ESCAPE FROM ISLAM
Ex-Muslim calls on her
people to reject hatred
By Lisa Friedman
Washington Bureau - Los Angeles Daily News
Sunday, June 05, 2005 - WASHINGTON -- Nonie Darwish was 8 years old and living in Gaza when her father, an Egyptian military officer who led Arab attacks inside Israel, was killed by assassins.
"Which one of you will avenge your father's death and kill Jews?" Darwish recalls friends, family and neighbors asking her and her siblings.
Her life could not have taken a more different path. Today Darwish, 56, makes her home in the San Fernando Valley and runs an "Arabs for Israel" Web site.
A Muslim who converted to Christianity, Darwish also is making a national name for herself as an outspoken critic of radical Islam, as well as of moderate Muslims whom she believes don't do enough to fight what she calls the "culture of hatred" in Arab countries.
"I might sound a little harsh talking and judging my culture of origin, but it is time for Arabs and Muslims to start doing some soul-searching," she said recently in Washington, D.C., where she was speaking to the Israel Project, a pro-Israel public relations group.
"The silent Muslim majority has to rise and end this insanity -- teach children peace instead of war, teach them respect for other religions," she said. "We need to promote that in the Arab world."
Darwish's newfound role as an editorialist and public speaker has come at a price.
She writes under a pseudonym: "Nonie" is a family nickname, and "Darwish" is her grandfather's last name. She asked that the community where she lives not be printed because she receives periodic death threats.
Jennifer Laslo Mizrahi, president of The Israel Project, called Darwish "courageous" and asked her to kick off the group's newest initiative, Teach Kids Peace.
"If you do searches of courageous Muslim leaders willing to speak out, there aren't very many of them," Mizrahi said.
But Ibrahim Hooper, director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group in Washington, said he thinks Darwish is "a notorious Muslim-basher."
Referring to the story Darwish tells of growing up indoctrinated against Jews and other non-Muslims, Hooper said, "If that was her experience, it's not the experience of the majority of Muslims worldwide."
Born in Egypt and raised during the 1950s in Gaza -- then under Egyptian control -- Darwish spent her school days memorizing and reciting daily poetry about the pride of martyrdom. The lyrics of her playground songs referred to Jews as "dogs."
Her father was a high-ranking officer in the Egyptian military, and his job, Darwish said, was to lead undercover attacks inside Israel "and cause as much damage and destruction and death inside Israel as possible."
Even so, Darwish said, both anti-Semitism and strict Islamic followings were absent from her home life. Her father, she said, treated his job as an unwanted duty.
When her father was assassinated in 1956, Darwish said, he was hailed as a national hero and a square in Gaza was renamed in his honor. But her mother, Darwish said, saw no glory in the husband dying a "martyr" and struggled as a single parent.
A government pension afforded Darwish the ability to attend Catholic school, an education that led her on a path to the American University in Cairo and later to a position as an editor for the Middle East News Agency. Along the way, Darwish met and married a Christian, converted to Christianity herself and moved to Southern California in 1978.
The 9-11 terrorist attacks triggered something inside her, she said. Listening to Islamic leaders claim the terrorists were not truly Muslim, Darwish found herself furious that no one was taking responsibility for the glorification of cultural violence on Arab television and in schoolbooks.
Darwish began writing opinion pieces for newspapers, as well as for the conservative online journal FrontPage Magazine, criticizing what she saw as a dearth of Muslim outrage at Islamic fundamentalists.
"They just want to divorce themselves from being responsible for producing people like that," she said.
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, who is pushing to divert at least $150 million of U.S. foreign aid to the Palestinian territories into creating new textbooks and school curricula that don't glorify suicide bombing, called Darwish's perspective valuable.
"We can't lie to ourselves and believe what she describes isn't happening," he said. "A whole hate industry is operating in the Middle East."
Kamal Nawash, a Palestinian native who was raised in the U.S. and who now runs a group in Washington called Free Muslims Against Terrorism, praised Darwish's work, but said her decision to leave Islam dilutes her message.
"She left the religion and now she's trying to reform it," Nawash said. "We support her as much as possible, but the only people she can really speak to are the choir."
Still, he said, Darwish's voice is an important one no matter who listens to it.
"The Muslim community needs the controversy," he said. "For too long there has been a monopoly on who spoke for us."
For her part, Darwish said, she has made peace with her role. And she believes her father's spirit is guiding her.
"Really inside me, I think he's directing me in what I'm doing," she said. "I think my dad would be proud."
Christian enclave ties
future to life outside Iraq
Mon Aug 15, 2005
Reuters
By Luke Baker
ANKAWA, Iraq (Reuters) - It looks much like any other Iraqi town, until you notice the number of shops selling alcohol, the young women walking the streets at night in jeans and tight T-shirts, and the church spires.
Ankawa, a town of about 15,000 people just outside the capital of the northern Kurdish region, is almost entirely populated by Christians and has become a bastion of that declining -- some say dying -- community in mainly Muslim Iraq.
Legend says Ankawa was founded in the 2nd century by Saint Thomas the Apostle. It is one of the oldest Christian settlements in Iraq, a land that has deep roots for several Christian denominations, including Chaldeans and Assyrians.
In the early 1990s, Iraq's Christian community was estimated at more than 1 million with large populations in Baghdad, Basra and the northern city of Mosul.
But since 1991, and particularly over the past 2 1/2 years, the community has fallen into disarray. Christians are fearful religious violence after churches were bombed and Muslim militants targeted Christian-owned alcohol shops.
