Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (11 page)

It was a shock to our sensibilities. We had always shown our Muslim neighbors kindness and respect. Many of the same Muslim soldiers had eaten at my father’s restaurant before the war. Some of them had running accounts that Papa never collected because he knew they had no money. As I outgrew my clothes, Mama gave them to some of the Muslim families for their daughters. One of my friends through my five years of elementary school was a Muslim girl called Khadija, who lived in a nearby Muslim town. Khadija and I were inseparable. We attended the same Catholic school, shared the same classes, walked together on the playground, and sat together to have our lunch. I knew that her family remained in our area and was not involved in any evildoing against the Christians. There were plenty of these good-hearted Muslims, but they were subdued and silenced by the radicals. In a later chapter I will describe the far-reaching and dangerous implications of this ability of radical jihadists to subdue and influence moderate Muslims living in Christian communities.

At this point in the civil war the Communists were allied with the Palestinians. The only thing that saved our lives was Papa’s friendship with a man who was a senior leader in the local Communist Party. This man had sufficient power to put us under his protection. He sent orders that our house was not to be looted and we were not to be arrested or abused. Although these orders were followed, we became prisoners in what was left of our home.

Meanwhile, the Muslims and PLO found another way to fill our lives with terror. By 1976 Klaia was the only town in southern Lebanon still under Christian control. It held out against Muslim attacks only because of the few tanks and cannons the Christian soldiers had taken with them when they had escaped from the military base. Klaia’s conquest became the number-one priority of the Muslims. Since the Muslims and their Palestinian allies couldn’t conquer Klaia immediately, they launched a campaign of artillery and rocket bombardment. The Muslims and PLO would set up their artillery and rocket launchers in our yard (or the yard of some other Christians who had been unable to flee Marjayoun), and they would launch a barrage of rockets or shells at Klaia or Israel. Then they would pack up and leave, knowing that we would absorb the brunt of the return fire. The Palestinians use this tactic today in Christian neighborhoods in the West Bank when attacking the Israeli army. The Christians experienced the same punishing results.

Even though our neighbors over in Klaia were still holding out in the last remaining Christian village, their situation was becoming desperate. They were under constant artillery and rocket bombardment, and running out of bombs and bullets with which to defend themselves. They knew they needed help fast, for their own sake and so they could come and save us. They knew our days were numbered and action was of the essence. For us in the south, there was no help coming from Christians anywhere else in Lebanon or the world. With nowhere to turn, the people of Klaia asked for help from the Israelis. Since they and we were facing torture and death at the hands of the Muslims, seeking help from Israel seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Under the cover of darkness, a few men from Klaia went to the border to make contact with the Israelis. This in itself was very dangerous because the Israelis were always on alert for attempts at infiltration by Palestinian terrorists. Fortunately, there were Arabic-speaking soldiers assigned to the Israeli border patrols. After a tense moment of flagging down a jeep full of soldiers with a .50-caliber machine gun ready to shoot infiltrators coming over the border fence, the men from Klaia were able to explain their dire situation.

The Israelis were well aware of the nature of the threat that faced the Christians, and they were willing to help for both moral and strategic reasons. The Palestinians had been launching terror attacks and artillery and rocket barrages against Israel from southern Lebanon for almost ten years. The Israelis knew that if the Muslims and Palestinians completely controlled southern Lebanon, the Christians could be slaughtered as they had been in other Christian towns and villages, and Israel would face even more terror attacks and bombardments. Accordingly, the Israelis offered to equip and train the Christian men so they could defend themselves and at the same time provide Israel with a buffer. They provided food and humanitarian assistance to the people of Klaia. This was the beginning of the South Lebanese Army, the SLA, led by Christian Major Sa’ad Haddad, who had defected from the crumbling Lebanese army to help protect Christians in the south. With the help of the Israelis, Christians from Klaia began formulating plans to come back and save us.

