Brigitte Gabriel: Lebanese speaking for Israel
08.16.06Here’s a bit of an inside scoop on a Lebanese lady speaking about her life in Lebanon and her observations on the origins and nature of the conflict between Jews, Muslims, Christians, Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians in that part of the world. This is a couple years old, but it is ment to show the ideology of the people involved in this age old dispute.
I know alot of the liberals think they know all the answers for this war, and that jews are the devil. But here’s some info from somebody who knows the truth.
Remarks of Brigitte Gabriel, delivered at the Duke University Counter Terrorism Speak-Out
I’m proud and honoured to stand here today, as a Lebanese speaking for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. As someone who was raised in an Arabic country, I want to give you a glimpse into the heart of the Arabic world.
I was raised in Lebanon, where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.
When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.
It was Israel who came to help the Christians in Lebanon. My mother was wounded by a Moslem’s shell, and was taken into an Israeli hospital for treatment. When we entered the emergency room, I was shocked at what I saw. There were hundreds of people wounded, Moslems, Palestinians, Christians, Lebanese, and Israeli soldiers lying on the floor. The doctors treated everyone according to their injury. They treated my mother before they treated the Israeli soldier lying next to her. They didn’t see religion, they didn’t see political affiliation, they saw people in need and they helped.
For the first time in my life I experienced a human quality that I know my culture would not have shown to their enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis, who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. I spent 22 days at that hospital. Those days changed my life and the way I believe information, the way I listen to the radio or to television. I realized I was sold a fabricated lie by my government, about the Jews and Israel, that was so far from reality. I knew for fact that, if I was a Jew standing in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched and thrown over to the grounds, as shouts of joy of Allah Akbar, God is great, would echo through the hospital and the surrounding streets.
I became friends with the families of the Israeli wounded soldiers: one in particular Rina, her only child was wounded in his eyes.
One day I was visiting with her, and the Israeli army band came to play national songs to lift the spirits of the wounded soldiers. As they surrounded his bed playing a song about Jerusalem, Rina and I started crying. I felt out of place and started waking out of the room, and this mother holds my hand and pulls me back in without even looking at me. She holds me crying and says: “It is not your fault.” We just stood there crying, holding each other’s hands.
What a contrast between her, a mother looking at her deformed 19 year old only child, and still able to love me, the enemy, and between a Moslem mother who sends her son to blow himself up to smithereens just to kill a few Jews or Christians.
The difference between the Arabic world and Israel is a difference in values and character. It’s barbarism versus civilization. It’s democracy versus dictatorship. It’s goodness versus evil.
Once upon a time, there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now, the intentional murder of Israeli children is legitimized as Palestinian “armed struggle.”
However, once such behaviour is legitimized against Israel, it is legitimized everywhere in the world, constrained by nothing more than the subjective belief of people who would wrap themselves in dynamite and nails for the purpose of killing children in the name of God.
Because the Palestinians have been encouraged to believe that murdering innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic for advancing their cause, the whole world now suffers from a plague of terrorism, from Nairobi to New York, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan.
They blame suicide bombing on “desperation of occupation.” Let me tell you the truth. The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred ten weeks before Israel even became independent.
On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel’s independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street, in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the “desperation” of “occupation” but by the VERY THOUGHT of a Jewish state.
So many times in history in the last 100 years, citizens have stood by and done nothing, allowing evil to prevail. As America stood up against and defeated communism, now it is time to stand up against the terror of religious bigotry and intolerance. It’s time to all stand up and support and defend the state of Israel, which is the front line of the war against terrorism.
A lot of conservatives think they know all the answers for this war. Nobody knows all the answers.
Hahaha … WTF are you talking about? What liberals say Jews are the devil? Isn’t it you guys who believe that after Jesus returns, all the Jews are going to burn in hell for all eternity?
The fact that she is Lebanese does not mean the things she says are objective “truth” anymore than the things Nasrallah says are objective truth. Nationality does not impart some inherent accuracy. We’re both American. Does that mean everything that you or I say about America can be cited by a foreigner as “truth” just because we’re American? ‘Course not.