Many Christians have sought refuge abroad.
Father Youssef Sabri, a priest at St Joseph's Chaldean church, maintains broad connections across the Christian community in Iraq and says the numbers may now have dwindled to 600,000 or less out of a total population of around 27 million.
Far away from most of the bombs that plague the country, Ankawa has emerged as a refuge for Christians seeking to escape violence. It has also become a jumping off point for those looking to flee Iraq.
SWEDISH HONEYMOON
Around 250 families have come to Ankawa from Baghdad, Mosul, Samarra and other towns in the past year, according to Sabri, while hundreds more have left, moving to Sweden, Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States.
"People here say, 'Rather Ankawa than Baghdad'," said Father Tariq Choucha, another Chaldean priest in the town. "But what they really want is a visa to go abroad and stay there."
In Ankawa, Iraqis who have fled the violence of Baghdad can relax and plan the next stage of their journey, knowing that at least they will not have to take the dangerous road to Baghdad's airport.
As well as alcohol stores, Ankawa has several restaurants, an ice-cream parlor, an Internet cafe and antiques shops. There are two churches and three chapels.
Foreign security companies in the area have set up bases in the town, finding the lifestyle more relaxed than conservative Arbil, the region's capital. Young men and women can walk the streets together, and their dress is as relaxed as in Europe.
Because of the possibility of attack, and the presence of foreigners, security is tight but there have been no problems.
"It is a good community. We even get Arabs coming to visit," said Paulus Danha, 52, who owns an alcohol shop. Business is strong thanks to demand from the security companies and international non-governmental organizations, he said.
The town has also become richer thanks to remittances from abroad. There are 3,000 people from Ankawa living in Sweden, more than 2,000 in Australia and a similar number in Canada, according to Sabri.
Most of those who have left are young men, leaving behind a disproportionate number of young women. But rather than weakening the community, Sabri says it has worked out well.
"Now we see the young men coming back to find wives," he said, introducing a 26-year-old Iraqi now living in Stockholm and his bride-to-be, a trainee doctor from Ankawa.
While anxious about Iraq's wider Christian community, Sabri, who lived in the United States for 13 years and returned to Iraq after the war in 2003, sees some reason to hope.
"It's good for the young people for now if they are abroad and secure, but eventually I think they will come back," he said. "The community is strong and Ankawa is where their hearts are."
Because she has dared to speak publicly against the Islamist violence that has alarmed millions, but against which millions of others have kept silent, Wafa Sultan has suffered threats against her life.
But threats like darkly worded e-mails and phone messages might not shake Sultan. She has seen the blood, up close.
While still studying medicine in her native Syria in 1979, she and fellow students watched in horror as gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist group that at the time sought to undermine the secularist President Hafez al-Assad, burst into their classroom and brutally killed their professor.
"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!’ ” she told the New York Times.
The effect led her and her husband and family to leave the Middle East for America and, eventually, to lead a comfortable middle-class life as a doctor now living outside Los Angeles. But although she had repudiated her Muslim upbringing and would declare herself a "secular human being," the terror of that day at the University of Aleppo had left her with a burden to express her anger.
The Internet gave Sultan her first outlet - a Web site called Annaqed, or The Critic, run by a Syrian who now lives in Arizona. It also features posts by experts on the Middle East, such as Daniel Pipes.
That led to an invitation by the Arab news network al-Jazeera, which asked Sultan to appear Feb. 21 opposite Ibrahim al-Khouli, an Egyptian professor of religious studies, for a debate on "the clash of civilizations."
But Sultan insisted the confrontation had nothing to do with contemporary civilizations.
"It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras," she told al-Jazeera. "It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."
By available accounts, al-Khouli seemed more or less outgunned. "If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the prophet and the Quran," he countered clumsily.
"These are personal matters that do not concern you," Sultan shot back. "Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern."
That was enough to boil the blood of many Islamic hardliners, but she was hardly finished.
"We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church," she said. "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. . . . The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.
"The Jews have come from the (Holocaust) and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror," she told al-Jazeera.
It was not the first time Sultan had appeared on al-Jazeera to denounce violence in the name of Islam. She had been a guest in July for a debate against Algerian religious politics professor Ahmad Bin Muhammad about suicide bombers.
To her pointed questions about the cynicism of sending young men to kill themselves that others might die, Bin Muhammad responded feebly with hyperbolic questions about the misdeeds of other nations. He clearly was unwilling to approach the matters of his own religion's responsibilities; he never addressed them.
But it was the February appearance and her remarks about the example provided by the Jews that escalated Sultan's name on Islamic militants' hate lists.
Among non-Muslims, the response to Sultan's statements has been as mixed as it has been muted. A humanities professor from the University of California-Irvine fretted in a letter to the Times that hers is a "secularist viewpoint rather than one of an engaged, thoughtful and practicing Muslim. This makes her views suspect or worse in the Muslim world."
That is bona-fide hair-splitting. Because she is Arab, was brought up Muslim and said the Jews came off better than Muslims, and did so before one of the largest Arab audiences to be found in the world, her current religious standing instantly became irrelevant, especially where practicing Muslims are concerned.
Those who think otherwise should spend time clearing the death threats from Sultan's e-mail and voice mail boxes.
But the news may not all be dark. The transcript or video of her appearance on al-Jazeera has been viewed more than 1 million times on the Web site of the Middle East Media Research Institute, and a recent profile about her has been one of the New York Times' most e-mailed stories.
