Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (22 page)

Working as a news anchor for
World News
gave me a front-row seat at the international theater. With an Associated Press machine in my office, faxes coming in from Beirut, calls from reporters working on stories in Lebanon, and a daily satellite feed of worldwide stories, I was plugged in. With a show deadline every day, all this moved at high speed. But it didn’t stop in the office or when the show was over. My friends were journalists and bureau chiefs who worked the odd hours with me and beyond. We would go out together in the evening for dinner, sit around the table, and talk about the news. Our life
was
the news.

While working in Jerusalem I met an American journalist who worked for the English department of Middle East Television. Together we traveled between Israel and Lebanon, changing the Israeli license plates on his car to French ones and making sure we had nothing on us to indicate we had been in Israel as we entered Lebanon. Time spent in Lebanon often involved dodging bombs and bullets. My journalist friend, probably the only American freely moving around in Lebanon at that time, called it the Wild West and traveled with his two friends, Smith & Wesson. Once while we were passing through a checkpoint in the Christian town of Jezzine, a car behind us sped through, passing us without stopping. The guards opened fire and we ducked as it sped by. Luckily the machine-gun position that fired on the car was higher than we were, so the shots went over our heads. Other times we ducked shells and looked out for roadside bombs. Needless to say, going through the war together was a bonding experience. We became best friends.

Back in Jerusalem doing the news show I soon realized there was a form of repetition developing with every broadcast I did. It was the same story but with different actors: hijackings, car bombs, and Muslims fighting non-Muslims was the news. The only differences were the locations, the vehicles used, and the names of the perpetrators and their victims. The names of the terrorists became all too familiar and similar. Muhammad, Ahmed, Hussein, Ali, were nothing but a repeat of Islamic names of Muslim youth who had been brainwashed with hatred and bigotry toward the infidels. They were always shouting “Allahu Akbar,” the Muslim call to prayer, as their trademark celebratory cry for murder and glory as they slaughtered, killed, blew up, maimed, or beheaded non-Muslims. There were always new names for different groups springing up, which in the Middle East means nothing more than few Islamic militants with a cause. My friend the American journalist, ever aware of the fine line between his covering the news in Lebanon and the possibility of his being the news, would say, “Five guys with beards, AK-47s, and an American hostage make a movement around here."

The names of the targets or the kidnapped people were usually Western: Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins, Pan Am or TWA flights, the
Achille Lauro.
The aggressors were always Muslims. The victims were always Christians or Jews. I began to see how the Middle East was dragging the world down into a war of ideologies based on religious hatred and bigotry. I began to understand that what I and the Christians were going through in Lebanon, which I had thought was just a regional conflict, was becoming a worldwide conflict with international implications. Time and time again, story after story, I was reporting the murderous, barbaric behavior of killers in different countries with Islam the reoccurring theme and “Allahu Akbar” always a part of the language used as they killed. America and the West found an excuse for every incident and boxed and labeled it under the context of the country in which it took place. They attributed Iran’s conflict and the victory of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to an inner conflict within Iran. They considered the Lebanese war a civil war among factions. They considered the overall Arab-Israeli conflict a Palestinian-versus-Israeli conflict over land. Yet in all these conflicts radical Islam was the driving force or lingered just under the surface. Here is a list of Islamic and Arabic aggression compiled by Abdullah al-Araby of the
Islam Review
reported in world media leading up to 9/11 while the West neglected to connect the dots.

1985

• June 14: TWA Flight 847 hijacking.
  
• October 7: October 10:
  Achille Lauro
  cruise ship hijacking by Palestinian Liberation Front, during which passenger Leon Klinghoffer is shot dead.
  
• November 23: EgyptAir flight 648 hijacked by Abu Nidal group, flown to Malta, where Egyptian commandos storm plane; sixty are killed by gunfire and explosions.
  
• December 27: Rome and Vienna airport attacks.
  

1986

• April 2: TWA flight 840 bombed on approach to Athens airport; four passengers (all of them American), including an infant, are killed.
  
• April 6: The La Belle discotheque in Berlin, a known hangout for U.S. soldiers, is bombed, killing three and injuring 230 people; Libya is held responsible. In retaliation, the U.S. bombs Libya in Operation El Dorado Canyon and tries to kill Colonel Muammar al-Gadhafi.
  
• September 5: Pan Am flight 73, an American civilian airliner, is hijacked; twenty-two people die when plane is stormed in Karachi, Pakistan.
  

1988

• December 21: Pan Am flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. The worst act of terrorism against the United States prior to September 11, 2001.
  

1989

• September 19: Suitcase bomb destroys UTA (Union des Transport, Aèriens) flight UT-772 en route to Paris, killing all 171 passengers and crew. Libyan intelligence involved.
  

1993

• January 25: Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani, fires an AK-47 assault rifle into cars waiting at a stoplight in front of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. Two die.
  
• February 26: World Trade Center bombing kills six and injures more than one thousand people.
  
• June: Failed New York City landmark bomb plot.
  

1994

• July 18: Bombing of Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kills eighty-six and wounds three hundred. Generally attributed to Hezbollah acting on behalf of Iran.
  
• July 19: Alas Chiricanas flight 00901 is bombed, killing twenty-one. Generally attributed to Hezbollah.
  
• July 26: Israeli embassy is attacked in London, and a Jewish charity is car-bombed, wounding twenty. Attributed by Britain, Argentina, and Israel to Hezbollah.
  
• December 11: A small bomb explodes on board Philippine Airlines flight 434, killing a Japanese businessman. Authorities found out that Ramzi Yousef planted the bomb to test it for his planned terrorist attack.
  
