Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (8 page)

However, as a little girl, I never met a Jewish person or even knew that they even lived in Lebanon. Where were the Jews who were causing all these “problems"? Lebanon’s unique experiment in democracy was not threatened by Israel or some international Jewish conspiracy, as we were told by our leaders and Arab leaders in the surrounding Arabic Islamic Middle East, but by intercommunal enmity and strife between Christians and Muslims. Prosperity enabled the various communities and factions to suppress their ancient hatreds enough to tolerate each other, but differences in cultural standards, values, and customs between the Christian and Muslim communities may have made conflict inevitable. Perhaps the most critical difference was the value placed on education. Although Lebanon had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world, Lebanese Christians had a literacy rate twice that of Muslims.
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The lack of emphasis on modern education in the Muslim community caused them to have higher levels of poverty than the Christians.

In addition, the Muslims' much higher birth rate began threatening the demographic balance reflected in the Lebanese National Pact of 1943. The Islamic birth rate was one of the major differences between Christians and Muslims. As Christians, we would marry one spouse till death did us part. We would have two, three, maybe four children. From the time children were born we started thinking about what school we would send them to and what education we would give them.

According to their religion, Muslims, on the other hand, are allowed to marry up to four wives at the same time. All a Muslim man has to do to divorce a wife when he gets tired of her is to say three times in a row, “You’re divorced, you’re divorced, you’re divorced,” and she’s divorced. Meanwhile, Muslim men have many children with each wife. It is this cultural dynamic in the Muslim faith that increases the population. Thus, power shifted in Lebanon. By 1970 the Christians became the minority and the Muslims the majority. The most famous Muslim in the world today is Osama bin Laden. He is one of fifty-three children. He himself has twenty-seven children. Father and son have sired eighty children. That’s not to mention Osama bin Laden’s fifty-two brothers and sisters.

These demographic changes created political pressure to modify the structure of the Lebanese government. When the Muslims became the majority, they started demanding more power in the executive, legislative, and administrative branches of the government. The better-educated minority Christians started demanding more guarantees to protect the Christian political presence by insisting that the presidency remain in Christian hands. These inner Lebanese problems might have been worked out, and Lebanese democracy might have survived, if it had not been for the arrival of Palestinian refugees and Palestine Liberation Organization gunmen, who were mostly Muslims.

The Christians in Lebanon had always had differences and problems with the Muslims, but we never thought our neighbors would turn on us to kill and blow up our cities, towns, and villages. The problems started in 1968, shortly after Lebanon accepted its second wave of Palestinian refugees. The first wave came in 1948 and 1949, when Israel declared its independence and was immediately invaded by the combined armies of five surrounding Arab countries, including Lebanon. Arab governmental and religious leaders had urged the Arabs living in the fledgling state to flee temporarily, assuring them that they would return shortly and share in the spoils when Israel was destroyed. However, Israel won its War of Independence, and up to 180,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were taken in by Lebanon.
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Our government and the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) set up refugee camps in and around the major cities of Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, and Beirut for the Palestinian refugees who were too poor to go anywhere else.

The second wave of refugees came as a result of the Six-Day War of 1967. As Arab nations around Israel placed their militaries in offensive readiness to invade and partook in media saber rattling, declaring their desire to wipe Israel off the map, Palestinians again fled to Lebanon and Jordan with the expectation that they would return when Israel was defeated and destroyed. These expectations were again dashed, greatly increasing the Palestinian refugee population of both countries.

Jordan had experienced great waves of Palestinian refugees in 1948-49 and 1967. The PLO set up a corrupt, terrorist ministate, and used Jordan as a base to conduct terrorist operations against Israel, drawing the inevitable Israeli counterterror response. In September of 1970, King Hussein of Jordan finally grew weary of the PLO agitating and destabilizing his country. He ordered his army to expel the PLO from Jordan, and it did so, killing thousands of PLO gunmen and thousands of Palestinian civilians in the process.