This is what I mean—she’s leaving out half of “the truth.” As soon as sectarian violence popped off, a number of war crimes and acts of ethnic cleansing were commited by ALL the Lebanese factions participating in the civil war.
For example, in 1975, gunmen fired on a group of Phalangist (Christian) leaders. Phalangists then killed 27 Palestinian workers travelling on a bus. Four Christians were then killed in East Beirut. In retaliation, the Phalange erected roadblocks throughout the city, and any Palestinian or Muslim caught had his throat cut. Opposing militias retaliated and 600 Muslims and Christians were butchered in a matter of hours on “Black Saturday.” And it got worse.
I notice she doesn’t mention when the Israeli-directed Christian militias entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 and literally spent a day and a half massacring and mutilating about a thousand Palestinian and Lebanese refugees—including women and children.
That’s not “the truth.” It certainly happened, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Let’s examine the context that that act in 1948 occurred in: over the PREVIOUS 10 years, Zionists in Palestine used a variety of tactics: Grenades in cafes, electrically timed mines in crowded marketplaces, blowing up a ship with its civilian passengers still on board, assassination of government officials, use of hostages, blowing up of government offices with their civilian employees and visitors, booby-trapped suitcases, car bombs, letter bombs sent to politicians, murder of hostages, blowing up buildings with people inside and massacres—all of these things were done by Zionists against the British and Arabs between 1936 and 1948.
So yeah, the bombing she mentioned was the first terrorist attack against the Jewish STATE, but it certainly didn’t just spontaneously erupt from a period of peaceful co-existance like she’s implying.
For example: In 1946, two years before the bombing she mentioned, members of Irgun—a militant Zionist terrorist group—blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, most of them civilians (and most of them Arab). The attack was ordered by Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun, who would later become Israeli Prime Minister. Israel was founded on terrorism, and several of it’s early Prime Ministers were former terrorists.
Look, the point here is not that “the Israelis are wrong” or that “the Palestinians are wrong” or that “the Lebanese are wrong”—the point is that they all are. Everyone over there is frickin’ nuts. If there was a “first punch” thrown, nobody remembers who it was, and everything since then has been retaliation against retaliation, and endless cycle of bloodshed where, as usual, the people who pay the biggest price on both sides are civilians.
That’s the problem with one-sided “truths” like hers, “truths” where all the blame is assigned to one side and the other side gets no criticism: it’s not the truth. ESPECIALLY when talking about the long tortured conflict in the Middle East.
That being said, I don’t disagree with everything she wrote, and I’m certainly no fan of Islam (or of any religion for that matter). But there are no angels in this story, when someone assigns all the blame on either the Jews or the Arabs, they are either ignorant or lying.
# August 16th, 2006 at 11:13 amIt should also be noted that the speech you posted is two years old, and was given before the current war (and does not directly relate to it) and also before Lebanon held their democratic elections last year, hence her statement that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” That is no longer true (although Lebanon’s brief experiment with Democracy might be over now as a result of the current war—it’s times like this that extremism flourishes in weak states).
# August 16th, 2006 at 11:14 amYea, I should have posted that. Thanks.
I didn’t intend for it to be in relation to the current fighting. I intended to show just how these palestinians think and act. To show how truely evil and vile they are.
and we think jews are gonna burn in hell for eternity? WTF are YOU talkin about? I thought you knew us better than that, Guav. You are confusing us with neo nazi’s.
and i’ll finish this later.
# August 16th, 2006 at 11:42 amHahaha … no dude, I’m talking about the rapture, end times dispensationalism and all that evangelical stuff—isn’t that what happens after the coming of Christ, the unconverted Jews will be tossed into the pit of fire?
Her speech only shows you how “evil and vile” the Palestinians are if you believe her implication that the Palestinians invented terrorism, and started carrying attacks out unprovoked, merely because they irrationally hate Jews.
So yeah, if you take what she wrote at face value and completely ignore the factual history of the region and the crimes that both sides have routinely carried out against each other, I could see why you’d come to that conclusion.