• December 24: Air France flight 8969 is hijacked by Groupe Islamique Armè members who planned to crash the plane on.
  

1995

• January 6: Operation Bojinka is discovered on a laptop computer in a Manila, Philippines, apartment by authorities after a fire occurred in the apartment.
  
• July-October: Bombings in France by a GIA unit led by Khaled Kelkal kill seven and injure more than one hundred.
  
• November 13: Bombing of military compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, kills seven.
  

1996

• June 25: Khobar Towers bombing. Dharan, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen servicemen lost their lives, hundreds of others wounded.
  

1997

• February 24: An armed man opens fire on tourists at an observation deck atop the Empire State Building in New York City, killing a Danish national and wounding visitors from the United States, Argentina, Switzerland, and France before turning the gun on himself. A handwritten note carried by the gunman claims this was a punishment attack against the “enemies of Palestine."
  
• November 17: Luxor massacre. Islamist gunmen attack tourists in Luxor, Egypt, killing sixty-two people, most of them European and Japanese vacationers.
  

1998

• August 7: U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 225 people and injuring more than 4,000.
  

1999

• December: Jordanian authorities foil a plot to bomb U.S. and Israeli tourists in Jordan and pick up twenty-eight suspects as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.
  
• December 14: Ahmed Ressam is arrested on the United States-Canada border in Port Angeles, Washington; he confesses to planning to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots.
  

2000

• The attacks against Israel in 2000 are too numerous to detail. Over thirty attacks of terrorism were committed, resulting in death. Forty-four civilians were killed and hundreds injured.
  
• The last of the 2000 millennium attack plots fails, as the boat meant to bomb the USS
  The Sullivans
  sinks.
  
• October 12: USS
  Cole
  bombing kills seventeen U.S. sailors.
  
• August 9: A suicide bomber in Jerusalem kills seven and wounds 130 in the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing; Hamas and Islamic Jihad claim responsibility.
  

2001

• The attacks against Israel in 2001 are too numerous to detail. The death toll was 203 and hundreds of people were injured.
  
• 9/11: The attacks on September 11 kill almost three thousand in a series of hijacked airliner crashes into two U.S. landmarks: the World Trade Center in New York City, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth plane crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
  
• Paris embassy attack plot foiled.
  
• Richard Reid, attempting to destroy American Airlines flight 63, is subdued by passengers and flight attendants before he can detonate his shoe bomb.
  

The reason the West was unable to connect the dots had a lot to do with viewpoint.

As a native Lebanese journalist I observed the operations of the foreign press in Israel. They would fly in, all expenses paid; live the first-class lifestyle, with a nice hotel and expense account; report what was happening for a week or couple of months; and then leave. They blew in, blew around, and blew out. They came with their preconceived ideas, toed the network editorial policy line, and perpetuated what they unwittingly had been programmed with through subtle Arab and PLO propaganda, which had reached them wherever they came from. Scenes of wailing Palestinians they saw on the air in the States became the shot to look for. Usually their stories reflected badly on the Israeli occupation. They clamored for shots of kids throwing stones against border patrol soldiers firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Because I could speak the language and read the Arabic press and knew the nuances behind events, I sensed that reporters were being manipulated. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for the Palestinians while watching the way they were living, and seeing young teenagers throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, trying to expel them from the West Bank and Gaza. I wonder if many of the foreign press knew that the PLO was founded three years
before
the Israelis ever occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and that the PLO wanted Israel wiped off the map. But in a ninety-second story, who has time to remind viewers that when the PLO was founded, Gaza was illegally occupied by Egypt, and the West Bank by Jordan, but Yasser Arafat did not mind those occupations? Where were the voices of the Palestinians then for their independent state?

I wanted to think that the journalists stationed there, some of whom I knew, had better sense, but in order to protect their relationship and not offend Muslim or PLO sources they had to be careful about what they reported. It was from this perspective that I watched the West fall further under the spell of anti-West, anti-Israeli propaganda, just as it did during its coverage of Lebanon, which portrayed the Palestinians and Islamo-fascists as the victims instead of the aggressors. As Islamic aggression increased, the press slid more deeply into a submissive, easily manipulated relationship.

When I would visit my Christian Arab friends' houses in the West Bank and talk with the locals, they joked that the Muslims were playing the West like a violin. The Christians, whether in Lebanon or in Bethlehem in the West Bank, knew that the Islamic agenda was violently against anything non-Muslim. The West was ignorant and refused to learn and listen to what the Arabs and radical Muslims were openly saying to their people about what was in store:
"We will be victorious against the Jews. We will destroy Israel. We will conquer the Christians and claim the world for Islam. Islam will once again dominate the world.”
The radical Muslims knew the West was completely ignorant as to what was coming their way. The West’s biggest fault was continuing to judge the Middle East and trying to negotiate with it according to Western practices. The West didn’t have a clue about their culture and what was important in understanding Arab Muslims. Because of fear, intimidation, or a special agenda, Arabs can say one thing but believe something entirely different. When being questioned in an interview, their response can vary depending on a range of influences: religion, gender, money, fear, society, and uncertainty. If they are Muslim they can lie and deceive if it is good for Islam. If the interviewed subject is a woman she may answer in the broadest of terms for fear of retribution from the males in the family. People’s answers will be greatly influenced if they feel their financial or social position may be jeopardized. Usually they exercise herd mentality and voice the majority opinion. Uncertainty and fear concerning who is in power may leave them without an opinion or reiterating the talking points of the powers that be. Taking a position may bring retribution if power changes hands. Fear is the biggest enemy in getting the truth about something in the Middle East.