Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (23 page)

Because Middle East Television’s
World News
was based in Israel, we were free to report the facts without corrupt Arab leaders dictating what we were allowed or not allowed to say. I read the news, reporting the facts without adding the lies and the propaganda required by Arab media to vilify Israel. The terrorists resented that. For that crime I had to fear for my life and alter my lifestyle to ensure my survival.

When I became an anchor, I knew that the freedom and security I had experienced for a few months living in Israel as an unknown production assistant would change. As my situation required me to travel back and forth between Lebanon and Israel to check on my parents, I knew every time I crossed into Lebanon or even traveled in the West Bank and parts of Israel that danger was always lurking in the air, threatening my life and security. As a survivor of the Lebanese war I now had to fear for my life again for being a Lebanese journalist working and living in Israel. This was a crime of betrayal to the Arab people and the Arab cause against Israel. They looked at me as a traitor because I was seen on a TV station backed by the Israelis, located in the Israeli security zone. A Lebanese living and working in Israel must be in bed with the Israeli enemy.

I went back to becoming a target. I learned to disguise my appearance. I had a collection of wigs. I also used the fictitious on-air name of Nour Saman. I was chased once for two hours on the highway between Tel Aviv and Haifa by two Palestinians driving a car with West Bank license plates. They recognized me at a traffic light and followed me to Haifa. I shook them by changing cars with people from our office who were traveling together with me. I was also chased between Tiberias and Metulla one Friday evening at ten o’clock as I was making my way up the mountains to Lebanon to see my parents. My car nearly flipped on a curve. My pursuers stopped after they saw me pull into the military base at the border and disappear inside.

During my years of broadcasting, Hezbollah became stronger and infiltrated the Israeli security zone, where my parents lived. Hezbollah activists took a photo of me on TV doing a broadcast and published it in their magazine, along with a picture of the Israeli news anchor for the Israeli evening news, linking me to Israel as a journalist collaborator. In early 1987 I was shot at in Lebanon from a car speeding by as I walked home from a store after shopping for my parents. I fell into a nearby ditch and lay there for a few minutes playing dead before crawling back home. It was like the snipers from my childhood all over again. That was the last time I walked in my hometown.

After two years of courtship, my relationship with my journalist friend became serious, and we decided to get married. I was twenty-two. Because my father was ill and unable to travel, we planned to have the wedding in Lebanon. Those plans were canceled because of death threats and security issues. The Israel commander at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters in Marjayoun suggested that a wedding of an American journalist and the news anchor for a Christian-militia-protected, Israeli-backed, Jerusalem-based, U.S.-owned TV station might attract uninvited guests and anonymous wedding gifts. It was also 1987, and two weeks before our wedding day, the State Department issued an order for all Americans to leave Lebanon after the Muslims hanged American lieutenant colonel William Higgins after kidnapping him from his UN post. My future husband had no problem moving about in Lebanon as long as he stayed in the Israeli security zone. At the same time, he had recognized that the bad guys were playing by new rules. Being a hostage had moved beyond just being chained to a radiator. With the colonel’s hanging, they were playing for keeps, so he began, as he puts it, “traveling with protection."

We had to quickly move the wedding to Jerusalem. My father’s health prevented him from making the long trip, and my mother couldn’t leave him alone, so neither could be there. I’ll never forget the look of desolation on my mother’s face as they stood in the driveway, slowly waving to us as we left for Jerusalem. She would not be there for her daughter, whose marriage she had waited twenty-two years to see. I stood in my white wedding dress in the church without my beloved parents as a few friends and co-workers attended our small ceremony.

My mother died a few weeks later. My father followed her nine months after. Their loss has been the biggest tragedy and pain I have faced in my life to date. I adored them with all my soul, and I live to honor them and their legacy. They are the drive behind everything I do.

After we got married, my husband was transferred back to America. The change opened a new chapter in our lives. Before we left Israel, I decided to make my final statement about how I felt about the Middle East and where my loyalty lay.