The Palestinians and their leftist Muslim allies, infuriated that the Christians in Klaia had sought and received help from the Israelis, increased the frequency and duration of their artillery and rocket attacks on Klaia and south across the border into Israel. This prompted the Israelis and the Christians to fire back at our town, where the shelling against them was coming from.

As the shelling intensified we started spending our nights in a small underground bomb shelter behind the restaurant. My father had had this shelter built with financial assistance from the Lebanese government, given to those in southern Lebanon to protect them from the “Israeli aggressors.” Ironically, the bomb shelter my father had built with the encouragement of the Muslims in government to protect us from the Israeli enemy would be the same shelter that would protect us from being slaughtered by the Muslims. Papa, Mama, and I shared this tiny space, about ten feet by twelve feet, with Uncle Tony, Tante Terez, and their four daughters. Tony and Terez were not really my uncle and aunt, but that’s what I called them. They were renting one of our houses in our complex at the time. Like us, they had nowhere else to go.

We lived in the shelter for three consecutive weeks, bombarded by shelling. One night it was particularly bad. We huddled in terror, sure we would not survive the night. Just before daybreak the shelling stopped, and was replaced by an eerie silence. The silence lasted for about half an hour, and then we heard a commotion on the road in front of the restaurant. Papa peeked out of a small window and saw gunmen fleeing north on foot and in jeeps and trucks. After fifteen minutes, the commotion subsided and the silence returned. We didn’t know what was happening, but we were too terrified to move.

Suddenly, we were shaken by the rumbling of a tank pulling up next to our bomb shelter. Papa jumped to the window to see what was happening. Five men carrying machine guns climbed down from the tank and began walking toward the entrance to the bomb shelter. Papa gasped in fear, and then he started to laugh and cry at the same time. “They’re wearing crosses,” he said. “They’re Christians, come to save us!” We all rushed out of the bomb shelter crying with relief and joy. The Christians had finally been able to expel the Palestinians and Muslims from Marjayoun. We felt as if we had returned from the dead.

In a short time, Major Haddad and his volunteer army of civilians and ex-Lebanese soldiers were able to extend protection to three small enclaves in southern Lebanon. However, although Marjayoun was now back in Christian hands, the danger was far from over. In fact, it became even greater. Now death could come out of the sky at any time, without warning. We were still surrounded on three sides. The Palestinians and their Muslim Communist and leftist allies held fortified positions in the mountains on our east, north, and west. It was the perfect setting for them. No matter which way they shot, they couldn’t miss. Their largest artillery base was located across the valley to the east in the Muslim village of Elkhiam, where the rockets that bombed my home had come from. Their big guns were aimed straight at us. You could be sitting in your kitchen, or walking down the road, or visiting with friends on the porch, and suddenly there would be a loud explosion, and you could be dead or wounded. If you heard the rushing
zoom-whoosh
of a shell flying through the air, you were lucky, because that meant it would explode someplace else, giving you time to run to the bomb shelter before the next round landed.

And then there were the snipers. Elkhiam was so close that they didn’t need binoculars to see us walking down the street. They could shoot with either small-caliber rifles like the AK-47, or big machine guns with bullets that could go through thick metal and still take your head off. We could hear the hiss of bullets zipping by before hearing the sound of the shots being fired. Because of the echoes created by the hills and valleys, we couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from. They were bombarding or sniping at us most of the time, making us prisoners in our tiny shelter.

Our bomb shelter had one small window, which we blocked with marble tiles that my father had originally bought to decorate our living room. Now we strategically placed the tiles to stop shrapnel. Although no sunlight could get through that window, somehow a freezing wind found its way in. We covered part of the door with a big block of cement that had been a public bench next to Papa’s restaurant. A long plastic tarpaulin was hung over the remainder of the opening to partially stop the cold wind.

It’s a good thing that we were already very close to Tony, Terez, and their four daughters. All nine of us had to share the small space, deprived of any privacy. We slept on the floor almost on top of each other. The women and girls slept on one side and the men on the other. With our long hair, sleeping on a damp floor, it was not long before Mama, Tante Terez, and all five of us girls developed an infestation of lice. Mama and Tante Terez put kerosene on our heads to get rid of them. I remember getting dizzy from the fumes, but I had to put up with it. It worked, and it was better than itching.

