Zionists Out of the Peace Movement

Last Friday's blog post on Brigitte Gabriel set off a wide-ranging, Right wing cyber-frenzy that I'll discuss in a day or two. For now, I want to report on Gabriel's talk at the University of Michigan on Monday.

I arrived at the appointed place at about 7:50 PM to find that the event had been moved across the hall to Auditorium B, which is a nicer space. At that time there were five campus police officers present and the auditorium was about half full. When Gabriel started talking around 8:10 PM, the auditorium was about 90% full and judging from audience response, I'd say that about 20% of the crowd--the ones who did not clap or give her a standing ovation--consisted of "Muslims, Arabs, and their friends and allies" who turned out to " ... give Gabriel a proper welcome."

Gabriel was probably disappointed at the quiet comportment of the crowd which stood in stark contrast to the rumors of violence and disruption she and her followers spread. She also took the precaution of requiring note cards for the submission of questions so that no one could say or ask her anything too revealing or embarrassing.

Based on what I've seen and read by her in the past, Gabriel gave her stock talk; she spoke for about an hour. The topic was "Islamofascism" and hatred. The first part of her speech was heavily autobiographical--at least it is purported to be autobiographical. She talked about spending seven years in desperate and dangerous conditions hiding in a bomb shelter in southern Lebanon because, as her parents told her, Muslims wanted to kill her family "because we are Christians."

As she has written elsewhere:

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.

At one point, she claims that her family was warned that Muslims would be coming in the night to kill the entire family. Fatalistically, we are told, she put on her best Sunday dress and her mother brushed her hair and tied a pretty ribbon in it and then the family waited to die. Gabriel wanted to look pretty because, she says, she knew no one would be alive to bury her body. Where she got that dress and what she used it for during those harrowing years in a bomb shelter, one wonders.

Obviously, she was not killed nor, apparently, even injured that night and although she claims to be an orphan she disclosed none of the details of her parents' deaths but they did not occur on the night in question. She was saved from almost certain death, we are told, by Israel's 1978 invasion of Lebanon, known as Operation Litani, although, according to Gabriel, "Israel has never occupied my country"--they were guests of the Christians.

She gives some details of the events described above here:

I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted ?Allah Akbar! My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word "infidel."

I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends--killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon.

In her speech to the Heritage Foundation she places the destruction of her home described above in 1975, which places Gabriel's birth about 1965.

Sometime later, we are told, her mother was injured by a "Muslim shell" and required hospitalization in Israel. Gabriel accompanied her mother and was given $60 for the trip. Given the family's alleged destitution one wonders where the money came from. Having learned as a child that Jews were the "lesser of two devils" (Muslims being the greater) she claims she was amazed at the kindness of Israeli medical staff who treated "Muslims, who would slit their throats at the first opportunity."

Eventually, at age 20, she says, Gabriel moved to Israel to work for Middle East Television (METV). The promotional leaflet from the event sponsor, Israel IDEA, says: "Ms. Gabriel began her career as news anchor for ... Middle East Television" (emphasis added). Not bad, for someone who had spent seven of the previous ten years living in a bomb shelter, eating grass, and drinking her own blood to survive.

It's not clear if Gabriel started working for METV in Lebanon or Israel. Televangelist Pat Robertson started a radio and television station--"Voice of Hope"--located in southern Lebanon in territory controlled by the Maronite-dominated and Israel-allied Southern Lebanese Army in 1979. According to Robertson's chronology:

1982, April 12: Hope TV station in free Lebanon is donated to CBN and becomes Middle East Television.

1983, July: The Middle East TV Control room is destroyed by terrorist bombing, but Israeli TV friends have it back on the air within 24 hours.

I tried to ask Gabriel, "What is your relationship to Pat Robertson?" but that question was not approved by the screeners. The mailing address for Gabriel's American Congress for Truth is a post office box in the same Zip Code--23456--as Robertson's Virginia Beach media headquarters.

She also opined that "Terrorists are always Muslims" and the "victims are always Americans." She claims that "Hamas is an American problem" operating "cells in more than forty states" and al-Qaeda is working with Mexican gangs to smuggle terrorists into the US. She did not explain why the FBI has not shut down the Hamas cells but in answer to one of my questions that did make it past the screeners she claimed that the Hamas cells were charitable front operations and twice mentioned "hot dog stands" as Hamas cells. Let's hope those hot dogs are halal.

Gabriel called upon the audience to work together to "defeat Islamic bigotry, hatred, and intolerance." Gabriel called the BBC's Israel coverage "Lies, lies, lies" and asserted the mainstream media is so whipped by political correctness, they need to throw political correctness in the garbage." She claimed that the killers of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg were exemplars of what it means to be a "good Muslim" but that Baruch Goldstein was not a good Jew.

She said that the lack of suicide bombers demonstrates the superiority of the Jewish religion. Gabriel essentially exonerated Israel of responsibility for the Sabra and Shatilla massacres but, curiously, had nothing to say about the responsibility of her own Maronite people.

She decried violent Islamic eschatology concerning the Mahdi but was silent about violent Christian eschatology. Pat Robertson, for example, quotes Zechariah 14:2-4:

For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city.

Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle.

In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south.

Robertson is dead set against the US' Middle East "Road Map" and interprets Zechariah literally, claiming: "Now, that prophecy in Zechariah has not yet totally been fulfilled, but this is a precursor of it because the United Nations represents all of the nations of the earth and they have now come against Jerusalem."

Gabriel claims that the alleged major threat by Iran to Israel and the US is part of the conscious fulfillment of Islamic eschatology. But she assures us, when the time comes, Israel will use her "Samson Project" and "take her enemies with her" and use biological or nuclear weapons against Iran to "drag the US into war."

It is no wonder that Zionists love Gabriel and she commands the highest fees ("$$$") in the Jewish National Fund Speakers Bureau. The stories she tells can't help but make Zionists feel good and righteous about Israel and themselves. Her anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia is clearly a selling point as in this blurb promoting her talk at a Dayton synagogue:

During a July 27 speech at Duke University, she said, "The difference between the Arabic world and Israel is the difference in values and character. It's barbarism versus civilization. It’s democracy versus dictatorship. It’s goodness versus evil."

Last revised: 12/07/2006

Labels: Brigitte Gabriel, hasbara, Islam bashing, University of Michigan