Of course, many of these accesses may have kept the pot of resentment and hatred at a boil among hard-liners. But many Muslims who take the difficult path of seeking reform in their religion also might be adding her clear-eyed and unapologetic criticism to their arguments in favor of change.
In either case, Sultan continues undeterred. She told the Times she is working on a book, which she has tentatively titled "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."
"It's going to turn the Islamic world upside-down," she predicts.
Stay tuned.
Ex-Muslim terrorist turns
away from hate
Thursday, April 6, 2006
BY CHARITA M. GOSHAY REPOSITORY STAFF WRITER
NORTH CANTON - Only in America could a former Muslim terrorist speak at a Catholic university for a program sponsored by Jewish organizations.
On Wednesday, Ibrahim Abdullah visited Walsh University, where he shared his journey from harboring a visceral hatred of Jews to his conversion to Christianity.
Abdullah was born in Dearborn, Mich., home of the nation’s largest Muslim population.
“I grew up as a cultural Muslim, but an avid Palestinian,” he told the audience of more than 200. “I was born and raised to hate the Jews ... . Unfortunately, many Muslims around the world, regardless of where they live, hate the Jews.”
At his parents’ urging, Abdullah said he immigrated to Israel at age 18, where he joined Fatah, the main, radical arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Palestinians, he noted, specifically hate America for its support of Israel and because America is seen as a stumbling block to the spread of Islam.
Abdullah said he was prized by Fatah for his American passport and his fluent English.
“I was recruited the second day I was there,” he said. “I was excited. I hated the Jews. I was taught to believe they were responsible for every evil in the world. I had the same mind-set as a suicide bomber.”
Abdullah was arrested by the Israeli Army, but released two weeks later on the condition that he never return.
Upon coming home, Abdullah embarked upon an intense study of Islam.
“I was captivated by it,” he said, adding that he also began a four-year study of the Bible.
“I was determined to find proof the Bible was wrong.”
Instead, he said he found God. Abdullah said that in contrast to the Koran, the Bible has scientific and archeological proof and eyewitness accounts.
“The more I was amazed, the more depressed I became,” he said. “It took a year to go from my head to my heart. There was an ‘ice block’ there because I hated the Jews.”
Knowing the dangers of converting to another faith, Abdullah said he initially hid his conversion from his wife, but she later converted to Christianity after her own study.
“I came to love the Jews,” Abdullah said. “I love them as much as I love my own people. I came to the conclusion that we’re all the same in God’s eyes.”
Asked whether the Palestinians’ anger is justified, Abdullah replied that the Palestinians have been repeatedly used as “frontline fodder” for the Arabs’ desire to destroy Israel.
“Arabs have been the Palestinians’ worst enemy,” he said.
Abdullah’s appearance was sponsored by the Arlene Knell Education Fund of the Canton Jewish Community Federation and the university’s Ed & Ruth Wilkof Jewish Studies Project.
Former Muslim: Islam causes Middle East violence
By DOMINIC ADAMS
LimaOhio.com
07/20/2006
LIMA — Daniel Shayesteh knows firsthand of the fighting in the Middle East.
And he said he knows why Hezbollah militia is fighting Israel from Lebanon.
“Islam is not a peaceful religion,” Shayesteh said. “We see that Islam is
fighting all nations. They blame America. No, look at the Quran. Quran is saying
this.”
Shayesteh, 50, was born in Iran and was a self-proclaimed militant Muslim. He
helped Ayatollah Khomeini rise to power and force the Shah of Iran into exile in
1979.
Israel and Lebanon have been fighting since July 12. Two Israeli soldiers
were captured by Hezbollah guerillas and prompted an aggressive offensive
response from the Jewish state.
“The current situation really is not the fighting of two groups of people.
It’s the holy war of Islam against the Jews, and it stems from the pages of the
Quran,” Shayesteh said. “The Quran is clearly written that Jews should be
demolished, and tradition says there should not be a single Jew in Israel.”
Shayesteh has been in Ohio since Monday speaking about his
interdenominational organization, “Exodus from Darkness.”
A converted Christian, he will speak at 9 a.m. Sunday at Shawnee Alliance
Church, 4455 Shawnee Road. He also spoke in Wapakoneta and in Lima on Wednesday.
“Unless we read the chapters of each others’ lives, a good relationship will
not be possible in our society,” said Shayesteh, who became an Australian
citizen in 1991. “Let us search for the truths together. Come out from your
personal zone and research other religions. You pick the best one, and I
guarantee you’ll come to Christ.”
Ralph and Beth Miller invited Shayesteh to stay in their Lima home for two
days.
The three of them discussed Shayesteh’s life in Iran late Tuesday night.
“He’s got a passion and his first love is the Lord, and he wants that for
everyone,” Beth Miller said. “I don’t think we can understand what he’s been
through.”
If Shayesteh returns to Iran, he will be executed. His mother and brothers
are still in Iran.
“It makes us realize our freedoms,” Ralph Miller said.
A violent ideology
The
people in Iran cannot stand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Shayesteh said. He
said more than 95 percent of Iranians hate their government.
Iran fuels the fighting in Lebanon, and Shayesteh said Iran funds Hezbollah.
“This Iranian president is a suicide bomber,” Shayesteh said. “He is just
ready to die for Islam and demolish Israel.”