My father had been living with us after my mother passed away, and he died in Israel. I buried him in a Christian cemetery on Mount Zion on the southern slope of Jerusalem. Within a few days of my final departure from the Middle East, I went back to Marjayoun and took my mother out of her grave, and out of the coffin that had held her for a year and half. She was put in a coffin custom designed to fit the trunk of our car and made by the local cabinetmaker, who made the caskets for all the funerals in our town. I put my mother in my car and cried all the way to Jerusalem to reunite her with my father. It was a very sad and surreal experience.

We arrived in Jerusalem on Good Friday, April 1989. The bells of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other Christian churches were ringing as I reunited her with my father for eternity. There was no ceremony. The only people present were me, my husband, the gravediggers, and the wonderful Christian Palestinian lady who made the interment arrangements. My parents are buried in the same Mount Zion cemetery where the grave of a
ger tzaddiK,
or righteous gentile, Oscar Shindler, would one day be. If you have ever visited Oskar Schindler’s grave, you have walked right by theirs. They are the only couple buried with the word “LEBANON” on their gravestone. All during our seven years in the bomb shelter they never let me forget that they loved me higher than the sky, deeper than the ocean, and bigger than the whole wide world.

I believe actions speak louder than words. I wanted to ensure that my children would always be drawn to Israel and not the Arabic world, and that they would always know where my loyalty lay.

Muslims in the Arab world have a saying: “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.” Every Muslim in the Middle East knows exactly what this means. This is their way of saying that first they’ll get the Jews (who observe Sabbath on Saturday), and then they’ll get the Christians (whose Sabbath is Sunday). In the modern Middle East, the Muslims reversed this—they got the Christians first. Lebanon used to be the only country in the Middle East with a Christian majority. It’s not a coincidence that Lebanon was also the only democracy in the Arab world. Now Lebanon is dominated by Muslims, and the Christians who remain are a disrespected and irrelevant minority. They are oppressed and exploited by Syria and terrorized by Hezbollah. Through Hezbollah, Iran has sunk its radical Islamic fangs into Lebanon. Even if the Assad family dictatorship falls, the Syrians and their Iranian patron-paymasters will never leave voluntarily. Syria cannot leave, because most of the Syrian economy is based on plunder from Lebanon. Iran will not leave, because Lebanon serves as the perfect training ground and launching point for Hezbollah’s international terrorist campaign.

Lebanon was the first country to fall to Islam in modern times. As commanded by the Koran, the Islamists have now put the rest of the world in their sights. The destruction of Lebanese democracy and subjugation of Lebanese Christians was not merely a strategic victory in Islam’s jihad to rule the world. Along with the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, it was an inspiration. The jihadists were encouraged by the West’s ineffectual policies and pathetic responses to provocations and confrontations manufactured by the Islamists. During the Iranian hostage crisis, while Jimmy Carter alternately groveled and bungled, Ayatollah Khomeini exultingly proclaimed, “America cannot do a damn thing!” This became a slogan and a battle cry throughout the Middle East.
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When Iran’s vicious puppet Hezbollah blew up the marines in Lebanon in 1983, America turned tail and ran, leaving the Christians to be slaughtered in town after town. It sent a strong, loud, and clear message to the Muslim radicals of the world, including Osama bin Laden: America is no longer the power it used to be.

After taking over Lebanon Arab Muslims turned their attention to countries outside of the Middle East. In their quest for world domination Muslims organized, grew stronger, and planned one attack after the other. As a result of the humiliation of America and the conquest of Lebanon, the flames of jihad now rage all over the world. Here are only a few examples.