However, the survival of the Hussein regime and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan was a disaster for democratic, Christian, tolerant, and open-minded Lebanon. In the wake of “Black September,” the rout of the PLO from Jordan, Lebanon was the only one of twenty-two Arab countries that was willing to open its borders to a third wave of Palestinian refugees. These additional Muslims, combined with the higher Muslim birth rate and a high rate of emigration by Christians, caused Muslims to outnumber Christians in Lebanon. To this growing Muslim numerical superiority, the PLO gunmen from Jordan added brutality, arrogance, intolerance, and aggression. That’s what tipped the scale toward civil war in Lebanon. Not only were Muslims the majority, but they felt empowered by the presence of the PLO and Yasser Arafat, who were well financed and backed by the Soviet Union and by the other Muslim countries.

The Palestinians' mission to “liberate Palestine” was mandated by pan-Arab nationalism and later infused with Islamist fervor in order to draw Lebanese Muslims over to their side of the struggle. The only value Lebanon had to the Palestinians was as a launching pad for attacks against Israel. The first thing that stood in their way was the Lebanese government and its democracy. Knowing that Lebanese and Palestinian Muslims now constituted a majority of the population, the PLO exploited the ancient hatreds and rivalries that had always simmered below the surface of Lebanese society. This is exactly what al Qaeda and radical Islamists are exploiting in America today in the African-American community, which is the largest community converting to Islam. They are using the race issue to attract converts, increasing the Muslim population in the U.S.

When Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians declared jihad on Christians in 1975, we didn’t even know what that word meant. We had taken the Palestinians in, giving them refuge in our country, allowing them to study side by side with us in our schools and universities. We gave them jobs and shared our way of life with them. What started as political war spiraled very fast into a religious war between Muslims and Christians, with Lebanese Muslims joining the PLO fighting the Christians. We didn’t realize the depth of their hatred and resentment toward us as infidels. The more that Christians refused to get involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to allow the Palestinians to use Lebanon as a launching pad from which to attack Israel, the more the Palestinians looked at us as the enemy. Muslims started making statements such as “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday,” meaning first we fight the Jews, then we come for the Christians. Christian presence, influence, and democracy became an obstacle in the Palestinians' fight against Israel. Koranic verses such as sura 5:51—"Believers, take not Jews and Christians for your friends. They are but friends and protectors to each other"—became the driving force in recruiting Muslim youth. Many Christians barely knew the Bible, let alone the Koran and what it taught about us, the infidels.

We should have seen the long-simmering tension between Muslims and Christians beginning to erupt, but we refused to believe that such hatred and such animosity existed. America also failed to recognize this hatred throughout all the attacks launched against it, beginning with the marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 all the way up to September 11, 2001. It was that horrible day that made Americans finally ask, What is jihad? And why do they hate us? I have a very simple answer for them: because you are “infidels."

When the Black September PLO gunmen first arrived in Lebanon, their only support from among the Lebanese people came from the Communist and leftist parties, because the PLO was a client of the Soviet Union. In 1970, the Left in Lebanon included both Christians and Muslims, but it was politically insignificant. However, with Soviet financial and material support and Arab oil protection payoff money, the PLO was able to lure significant numbers of Lebanese, both Christian and Muslim, away from their traditional religious and clan loyalties. With the arms that the PLO obtained from the Soviet Union, the leftist parties organized their new recruits into formidable militias. When hostilities broke out in 1975, the Palestinians and their leftist allies imposed a reign of terror on the people of Lebanon. Rape, murder, kidnapping, mutilation, and extortion were common occurrences. Christian and Muslim sectarian militia groups formed and armed themselves for defense against Palestinian and leftist gunmen. Christians who championed the Palestinians' cause and fought for a greater Islamic presence in the government, thinking they were protecting the underdog and fighting for justice, were so blinded by their self-righteous attitude that they failed to realize they would become as much a target as we were. As soon as the Muslims and Palestinians got the upper hand in the war, they turned against the leftist Christians and fought them just as they fought the rest of us.