But that’s hardly “the truth.”
# August 16th, 2006 at 12:31 pmIt’s like talking about how the Native Americans attacked and massacred English settlers and neglecting to mention that English settlers also attacked and massacred the Native Americans.
It’s an incomplete truth, which is as good as lying if done intentionally. I don’t think you’re doing it intentionally, but she sure as hell is.
# August 16th, 2006 at 12:48 pmObviously crimes have been carried out on both sides.
But why are the Israeli’s so bad, when they’re not strapping bombs to themselves, and they’re not cutting off the genitals of
Christianspeople of other religions, stickin it their mouths, and carving crosses in their chest while they bleed to death?War is war. So obviously the jews are attacking them. But I dont get why the left is so anti-jew.
# August 16th, 2006 at 2:56 pmChad, the left is not anti-Jew by any stretch of the imagination.
Many on the left (and on the right as well) are highly critical of the state of Israel, whose policies should be open to criticism just like any other government’s. The Jews existed for thousands of years before 1948, and you should not confuse Jews and Judaism with Israel—they’re two entirely different things.
# August 16th, 2006 at 3:58 pmAs far as why Palestinians blow themselves up and the Israelis don’t, it’s because the Israelis don’t have to. They have Apaches, F-15Is and F-16Is, tanks, armored bulldozers, UAVs, missiles and nukes. However, the Israelis are capable of terrorism when the power dynamic is reversed, as the origins of the Israeli state show us. (It can also be argued that state terrorism is still terrorism).
Yeah, Israel doesn’t saw people’s heads off—that’s a plus—but Israel kills three times more Palestinians than the Palestinians kill Israelis. And in the first invasion of Lebanon, Israel killed 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians (mostly civilians). That is more civilians killed than Israelis who have been killed by all terrorism since 1948.
Even in this latest war, Israel killed at least 800 civilians. Do you know how many civilians Hezbollah killed? 30.
# August 16th, 2006 at 3:59 pmi love it when you talk to me like I’m a 5 year old. I just want you to know that makes me feel special.
you pull out all these fun facts how Irael killed more civilians and how hezbollah are just as bad as them, etc. But I don’t buy it. I’m pretty sure nobody else does either, but these
guysliberal & commie moonbats. I guaren-damn-tee that the only rightists in that bunch are there to take photos, counter protest, and generally mock these guys.Israel is on such a huge higher moral ground, that it blows my mind that you try to sink them to hezbollah level.
Just the fact that Israel doesn’t sponsor terrorism globally is enough. And the fact that Israel killed so many more “civilians with assault rifles” simply proves the fact that Israel has God on their side. I know thats not an answer for you. But they kick more ass than anyone else. What can I say?
Stupid palestinian putts should stick to throwing rocks.
And just because I’m on Israels side, in no way states that I believe Israel isn’t deserving of critisism. Why did you put those words in my mouth?
# August 16th, 2006 at 4:22 pmFor being such a know it all, Guav sure plays dumb a lot.
# August 16th, 2006 at 8:09 pmAnd how did I do that? I think it’s the italics.
I know you feel left out when I devote all my time to JJ. I wanted you to know that you will always be first and foremost in my heart.
Yeah, I know, facts are annoying—it would be so much better if we could all just say whatever we wanted without being burdened by facts, history, and reality.
But the most recent figures are: Israel killed 530 Hezbollah fighters, 28 Lebanese soldiers (not in conflict with Israelis) and 1,109 Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah killed 116 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians (that’s the official Israeli figure).
Maybe that’s because they do things like shoot an unarmed 13 year-old girl seventeen times (they thought she was 10 though). Moral high ground? If anyone over there had the moral high ground, they lost it decades ago. They are all lunatics.
When Israel assassinates a Hamas leader in a crowded marketplace with a missile and kills a dozen civilians unlucky enough to be shopping that morning, they are not “civilians with assault rifles.” Missiles in markets, bombs in cafes, it’s all terrorism to me.
Of course they do—they are the world’s fourth most powerful military backed by the world’s lone superpower.