In April 1983, shortly after the United States fled from Beirut, the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum, Sudan, began a jihad to impose Islam on black African Christians and animists in the southern part of the country. The southerners' resistance to the imposition of Islam led to civil war, which the Khartoum government turned into a war of genocide and slavery.
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Estimates of the death toll run as high as 2 million, one of the highest civilian death tolls since the Second World War. That’s more people killed than in Rwanda, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Kosovo, and Bosnia combined.
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The Khartoum government used the profits from the slave trade to subsidize its war of genocide against the people of southern Sudan.
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At the same time, Sudan became a haven for al Qaeda jihadists and a hub for international terrorist operations.
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In addition, Since early 2003, the Khartoum government has been waging war against black African Muslims in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.
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In its war against Darfur, systematic rape has joined starvation and mass murder in Sudan’s repertoire of jihad terror tactics.
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According to a United Nations estimate, more than 180,000 people died between October 2003 and March 2005; an average of 10,000 people have died per month,
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and another 2 million have been driven from their homes.
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Unlike the world’s apathetic response to more than twenty years of genocide in southern Sudan, the Darfur crisis has attracted worldwide media coverage and scrutiny by the United Nations Security Council. No doubt the sudden glare of publicity and Security Council scrutiny led to the realization in Khartoum that it could not wage two wars of genocide simultaneously, and this is why it agreed to a “peace deal” in the south, which was “finalized” in January 2005.
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Kharoum’s “restraint” in southern Sudan is nothing more than a
hudna,
a temporary cease-fire, which will last only as long as Sudan is under international pressure for its depredations in Darfur. The Arab League and Egypt have already announced their support for the Khartoum government, and have led efforts to prevent the imposition of sanctions.

In 1999, Muslim-dominated governments in twelve of Nigeria’s thirty-six states began implementing Sharia, Islamic law, even though this violated the federal constitution of Nigeria. Under Nigerian Sharia, forbidden practices include building churches (or any other non-Muslim places of worship), playing music, women wearing pants, and riding in taxis with members of the opposite sex. Islamic punishments, such as flogging, stoning, and chopping off hands, are enforced by mobs of Muslim vigilantes.
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In at least one state, all existing Christian churches were destroyed by government order.
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In other states, hundreds of churches have been burned. At least ten thousand people have been killed in violence related to the imposition of Sharia.
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Most people are familiar with the more spectacular terror attacks that have been perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. These include the October 12, 2002, nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202, mostly Australian tourists; the September 9, 2004, bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, which killed 11; and the October 1, 2005, restaurant bombings, again in Bali, which killed 22.
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In addition to attacking foreign tourists and targets inside the country, Islamists have been conducting a terror campaign against Indonesia’s Christian minority, and have been seeking to impose Sharia law. Since 1999, over 19,000 have been killed in clashes between Muslims and Christians, and over 600,000 have been made homeless.
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The Islamic terror campaign in Indonesia has included the trademark bombings, beheadings, and church burnings. On Christmas Eve, 2000, eleven churches across Indonesia were bombed simultaneously by an al Qaeda affiliate; 19 people were killed and approximately 100 were wounded.
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On December 31, 2005, a bomb exploded in a Christian market in Palu, Sulawesi, as shoppers prepared for New Year’s Eve. Eight were killed and 45 were wounded.
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Pakistan and Bangladesh have emerged as the major centers of Islamic terrorism in Asia. Jihadists trained in terrorist camps in both countries commit atrocities inside Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as in neighboring countries, particularly India and Thailand.
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On August 17, 2005, there were five hundred synchronized terror bombings across Bangladesh.
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Also in Bangladesh,

members of minority religions have suffered from ghastly violence, including collective terror. The
Nation
reports that some Buddhists and Christians were blinded, had fingers cut off or had hands amputated, while “others had iron rods nailed through their legs or abdomen.” Women and children have “been gang-raped, often in front of their fathers or husbands.” In addition, hundreds of temples were desecrated and statues destroyed; thousands of homes and businesses looted or burned. . . . As for Hindus, the human rights organization Freedom House reports they have been subject to “rape, torture and killing and the destruction of their cultural and religious identity at the hands of Muslims. “
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