Between 1970 and 1975, the PLO launched numerous bloody terrorist attacks and innumerable artillery barrages from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. A favorite Palestinian tactic was to set up a couple of cannons or rocket launchers in a Christian village, fire a few rounds into Israel, and then quickly withdraw, knowing that Israel’s return fire would fall on innocent Christian civilians. This created a double benefit in the eyes of the Palestinians: Lebanese Christians would die, and the Israelis would be vilified and hated even more. This has become a public relations ploy that has been authored and perfected by the Palestinians ever since. They use this ploy effectively to make precise targeted killing of terrorists in the Palestinian territories by the Israeli air force difficult. Precision rocket attacks on known Hamas leaders, bomb makers, and masterminds often kill other people too. The Hamas members' movements and their hiding among the population lead to collateral civilian deaths and the accusatory and inflaming headlines that invariably follow.

Today, Islamic terrorists throughout the world who fight against the West copy this tactic of hiding within civilian communities for protection. They change their location every few days and sometimes every day to escape pursuit. They know that Western liberals, trying to shape Western public opinion, will pounce and scream to high heaven on word of civilian deaths. They rely on Western media to blame the policy makers who approved such an attack, and the military’s antiterrorism efforts, for the death of innocent women and children, when in reality it was the cowardly jihadists who placed themselves among civilians who brought death to those innocent victims. In reality, these terrorists are consciously making media martyrs out of the unsuspecting people they associate and hide among.

By the early 1970s Lebanon was divided into two camps. The conservative camp on the Right came to be known as the Lebanese Front. It wanted to maintain the existing structure of the Lebanese governmental system. At most it would allow the introduction of moderate reforms to that structure to recognize the new demographic realities, while at the same time protecting the rights of the various religious communities. Factions in this group wanted Lebanon to steer an independent course internationally rather than align itself with the rest of the Arab world. Some in the Lebanese Front had sympathy for the Palestinians, but felt that the burden of supporting the Palestinian cause should be borne by the Arab world as a whole, not by Lebanon alone. The Lebanese Front strenuously opposed allowing the PLO to have sovereign status within Lebanon, and allowing the PLO absolute freedom to attack Israel from southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Front was mostly Christian, but had Muslim adherents.

The leftist camp, which came to be known as the National Front or the “revisionist coalition,” was mostly Muslim (including the Palestinians), but it also had Lebanese Christian elements and supporters. The National Front wanted to radically alter the structure of the Lebanese government and society, without regard to the impact on the rights of Lebanon’s various communities. Internationally, the National Front sought to strongly align Lebanon with the rest of the Arab world. Not surprisingly, the Palestinian factions in the National Front supported the “right” of the PLO to have quasi-sovereign status in Lebanon and to attack Israel from anywhere in the world, especially southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Muslim factions in the National Front felt that it was their duty as Muslims to support the Palestinian cause and to allow the free use of Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks on Israel.

The incident that started all-out civil war occurred on April 13, 1975, when Palestinian gunmen opened fire on worshippers outside a Maronite church in Beirut, killing four and wounding many. In response, Christian militiamen launched an attack on Palestinians. The violence spiraled out of control, first in Beirut, then in other parts of the country. Although the issues that sparked the civil war were not as simple as Muslim versus Christian, the conflict soon developed a brutal and vicious sectarian dimension. Lebanon’s descent into hell had begun.

America has always prided itself on its multiculturalism and its multireligious communities, just as Lebanon prided itself on its multicultural, open-minded, and multireligious society. Today America’s lack of sufficient immigration and border control, like Lebanon’s, is allowing terrorists and other hostile individuals to come into our country at will. People who want to hurt us are mixed in with other Muslims who have no intention of becoming a part of our nation but are actually working to make America a part of their radical Islamic agenda.