Muslim ideology is cloaked in violence because of the status of its creator,
Muhammad, Shayesteh said. He said because the prophet fought in ancient wars,
the Muslim holy book seeps with violence.
Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001,
the U.S. government vowed to eliminate terrorism and any factions that harbored
the individuals responsible.
President George W. Bush focused his sites on capturing Osama bin Laden.
Laden is not the problem, Shayesteh said.
“Osama bin Laden is the servant of Islam. Islam is the enemy of this
country,” he said. “Osama bin Laden can be changed, but Islam cannot. Osama bin
Laden is just a tool in the hand of Islam.”
Shayesteh was heavily involved in the Iranian Fundamentalist Revolution and
taught Islamic and religious philosophy in Iran.
After Khomeini was in power, Shayesteh helped spread propaganda and gain
support from other militant Muslims near his hometown of Talesh in northern
Iran.
His candidacy for the Islamic parliament forced Shayesteh to be on the run
for the rest of his life.
Ruling with fear
When Shayesteh attended university in Iran, he deepened his militant Muslim
ideologies. Iran was in political turmoil when Shayesteh aligned himself with
Khomeini.
“Anyone who followed Ayatollah Khomeini must be a radical Muslim,” Shayesteh
said. “We were eager to overthrow the kingdom in Iran, and to do that you have
to be a militant and radical Muslim.”
Khomeini put Shayesteh in charge of a revolutionary army that had a primary
goal of killing all Jews in Israel and recapturing the Holy Land for Arabs.
Shayesteh then began spreading propaganda and training young Muslims.
“That was our main goal to mobilize all the boys and girls of the country and
to teach them the terrorist actions,” Shayesteh said. “You have to terrorize
Christians and Jews by frightening them. By killing them, you can take Islam to
the countries and to the rest of the world.
“Islam is a harsh religion. There is no peace in Islam.”
However, when questions crept into his mind, Shayesteh wanted to discuss them
in parliament.
He was silenced, sentenced to death and thrown in jail for six months.
A friend released him and he fled to Turkey in exile.
“Islam does not believe in freedom and democracy. You have to blindly follow
the leader,” Shayesteh said. “If you criticize Islam and Muhammad, your fingers
should be chopped first and then your head.”
Reluctant convert
Once in Turkey, Shayesteh began visiting a Christian church that was
harboring Iranian refugees.
He only went there because there were people there in his situation. He was
not interested in Christianity.
“We as Muslims were always taught, ‘Do not touch Christians. They were
impure,’” Shayesteh said.
He returned to the church week after week and grew interested in its message.
Christians preaching respect of their enemies amazed Shayesteh.
One night he had a dream and Jesus spoke to him, he said.
He was in his father’s house. There were people dying around him, and he was
scared to leave the house.
The next week’s sermon spoke of what Shayesteh dreamed.
“He said, ‘Come out of your father’s house, which is the house of killing, of
revenge and of pain and live in the house that Jesus has built for you,’” he
said. “It is a house of absolute joy, of freedom and peace.”
Shayesteh has been spreading the word ever since.
The Journey From Hate to Love:
A Former Terrorist Speaks Out
By Yitta Halberstam
Jewish Action
March 20, 2007
People would rather
believe that Walid Shoebat is an undercover operative working for (choose one):
A. the Arabs, B. the Israelis, C. the Americans, than what he is in reality—a
former PLO terrorist who repented, converted to Christianity and now travels
throughout the United States, Canada and England, advocating for Israel and the
Jewish people, on his own initiative and at his own expense.
Tragically, we can more readily believe in people’s capacity for evil than in
their capacity for goodness and change. A Charles Manson we can accept as
flesh-and-blood reality, but a Walid Shoebat makes us wonder if he’s genuine.
I first learned about Shoebat from—where else?—the Internet. An online magazine
published a report on Shoebat’s successful forays onto troubled college campuses
where turbulent clashes among Arab and Jewish students had taken place. In
September 2002, Binyamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, had been
forcibly blocked from delivering a scheduled speech at Concordia University in
Montreal by Muslim students, but Shoebat’s pro-Israel speech on the same campus
in March 2004 went off without a hitch. Perhaps the Arab students were seized by
the same insatiable curiosity as everyone else, with the oddity of a reformed
PLO terrorist piquing more interest and astonishment than ire. Certainly, those
were my reactions.
I tracked down Shoebat and learned that by chance he would be in the New York
area, where I live, within the week. We made arrangements for me to sit in on
two different speeches he would be delivering to Jewish audiences—at the Hebrew
Academy of Nassau County high school on Long Island and at Lincoln Square
Synagogue in Manhattan.
Shoebat is short and wiry, dark haired and olive skinned, intense, edgy, with
flashing brown eyes that alternately narrow in scrutiny, grow soft in sorrow, or
blaze in anger. It’s hard not to feel the tug of his personality pull you into
his orbit.
He opens his talk at HANC with a dramatic flourish. “I come here today to
confess to you —like an alcoholic confesses in AA. AA states that confession is
the beginning of healing. I come here today to confess to you that I once was a
PLO terrorist. One day, I hope that I, too, will be completely healed.”
Shoebat was born in Beit Sahour (a village just outside Bethlehem), the grandson
of its Muslim mukhtar (chieftain). Shoebat’s wealthy grandfather was an intimate
of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who was notorious for
forging alliances with Adolf Hitler. His family members—at least from his
father’s side—had been prominent landowners in the area for generations, and
were securely ensconced in the life of their community. But the DNA that Shoebat
inherited from his mother was altogether different, and perhaps ultimately
accounts for the dramatic U-turn his life has taken in the last ten years.
