Barrett Kalellis
Friday, Nov. 3, 2006

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While the world focuses on the daily sectarian and terrorist atrocities in Iraq, other outrages by Muslim fanatics are becoming increasingly prevalent in country after country. Spurred on by hate-filled radical mullahs, imams, sheikhs, muftis and diverse "spiritual leaders" who preach violence, Muslim followers gleefully assassinate, bomb, stab, behead and otherwise murder so-called infidels and heretics throughout the civilized world.

As one who has first-hand experience in suffering Muslim cruelty, Brigitte Gabriel speaks directly to this threat in her new book, "Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America" (St. Martin's Press). Indeed, her cautionary tale is one of those rare books that everyone who wants to understand the roots of the current Islamic violence should read.

The first part details the childhood that was mostly robbed from her because of the Lebanese civil war. Born to Christian Arabs who lived in a small village in southern Lebanon, Gabriel and her relatives were forced to live in an underground shelter after their home was hit with artillery fire from the PLO beginning in 1974. Asleep in bed, she was wounded in this attack and spent almost three months in a nearby hospital.

The Muslim PLO wanted to drive out or kill as many Lebanese Christians as they could, as they fought with the Southern Lebanese Army, in addition to lobbing artillery shells across the border into northern Israel.

Gabriel had to live seven years in this 10-foot by 12-foot refuge, no bigger than a tool shed, with the threat of death occurring every day with artillery flying overhead and rifle-toting snipers roaming the countryside looking for Christians in their crosshairs, when she and her mother had to forage for food and water outside the bunker. Her mother, in fact, was seriously wounded by an exploding shell and had to be driven to an Israeli hospital for treatment.

Gabriel and her family were finally rescued when Israeli forces occupied southern Lebanon after the long bombardment provocation and were able to drive out the radicals, bringing some peace and stability to the region.

A native Arabic speaker, Gabriel also learned English and French, and in a few years began a career as a TV World News anchor and journalist in Jerusalem with an evening Arabic news program broadcast throughout the Middle East. An expert in terrorism, she lives today in Washington, D.C. and runs the American Congress for Truth.

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Muslim extremists, she believes, are driven by hate that stems from ingrained, corrupt, social and religious values that run throughout all the countries in the Middle East, except Israel, and that respect craftiness and deceit over honesty and virtue.

"From the moment they are born," she says, "they are programmed to blame Israel and the United States for their ills." With a low level of literacy and education, Arab masses are manipulated by dictators and ruling families — who keep them ignorant by controlling all the sources of information—and have to toe the line according to oppressive theocratic dictates by Islamic clerics who lord over them with harsh medieval beliefs and practices.

America's blasé secular society is in grave danger, Gabriel warns. With a basic ignorance of both core Islamic beliefs and the Arabic language, with hate-spewing imams preaching in hundreds of U.S. mosques, with the current U.S. fetish for political correctness and unquestioning tolerance—plus subversive anti-American and anti-Semitic attitudes infecting many colleges and universities (some funded by Saudi oil money) — Americans are blissfully unaware of the fifth-column dangers that are secretly conspiring against them.

If one could point to the single, core message of this book, it would be this: "American and Western leaders and their citizens are deluding themselves and endangering their very existence because of their refusal to acknowledge, read about, and become informed about the violent history behind Islam and to understand what it is today."

Brigitte Gabriel should know. She saw her own Lebanon, a predominantly Christian country, the Jewel of the Mediterranean—a beautiful, prosperous, highly educated country—turned, within a few short years, into a murderous Islamic hellhole.

Her recommendations for her adopted country are to impose strict controls on both the Mexican and Canadian borders; to reform our immigration policies; to strengthen our intelligence capabilities, both internally and externally; to monitor foreign students from hostile countries; and find some way to develop alternative energy sources, that can help stop oil profits from funding terrorist activities.

Ms. Gabriel knows that the final chapter in this global struggle has yet to be written. A careful reading of her story is a good place to prepare for whatever is going to happen.

Barrett Kalellis is a Michigan-based columnist, writer and pundit for NewsMax.com, whose articles appear regularly in various local and national print and online publications. He can be reached at kalellis@newsmax.com.

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