Because you accused people who criticize Israel’s actions of being “anti-Jew.” Calling critics of Israel “anti-Semites” is a common tactic of Israel supporters to deflect all criticism of Israel’s *policies*—it sounded to me like you were doing that.
What are some things you think Israel is deserving of criticism for?
# August 17th, 2006 at 7:29 amI’ll agree that missiles in the market place are a party foul. and shooting little girls is pretty messed up. And I will agree that they are ALL crazy over there. I just see palestine as even worse. bombs in the cafes… yea, there’s always collateral damage in war…. shooting little girls, no call for that. so there. I’m criticizing Israel for that.
# August 17th, 2006 at 8:22 amIf I may jump in and try to bottom line this debate? Ofcourse I agree with Chad’s take on things but Guav has good input as well. Bottom line…
Dose Israel have a right to be there? If so then do they have a right to defend against attacks? If both questions are in the affirmative then Israel must neutralize the threat, even tho, innocence may be lost. It is about survival. It appears that the people who oppose Israel, also, oppose their right to be in that region. To argue over who uses what to get the job done is irrelevant, all war is bloody, and a neccessary evil. Israel is not calling for the destruction of everyone around them, they want peace. They are not ruled by fascist ideas but by humanitarian beliefs. The point of the lady’s statements were exactly that. Israel was the only helping hand to the hurting. The jihadists are not a cozy loving organization, they are bent on killing everything that does not submit to Allah, the moon honky. Wait honky is too good of a word to waste on such a evil deity…
Judaism is the founding of the three largest faiths, Guav, I’m sure you know that Hitler was a Catholic. Still he was a fascist… the poster child. If hitler was alive today he would have such a great time, he could destroy the jews and still be loved by the Moslems and the left leaning media here in the states. Most hate hitler’s tactics but most ignore the tactics being used by Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Arabia. Why is that?
# August 17th, 2006 at 12:42 pmAlthough I disagree with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 upon already-inhabited land, the plain fact is that Israel exists—given that reality, I support Israel’s right to exist within their original borders and they have the right to defend those original borders.
But Israel’s main problem with terrorism is that it has tried to exist outside of it’s rightful borders for 40 years now. And the current situation with Hezbollah all stems from Israel’s problem with the Palestinians—they originally invaded Lebanon to fight the PLO, and their 18 year occupation of Lebanon is what created Hezbollah in the first place. Hezbollah literally did not exist until it was formed to fight Israel’s occupation, which only ended 6 years ago.
Although Israel will probably not be loved by it’s neighbors anytime soon, it can manage to live in peace with them, but the thing preventing that is that they refuse to withdraw completely to the pre-1967 borders. Land for peace worked in the past, and it will work again. But not until Israel abandons the illegal settlements and gives up the aquifiers and other lands it possesses outside of it’s rightful borders.
I’m no fan of jihadists, but there is a distinct difference between people who hate Israel on religious grounds and people who hate Israel because it’s occupying their land (there’s a good article in The American Conservative that discusses this in further detail, The Logic of Suicide Terrorism).
There are extremists on both sides who do not want peace—if you remember Yitzahk Rabin was assassinated by a right wing Jewish terrorist because he was brokering a peace plan with the Palestinians. If the prerequisite for a peaceful settlement is that extremists have to first stop being … extremists … then there will NEVER be peace.
A just plan has to be put into effect regardless of whether or not extremists try to disrupt it, otherwise the religious fundamentalists on both sides are holding everyone else hostage. That is the key to everything over there.
# August 17th, 2006 at 1:25 pmIsrael was a nation way before 1948. With that simple fact we should consider an astonishing miracle. No other civilization has been scattered around the globe and then return to their homeland and take what was theirs. The Jews who came to their homeland were coming against astonishing odds. 1 out of 3 made it to the shores, that means 2 out of 3 died in transent or drowning coming off the boats. A small amount of untrained warriors facing hostile nations that amounted to 42 million. Israel won. The sixth day war was another major milestone for Israel. The took the Temple Mount then but allowed the Moslems to keep their “holy sites” and manage the Temple Mount. Wether you admit it or not the refounding of the nation of Israel is one amazing miracle and a fulfilment of Bible Prophecy, Ezekiel 37. Ezekiel 38 is about the last battle. Amazing stuff.