“My mother’s saga eerily resembles the storyline of the Sally Field movie Not
Without My Daughter,” Shoebat tells both audiences. “She was an American and a
Christian, the daughter of the mayor of Eureka, California. She met my handsome,
irresistible father in the mid-1950s at Humboldt State University where both
were students. She fell prey to his charm and became pregnant with my sister.
Abortion wasn’t legal then, but it also wasn’t an option she would have
considered anyway. She was utterly infatuated with my father, and so she married
him. Her first mistake,” Shoebat adds wryly.
“My mother didn’t know anything about my father’s religion, but willingly agreed
to convert to Islam. She gave birth to my sister and brother here in the United
States, and was pregnant with me in 1960 when my Palestinian grandmother fell
ill. She accompanied my father on what she believed would be a short trip to
Bethlehem to visit his ailing mother. That was her second mistake. She remained
trapped there for forty years. You know the song ‘Hotel California’? The lyrics
say ‘You can check out … but you can never leave’? That’s the way it was with my
mother. My father took away her American passport, and his family conspired with
him to keep her a virtual prisoner inside their ancestral home. My mother made
repeated attempts to escape, but each time they were foiled.”
Shoebat’s mother was
consigned to the kitchen, together with the other women of the household (the
entire extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins lived under one roof), and
Shoebat’s father took charge of his sons’ education. Shoebat was enrolled in a
Jordanian-run kindergarten, where, at the tender age of five, he learned his
first nursery song: “Arabs are Beloved, Jews are Dogs.”
Shoebat begins crooning in a soft, sweet voice the Arabic nursery songs he was
taught at school. These are gentle melodies—the lulling notes of the universal
nursery song. But when Shoebat translates the lyrics into English, chills run
down my spine.
“Sharpen my bones and make them swords.
I come in the name of death. Kill all the Jews;
Your blood is kosher to us.”
“My people don’t know that your nursery songs are only about peace and love,”
Shoebat tells the audience. “Our songs and our days, are filled with hatred. You
Jews have been painted as monsters; your rabbis portrayed as people who dip
matzah into our blood.”
Shoebat’s mother tried on occasion to enlighten her son about “the outside
world,” but she was rarely given an opportunity to spend time alone with him.
Her rights, both as a female in an intensely patriarchal society, and as a
mother, were severely restricted. In a traumatic episode that Shoebat still
recalls with a shudder, his mother finally gave vent to her frustration at being
ignored.
Shoebat’s mother rarely saw or interacted with her husband; by day he worked as
a principal of a Muslim school, and in the evenings he incessantly played
backgammon with the other men of the household, oblivious to her needs and lack
of company. One evening, she angrily approached the group of men huddled over
the table intent on their game, grabbed the backgammon set and hurled it to the
floor, where it broke into a hundred little pieces. Shoebat’s father beat her
with a hammer until blood gushed from her head. Shoebat, then eight, grabbed his
mother’s arm and ran outside with her, looking for help, but local residents
refused to get involved in a marital dispute. Finally, the two fled to a church,
where the nuns stitched her up and sent her back home.
When Shoebat was ten, his mother made her first serious attempt to escape. Over
the years, she had concealed a growing cache of money in the hollowed portion of
a towel rack. Flight was perpetually on her mind, but opportunities were
limited: She was constantly being watched by the other females of the household
and, as the only American woman in her village, was regarded with suspicion and
hostility by the neighbors. There was no one to whom she could turn for help.
But one fateful day when circumstances augured well for a safe passage to West
Jerusalem, she fled with her children to the King David Hotel, where she stayed
overnight. In the morning, she headed to the American consulate, where she knew
she could find sanctuary. Her heart expanded with thanksgiving and joy as the
building came into view, haven only a few feet away. Giddy with relief, she
advanced quickly, and then she saw them. Lined up in front of the consulate gate
was a platoon of her husband’s family members, waiting grimly. Before she could
dart into the refuge the consulate would have provided, the men snatched her and
dragged her away. There would be many subsequent attempts to escape after this
one, but it would be another thirty years before Shoebat’s mother would finally
be free.
“And so I rarely had access to my mother,” Shoebat says. “My education was
mapped out for me by my father, and the hatred of the society in which I lived
was my reality. Because of that education—the same education that all
Palestinian children are given today—I was brainwashed with tremendous hatred
for the Jew. Not the Israeli, the Jew. As a result, I refused to believe that
the Holocaust had really taken place; I was sure it was a fabrication. I used to
watch the Holocaust shows on Israeli television and roar with laugher. I
wondered where they found those skinny actors to portray the victims.”
By the time he was fourteen, Shoebat was already the successful product of this
indoctrination, well on his way to becoming a martyr for the cause. He threw
Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, hurled stones at Jewish worshipers at the
Wailing Wall, joined in anti-Israel riots and demonstrations and participated in
the near-lynching of an Israeli soldier in Bethlehem. The gratuitous violence
was propelled by the teachings of Islamic eschatology, Shoebat explains—the
concept that the “end times” could not be ushered in until all the Jews were
killed. “Among the phrases drummed into our heads was the prophecy: ‘The day of
judgment shall not come to pass until the tribes of Islam defeat the tribes of
Israel. And it was asked of the prophet where will this be, and he said
Jerusalem and its neighbors.’”
