I wish everyone in the West would read Brigitte Gabriel’s Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. It is not a pleasant read; at points I was nauseated at the clear depiction of evil. But it is a compelling and necessary read.
The book forms two sections. First, Gabriel recounts the fall of her native land to Islamic conquest, then she discovers that the same terrorism she experienced as a child has now followed her to her adopted land, and she tells us how to recognize and counter its stealth maneuverings.
Gabriel grew up in Lebanon, just as it suffered an Islamic takeover. Lebanon was a cosmopolitan paradise, with a stable government apportioned among three main population groups. But tensions mounted as Muslim political power grew due to their high birth rate. Then the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran radicalized the world’s Muslim population. Finally, the welcoming of Arafat’s lawless PLO into Lebanon was like a match struck to tinder, setting off a civil war.
Gabriel recalls how Muslims began a reign of terror. Road blocks would set up, and those with “Christian” marked on their ID card would be machine-gunned. Christians finding loved ones’ bodies in alleys, beheaded or with their throats slit, became a daily occurrence. Mere killing was seldom enough; brutality was celebrated. There was one instance where a Christian mother was physically forced by her own hand to slit her son’s throat, and then to watch as her two daughters were raped. Thus thousands were slaughtered as Muslims claimed the land for their god, and many more thousands fled the nation. Yet the West was oblivious toward the hideous modern-day genocide.
Though a Maronite Christian, Gabriel still was an Arab raised in Arab culture, and as such she was taught to hate Jews. But her understanding of life and culture suddenly turned around when of necessity she accompanied her injured mother to an Israeli hospital. There she was astonished to find that Jews, far from being apes and pigs as she was taught, were an advanced, open-hearted people who gave precious medical care even to enemies that were implacably trying to destroy them. As she contrasted this magnanimity to the irrational hatred of the very Palestinians that the Jews were treating, she clearly saw the nature of the veil of evil for the first time in her life, and she realized that she had been raised in a culture of lies.
On a personal level, Gabriel’s story – how she managed to survive years of close-range bombing, how her young love was suddenly taken from her by a Muslim explosive device, how she began to break out of cultural constraints and to embrace truth and freedom, and how she courageously raised herself out of dead-end poverty to become an international TV news personality – is spellbinding and gripping, and if a little more fully developed, the book could have stood on those merits alone. But it turns out that that is only half the story.
The other half commences when Gabriel watches planes fly into the Twin Towers, and realizes that the same terror she had experienced as a young person, and that she thought she had escaped, has now come to her beloved new homeland. In the remainder of the book she turns her attentions to how stealth jihad has infected America from within under the cover of political correctness, how massive the challenge before us is, and what we must do about it.
This book is a very-well-written, gut-wrenching warning to a culture preoccupied with entertainment and celebrity gossip, and more interested in gaining dubious new entitlements and social provisions than in defending itself against a vicious enemy it grossly misunderstands.
If you have believed the claims of presidents, pundits and Muslim “moderates” that Islam is a religion of peace, you need to read this book. Gabriel does a very effective gloss on how violent aggressive jihad centrally characterizes the life of Muhammad and is inextricably baked into the Koran. You will learn how deceit as a means of spreading Islam is authorized by the Koran, and is celebrated in an Arab culture that is tightly bound up with a inordinate and warped sense of loyalty and honor.
And if you already know that Islam is all about brutal coercion, this book will show you how a modern nation was taken down, and how the Islamics have carefully studied our psyche and are using our freedoms and our naivety against us. Our institutions, our politics and our culture are already deeply infected by an unwillingness to identify the danger, and we are being played like a violin by an enemy that many of us are unaware of and are actually unknowingly complicit with.
It’s way past time that we woke up and began to take the serious measures that alone can save us. This compelling tale is not pleasant reading at all, but it is essential that we understand the times in which we live. Please, if only for the sake of our children, who will inherit the effects of our decisions, read this book.
