change was that now my religion was a matter of life and death. Most of the three thousand people who lived in Marjayoun were Christians, with a few Muslims living in their own neighborhood at the edge of town. However, in southern Lebanon, a large majority of the population is Shia Muslim, and the vast majority of the Palestinians were Muslim. Marjayoun was boxed in by Palestinian enclaves and hostile Muslim villages and towns to the east, north, and west. To the south was the Christian village of Klaia, numbering barely nine hundred inhabitants. South of Klaia was Israel.

Even before that first bombardment, relations with our Muslim neighbors were tense because of clashes between Christians and Muslims in other parts of Lebanon. Now the fear had hit home.

A lot of Muslims poured in from other Muslim countries, such as Iran, the founder and supporter of Hezbollah, one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world today. They also came from Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt. The Lebanese civil war was not between the Lebanese; it was a holy war declared on the Christians by the Muslims of the Middle East.

They started massacring the Christians in city after city. The Western media seldom reported these horrific events. Most of the press was located in West Beirut, controlled by the PLO and the Muslims. One of the most ghastly acts was the massacre in the Christian city of Damour,
¹
where thousands of Christians were slaughtered like sheep. The combined forces of the PLO and the Muslims would enter a bomb shelter and see a mother and a father hiding with a little baby. They would tie one leg of the baby to the mother and one leg to the father and pull the parents apart, splitting the child in half. A close friend of mine became mentally disturbed after they made her slaughter her own son in a chair. They tied her to a chair, tied a knife to her hand, and, holding her hand, forced her to cut her own sixteen-year-old son’s throat. After killing him they raped her two daughters in front of her. They would urinate and defecate on the altars of churches using the pages of the Bible as toilet paper before shooting and destroying the church. Americans just don’t realize the viciousness of the militant Islamic fundamentalist. They refuse to see it even when they look today at video footage of churches being burned in Iraq or different parts of the world or synagogues being destroyed in Gaza.

I think the biggest disservice to the American people was the denial by the networks to air video of the beheading of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, or the many other hostages that were beheaded in Iraq. We as a society need to see the type of enemy we are fighting. People have been so sheltered in this country that they have not paid attention to what has been going on for the last twenty-some years. And today, even after the attack of September 11, people still cannot fathom that this type of barbarity could happen here.

As was common practice when Islamic terror prevailed, Christians fled. Any Christian who could move from Marjayoun did so. Unfortunately, when the bombs destroyed our home, they also turned my father’s savings into ashes. With no money to move, we were trapped. As the Christians left, Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims flooded into Marjayoun.

At first we were protected by the Lebanese army base up the hill from what was left of our house. As long as the Lebanese military remained neutral in the civil war, we were safe. However, that did not last long. In January of 1976, the army began to disintegrate along sectarian lines. One lieutenant, Ahmad al-Khatib, broke away, announcing the establishment of the “Lebanese Arab Army” and urging all Muslim soldiers to mutiny and desert with their weapons. Lebanese army bases throughout the country were quickly taken over by sectarian militias, Muslims in most areas and Christians in some.

One morning shortly after al-Khatib’s mutiny, the senior Muslim officer at the Marjayoun base called a meeting of the Muslims stationed there. When the Christians were told they’d better not be present, they knew exactly what was happening. While the Muslims met to plan the takeover of the base, the Christian soldiers quickly gathered as many weapons and tanks, and as much ammunition and equipment, as they could and dashed out of the base, south to Klaia.

With the army fragmented and the Christians soldiers gone, we were now at the mercy of the Muslims and PLO members who controlled the military base. And their mercy was not tender. With the military shift in power, the attitude and behavior of the Muslims living in our town and the surrounding area turned against us overnight. Even though not all of them became raging fanatics, the moderate voices of the less influential were silenced because of fear and intimidation.

The radicals started looting Christian homes and intimidating the owners. They would enter Christian businesses and demand products without paying or having any intention of paying in the future. Soldiers would enter my father’s restaurant and demand that he prepare food for them even late at night when he was closing up. After a few months my father closed the restaurant because it wasn’t worth the risk or the humiliation by the Muslims. We were nothing but
kuffar,
dirty infidel Christians, to them.