At fifteen, Shoebat was already serving time in a Jerusalem prison. Ironically,
it was there that he was inducted into the PLO, and immediately upon his
release, he began working with Fatah bomb makers. He was given his first mission
when he turned sixteen: Destroy the Israeli Bank Leumi in Bethlehem. He was
instructed to take a loaf of bread filled with explosives, smuggle it past the
Israeli checkpoint and place it in a garbage can outside the bank. “But when I
got to the bank, I saw Arab children playing nearby, and I was afraid to hurt
them. So instead I hurled the bomb onto the roof of the bank, where it exploded
with a deafening noise. When I saw black smoke pouring out of the bank, I fled.”
Later Shoebat would learn that no one had been seriously hurt in the incident,
and much, much later he would rejoice in the fact that there was no real blood
on his hands—neither Arab nor Jewish. But still the episode left him shaken and
depressed. “It was my first major terrorist attempt, and also the first time I
encountered the possible consequences of my deeds,” he recalls. “Up until then,
I didn’t really think about what it means to kill. I didn’t enjoy what I did,
but I felt compelled to do it because it was my duty. How else was I going to go
to heaven and bring salvation to my family?”
Shoebat’s initial twinges of disillusionment with the PLO came after a second
unsettling episode. In this instance, he was told to place a bomb in a certain
spot at precisely noon. The time was emphasized repeatedly by his superiors.
Shoebat wondered why the exact time was so important, and, following a hunch, he
flouted orders and placed the bomb at the assigned target a few minutes earlier.
Then he hid nearby to watch. The bomb exploded—at precisely noon. He had not
volunteered, nor had he been told, but had he followed the instructions he had
been given, he would have become a suicide bomber.
Alarmed at the violent path his son was treading, Shoebat’s father, who deeply
valued education, shipped him off to America, where at the age of eighteen he
was enrolled at Loop College in Chicago. There, he continued his activism,
albeit in a somewhat different form. He recruited for the PLO on campus, raised
funds, organized rallies and served as the college representative of thousands
of Palestinian students in the Chicago area.
In an eerie echo of his father’s youthful experiences, Shoebat proved
irresistible to his female classmates, and began a relationship with an American
student. Shoebat assumed that she, like his own mother, was a Christian with no
real ties to her faith. The woman was so smitten with Shoebat that she
constantly prevaricated about her background. Her religion was meaningless to
her, but she knew it would be of tremendous significance to him. She didn’t want
to lose him—so how could she tell Shoebat that she was Jewish?
Six months after the couple married, Shoebat’s new wife took him to visit her
aunt, who lived in Chicago. Shoebat was stunned to see a mezuzah affixed to the
doorpost. His wife’s elusive family history—her secretive manner, her constant
equivocations, her clearly contrived vagueness—suddenly made sense. “You’re
Jewish, aren’t you?” he spat out at her. Hoping that their six months together
had cemented their relationship, she admitted the truth. To Shoebat, however,
her “sin” was unforgivable. At home, he beat her, and the next day, he filed for
divorce.
Despite his residency in the United States for the next fifteen years, his
exposure to American values and a pluralistic society, and despite his own
unwitting marriage to a Jewish woman, Shoebat’s hatred for the Jewish people
continued to run deep. Aside from his first wife, Shoebat actually had no
experience with either Jews or Israelis; he had never interacted or even talked
briefly with them. But hatred isn’t rational. Still, the keen intelligence that
had saved him from becoming a suicide bomber also led to a natural curiosity
that was hard to contain. When in 1991, Shoebat found himself seated next to a
religious-looking Jewish woman on an Air France flight from Paris to Israel, he
decided to seize the opportunity and engage in discourse with the “enemy.”
“Hi, my name is Bill, and I’m from Dallas,” he dissembled, mimicking a Texas
drawl. “This is my first trip to Israel. Where are you from?”
“Oh, I’m an Israeli,” the woman answered politely.
“Really?” he leaned forward eagerly. “What’s it like living in Israel? I hear
you guys like to oppress Arabs; is that true?
“Oh, no!” the woman protested. “That is not true at all.” And then she began to
cry.
“Why are you crying?” Shoebat asked.
“My daughter is in the army,” she said.
“So how would you feel if your daughter killed Arabs?” he asked.
“I would hate it if my daughter had to kill anybody,” she answered. And then she
cried some more. “But I’m so worried that they will kill her.”
What kind of Jew are you? Shoebat remembers thinking during the dialogue. You’re
not the Jew I learned about.
Shoebat never told the woman that he was in fact a Palestinian and that this was
his first conversation with an Israeli. He doesn’t remember her name, and he is
sure that she in turn attributed little significance to their talk. But for
Shoebat, communicating with and connecting to an Israeli humanized the enemy.
“This discussion affected me tremendously, and softened my heart,” Shoebat
recalls. “It conflicted with the notion of the Jew as monster that I had been
taught all along.” A seemingly inconsequential conversation that reverberated
with profound aftereffects helped shape the beginning of Walid Shoebat’s
transformation.
The first stirrings began almost as soon as he deplaned and was met at the
airport by his uncle. During the car ride home, Shoebat suddenly became aware of
the fact that anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic graffiti was splashed on every
single building, sign and wall that they passed.
When my family learned of my conversion I was denounced as a traitor and
immediately disowned.“Uncle!” Shoebat exclaimed in dawning recognition. “Do you
realize that there is not one square mile here that isn’t plastered with hatred?