Look at the region and then look at the land that Israel occupies. Notice anything? How about the size. The land Israel is on is minute compared to all the land surrounding them. It isn’t about the land, its not like they don’t have enough to go around. It is about Israel. They are hated on religious reasons. Don’t buy the myth that it is anything else. The Moslems hate the Jews, but they will lie in order to “confound their enemy” into believing it is about land. If it were about land then conceding land would end the suicide bombers.
Land for peace has not worked entirely. Israel was backing out of areas and with a Liberal, Olmert, at the helm the Palestinians stand to gain much more by peaceful negotiations that by hostages, suicide bombers, and missiles.
I do agree that extremists are disrupting the peace and it isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Only if Israel is destroyed will the jihadists be happy for like a day, then they will focus more on the US.
A just plan will be put into place very soon. The Bible actually speaks about a covenant that the world government will confirm for 7 years. After the 7 years Ezekiel 38 will take place and all nations will gather against Israel. Sorry to wax theological… I guess its not that bad… until I wax olde english…
# August 18th, 2006 at 9:11 amNot in the modern sense—I’m referring to Israel the nation/state it currently is, not in the abstract theological sense. The kingdoms of David and Solomon—on which Zionists base their territorial rights—endured for only about 73 years and then fell apart. Even if you count the entire timespan of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, from David’s conquest of Canaan to the destruction of Judah, you get only 414 years of Jewish rule.
Palestine was a predominately Arab and Islamic country by the end of the 7th century, and despite the steady arrival of Jewish colonists after 1882, not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority.
In 1948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned only a little more than 6% of the land of Palestine. Arab rejection was of the state was based on the fact that even though the population of the Jewish state was to be only half Jewish with the Jews owning less than 10% of the Jewish state land area, the Jews were to be established as the ruling body—what self-respecting people would ever accept that? By denying the Palestine Arabs (who formed the 2/3 majority of the country) the right to decide for themselves, the UN guaranteed that it would be rejected.
This is profoundly incorrect. During the Middle Ages, the Arab Middle East was a refuge and a haven for the persecuted Jews of Spain and Europe, and it was the only place in the world at the time where the Jews were safe. During the Ottoman [Muslim] Empire, Jews and Muslims lived together with no problems, throughout the empire and in Palestine. At the outset of the Ottoman era, an estimated 1,000 Jewish families lived in the country. The Jewish Virtual Library speaks of Safed, a town in Palestine (now Israel) where “by mid-16th century, the Jewish population had risen to about 10,000, and the town had become a thriving textile center as well as the focus of intense intellectual activity.” The Jewish community thrived in Safed for more than 400 years with no problems.
Before the 20th century, most Jews in Palestine had settled more for religious than for political reasons, and there was little if any conflict between them and the Arab population. The peace between the Arabs and the Jews was only disrupted when the Zionists settlers—Europeans—arrived in the 1880’s and began to claim that Palestine was the “rightful” possession of the “Jewish people” to the exclusion of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants (Even the indigenous Jews of Palestine reacted negatively to Zionism because they didn’t see the need for a Jewish state in Palestine and didn’t want to aggravate relations with the Arabs).
It was *European colonialism* that started the conflict that carries on to this day, not Judaism or Islam or any inherent incompatibility between Jews and Arabs. The objective of Zionism has never been merely to colonize Palestine—as was the goal of classical colonial and imperial movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. What distinguished Zionism from other the European colonial movements of the time was that the stated purpose of the Zionist movement was not to exploit the Palestinian people (as other colonial powers did throughout Africa and Asia) but to disperse and dispossess them. The intent was to completely replace the indigenous population with a new settler community.
“Land For Peace” refers to an actual component of the peace process, not unilateral withdrawal and and the confinement of the population in an open-air prison. Land for Peace was the basis for Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, which has done more for Israel’s security than any war.
# August 18th, 2006 at 8:00 pm