We lived on the southern edge of town in an isolated no-man’s-land between Marjayoun and Klaia. Few people walked by, because doing so would have made them easy targets for snipers across the valley. Anyone who drove by would zoom down the road as fast as he could to avoid being hit. Every time I heard a car coming I wished so hard that it would stop, so we would have someone to talk to and tell us what was going on. But knowing they were being followed in someone’s gun sights across the valley, drivers pushed the gas pedal even more. Days would go by without seeing anyone other than my parents and Uncle Tony’s family.

I remember our first Christmas Eve in our new wartime surroundings. We stayed up until midnight singing Christmas hymns around the fire. Our parents told stories about Christmas when they were growing up. They asked us to close our eyes and imagine that we had a beautiful new dress laid out next to us, so when we woke up Christmas morning we could wear our new clothes to church. But that Christmas Eve it was hard to dream beautiful dreams while hearing artillery shells exploding every two seconds. That’s what our militia later estimated had fallen on us during that long night. It was a Christian holiday, and the Muslims were not going to let us enjoy it in peace.

Morning ushered in a very sad Christmas. We had no gifts to exchange and no electricity. Because the shells continued to explode, we had to stay inside. We ate our breakfast by candlelight and then just sat there for the rest of the day. We didn’t have much to celebrate. It was Christmas, but for us it was just another day in a war. We had no way of knowing how long it would last, or how long
we
would last.

Later that week, Uncle Tony told my father that he had been looking for rental homes and that he had found an underground house at the other end of town where his family could live. It would be safer, and they would have more room. He had tears in his eyes as he told my father that they had to leave. It was very hard for us to see them go. If we had been able to move away from the front lines we would have done it too, but we couldn’t just leave our home, since we were the owners. Uncle Tony could just take the same amount of rent he was paying my dad and pay it to someone else and move. We had lost our money and had no monthly income, so we couldn’t afford to pay rent anywhere.

There was no shelling on the day they moved. My mother helped Tante Terez pack dishes, and my father helped Uncle Tony carry the furniture to the truck. No one said a word. We were as gloomy as the day was dark and cloudy. The sun refused to come out. By three o’clock in the afternoon everything had been packed, and it was time to say good-bye. Tony had rented from my parents for fourteen years, since before I was born. I didn’t know life without them. As we cried and hugged each other, the rain began. It mixed with our tears and ran down our faces. To me, it seemed as if even the skies were crying because we were separating. Now it would be just Papa, Mama, and me alone at the edge of town.

There was nobody living in the few houses around us. The only people I saw were the Christian militia soldiers manning a checkpoint nearby. Even the military base was deserted: a huge empty structure where the wind blew at night, making noises that added to the spooky explosions of shellfire. My father was now seventy-three years old, and he seemed helpless without Uncle Tony. Tony had been someone that my father could depend on to take care of us if something happened to him.

However, now we had a little more space, so we made a few improvements. We had all been sleeping on the floor on thick blankets. Now we had room to move two beds from our ruined home into the shelter. Mama and I slept on one bed and my father slept on the other. We also brought down one chair from the house, and for a dining-room table we used a big plastic 7UP box with a tray on top of it. The bomb shelter was so small that we had to sit on the edge of our beds to eat. The other corner of the shelter was our bathroom. It consisted of a big metal oil container with sharp metal edges. We had to be careful how we squatted over it so we wouldn’t cut ourselves.

My parents stocked the bomb shelter with dried food brought down from our home. We had beans, rice, whole wheat, potatoes, onions, garlic, and dried greens, and oil for cooking. We could seldom leave the shelter to go downtown to buy food, so we had to be able to eat from what we stored in the shelter. We had no electricity, no heat, no bathroom, no shower, and no running water.