Why is there so much graffiti everywhere?”
And then, abruptly, he stopped himself. “Why am I asking you this? I’m the one
who used to write it!”
Later that week, the crack in his armor of hatred would widen, as he witnessed
an incident that was commonplace in Hebron—an incident that he previously would
have been oblivious to, or simply dismissed. “I watched an armored bus of Jewish
passengers drive through the streets of Hebron on its way to the settlement of
Kiryat Arba. There was wire mesh around the outside of the bus, and the
passengers looked like they were inside a cage. When the bus stalled for a
minute, Arab women on the street starting throwing large rocks at it. For the
first time in my life, I felt anguished by our treatment of the Jews. This is
not right, I thought. Jews have to travel like caged animals to their homes and
we travel freely about and without fear. How can the Jews live like this? People
shouldn’t have to travel and live like this! Who’s treating whom badly? For the
first time, I watched with different eyes. This incident affected me a lot.”
But the real breakthrough for Shoebat occurred in 1993 when he was back in the
United States, living in California: He met his second wife.
Maria wanted to marry Shoebat, but she wasn’t pliable or easily influenced when
it came to changing faiths. Shoebat asked that Maria convert to Islam, but she
was from a Catholic family and reluctant to abandon her religion. Instead of
complying with Shoebat’s dictates, she challenged him theologically. What made
him so sure that Islam was the true religion? Had he ever actually read the
Bible? No? Just the Koran? So how could he eschew the teachings of the Bible
when he didn’t even know what they were?
“I set out to convert her,” Shoebat says with a laugh. “But what happened was
that she converted me instead. Maria challenged me to read the Bible and find
mistakes and inconsistencies. I claimed that the Jews had corrupted the Bible
and were prophet-killers. ‘Prove those claims,’ Maria said. So I purchased my
first Bible [the King James Edition] to show her the contradictions and
corruptions introduced to it by the Jews. I did not begin my Bible study for
pure reasons. It was pure selfishness that motivated me: I wanted to convince my
wife to become a Muslim. But as I read the Koran and the Bible side by side, I
was struck by the discrepancies between them. The Koran was a holy work, the
foundation of our religion, but it was filled with hatred. The Bible, on the
other hand, overflowed with kindness and compassion. I also began to understand
the spiritual link between the Jewish people and their land. I was surprised to
see their deep connections to Israel mentioned throughout and at the very
beginning of the Bible. As a Palestinian, I had always been taught that Israel
was ours—that the Jews had expropriated it from us. But after reading the Bible,
I saw this was patently false. I had also been taught in school that Abraham,
Jacob and Moses were all Palestinian Arabs.
“After I finished poring over the Bible, I began to study the Prophets and was
startled to read thousands of ancient predictions that I knew had already come
true—many of them had come true in my own lifetime. And I asked myself: How
could it be that Allah is the true God if the Six-Day War in 1967 resulted in
the greatest victory for the Jews since Joshua’s encirclement of Jericho? And
how do I explain to myself that Muslim conquests have always been filled with
rape, pillaging and massacres, but in contrast, Israel’s victories have only
brought freedom for all people and religions?”
A few months later, Shoebat was baptized and became a Christian. The
reverberations—at least within his own family—were irrevocable and profound.
“Converting to a different faith from Islam is considered an act of apostasy
punishable by death,” Shoebat says. “When my family learned of my conversion I
was denounced as a traitor and immediately disowned. The land in Bethlehem I
rightfully stood to inherit was taken away from me. My brother made death
threats, and I was warned never to set foot in Beit Sahour again. Islam allows
no rights [whatsoever] to born Muslims who leave the faith—including the right
to life.
“To compound matters,” Shoebat says, “I didn’t merely become a Christian. I
became an evangelical Christian, a Christian Zionist.”
Upon his conversion, Shoebat embarked on a path of reconciliation, experiencing
deep regret for his past actions as well as anger toward those who had
indoctrinated him to carry them out. He remains haunted by the memory of the
young Israeli soldier he almost lynched, and wishes he could find him and beg
his forgiveness. His only clue to his identity is the name “Amnon,” which he
heard another soldier call him. “If I could find Amnon, I would beg him to
understand that I underwent an educational occupation of hatred, which
brainwashed my mind to hate Jews. I would say: ‘We were crazy and blinded with
frenzy. Please forgive me and become my brother.’ I truly want to do teshuvah
[repentance].”
Meanwhile, although he hasn’t yet found Amnon, Shoebat is busy making amends in
myriad other ways. “When I finally realized the lies and myths I was taught, I
felt strongly that I must speak out. The Jews don’t speak up as much as they
should, so I try to do it for them. I want to fight for Israel both from
theological and political perspectives. Israel is a small state, and the Muslim
world is a giant. My personal goal is to give strength to the Jewish people, to
give them encouragement. I had a change of heart, and this is the way I atone.”
Shoebat has become a one-man pro-Israel campaign, traveling across North America
and England, delivering passionate speeches to Christian and Jewish audiences.
His aim, he says, is to build a “grass-roots movement like Martin Luther King.”
He is particularly interested in going to universities and facing down the
Palestinian students. At Concordia University in Montreal, Shoebat confronted
his own cousin in the audience—Samer El Tarash, the Palestinian student leader
who had successfully instigated the riots that blocked Netanyahu from delivering
his speech there in 2002.
“My cousins remain passionate Palestinian activists,” he says. “One cousin ran
his taxi into a Chicago synagogue several years ago. Another cousin was on his
way to Ben Yehuda Street with a bomb when he was intercepted by Israeli soldiers
and killed. That night, my aunt—according to the dictates of our
society—distributed candies to the other women in her town, in celebration of
her son’s martyrdom. But at night, alone, she wept.
“I, too, thought I would die as a martyr. But now it may be for an entirely
different cause that I will die…. There is a ten-million-dollar bounty on my
head. I don’t know how long I will last. Yes, I am afraid. But I feel it is my
duty and my mission to seek justice for Israel and the Jewish people.
Eventually, I hope to go back to Israel and to live there, and to establish a
program for the Palestinians, to un-brainwash them. This is essential if there
is ever to be peace in the region.
“The occupation is not that of Israel occupying the land,” Shoebat says. “The
true occupation is of the minds of the Palestinians, who are taught hatred.
“I am still a terrorist,” Shoebat says with a laugh, “but now I terrorize
intellectually instead of physically.
“Don’t ever think that you can’t make a difference,” Shoebat tells the HANC
students gently, as he winds up his speech. “That you’re only one person, that
you’re not gifted enough. Moses was a stutterer who couldn’t even speak. I
didn’t know how to speak either, when I first started on my crusade. What’s
important is to believe in what you’re doing, even if the whole world tells you
you’re wrong. Noah warned his society of the impending flood, but they laughed
at him.
“He lived. They drowned.“
“Yes, I’ve lost my entire family,” Shoebat states sadly. “But,” he says bravely,
pointing to the members of the audience, “look how much family I’ve gained
instead.”
Committee for Ex-Muslims to be launched in the Netherlands on Tuesday
By The Associated Press
9-10-07
A Dutch organization for Muslims who
renounce their religion will be launched on Tuesday, joining similar groups that
have sprung up around Europe.
The groups hope to add a new voice to the debate about - and
within - Europe's Muslim communities, presenting themselves as diametrically
different to the disenchanted and sometimes violent youth who grab headlines, or
to immigrants who live cloistered among their own.
Instead, they seek recognition from the Muslim mainstream for
freethinkers, empowered Muslim women, homosexuals and those who want to renounce
their religion without fear.
Under some fundamentalist interpretations of
Islam, apostasy is forbidden, or is a heresy punishable by death.
"We want to support people who want to change their religion,
but their parents, their society have them clasped in it and won't let them
out," Ehsan Jami, 22, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday.
"They would realize that they are not standing alone."
Jami knew he was making himself a target for radical Islamists
when he decided to launch the Committee for Ex-Muslims. Five months and three
physical assaults later, his organization is officially being launched,
The latest attack on Jami last month, when he was struck and
pushed to the ground at a shopping center by three youths, was widely publicized
in the Netherlands. The assailants were arrested, but Jami was forced into
hiding, and receives police protection.
He said an earlier attack was even more dangerous, when he was
surrounded by a large group of youths at night and had a knife held to his
throat.
He had anticipated death threats, he said, but had not fully
appreciated what they meant.
"It's like the death of family," Jami said. "You know it will
come, but you don't know how much pain it will bring."
Leaders of ex-Muslim groups from Germany and England plan to
attend Tuesday's launch, before meeting the European Commission in Brussels on
Wednesday.
"Very clearly our intent is to break the taboo within Islam
against renouncing religion," said Maryam Namazie, who in June founded The
British Council of Ex-Muslims.
"The first step is making it easier to do that. You could
compare it to when the first gays came out of the closet," she said.
Other groups have formed in the Scandinavian countries.
Altogether, the European groups have total membership of no more than several
hundred.
"But the ex-Muslims say they are determined to show that not
all people from Muslim countries are religious," said Arzu Toker, vice president
of Germany's Council of Ex Muslims, the first and largest of the organizations.
"If we don't show it, many people (in the West) will think
'all these people are just the same,' and that's simply not true," she said.
Toker, a Turkish-born journalist, says membership in Germany
has grown to more than 100 from 18 founders in January. "Hundreds more have
written to show their support, but are unwilling, unable or afraid to join."
Akbar Ahmed, who chairs the Islamic Studies department at
American University in Washington, said the advent of such groups is not
surprising.
"Expatriates may be intellectually questioning, given the
freedom they have from being abroad," he said. "A few may decide they are fed up
with Islam - others become much more vigorously Islamic"
He gave the example of Muslim girls living in the West who
wear veils, but never would have done so in the country they immigrated from.
"It is wrong to say Islam endorses killing apostates, though
some of the Hadith, or sayings attributed to Mohammed, appear to endorse it -
when taken out of context," he said.
Salima Belhaj, who is not a member of Jami's group, says she
has been branded as an apostate because of her modern lifestyle. "It's others
who decide that I'm an ex-Muslim, because I wear short skirts or don't go the
mosque and drink a glass of wine now and then," she told the newspaper Trouw.
She said she still considers herself a Muslim, but "I don't
think that others should decide how I live my life. As I see it, Islam is
something between you and God."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch lawmaker who abandoned
Islam and lived under threat for years for her provocative criticism of
fundamentalism, said she was shocked by the attack on Jami.
"The rule of law, the basis of a state with civil liberties,
is hollow if it becomes dangerous to do your shopping," Hirsi Ali said in a
statement from the United States, where she took up residence last year after
quitting the parliament.