Why We Left Islam (6 page)

It’s hard to convey the degree to which someone like me, growing up under the Palestinian education system, is brainwashed. Every voice in authority speaks the same message: the message of Islam—
jihad
or hatred of the Jews—and things that no young mind should ever be subjected to.

I remember an occasion at Dar-Jaser High School in Bethlehem during Islamic studies when some of my classmates asked the teacher if it was permitted for Muslims to rape the Jewish women after we defeated them. His response was, “The women captured in battle have no choice in this matter; they are concubines and they need to obey their masters. Having sex with slave captives is not a ‘matter of choice for slaves’.” This was not merely the opinion of the teacher, but is clearly taught in the Qur’an:

Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hand as slaves, this is the law of Allah for you.
Qur’an 4:24

And elsewhere it says:

O prophet; we allowed thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowries, and the slaves whom thy right hand posseseth out of the booty which Allah hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, and of thy maternal aunt, who fled with thee to Medina, and any believing woman who hath given herself up to the prophet, if the prophet desired to wed her, a privilege to thee above the rest of the faithful.
Qur’an 33:50

We had no problem with Mohammad taking advantage of this privilege as he married around fourteen wives for himself and had several slave girls from the booty that he collected as a result of his victorious battles. We really never knew how many wives he had and that question was always a debatable issue to us. One of these wives was even taken from his own adopted son Zayd. After Zayd married her, Mohammad took interest. Zayd offered her to Mohammad, but it was not until a revelation came down from Allah
that Mohammad generously accepted Zayd’s offer. Others of Mohammad’s wives were Jewish captives forced into slavery after Mohammad beheaded their husbands and families. These were the things we learned about in our Islamic Studies course in high school. This was the man that we were supposed to emulate in every way. This was our Prophet, and it was from him and his sayings that we learned to hate Jews.

I remember one occasion in Bethlehem when all the viewers in a jam-packed theater clapped their hands with joy as we watched the movie
21 Days in Munich
. The moment we saw the Palestinians throwing grenades into the helicopter and killing the Israeli athletes, we all—hundreds of viewers—yelled, “
Allahu akbar!”
A slogan of joy.

In an attempt to change the hearts of Palestinians, the Israeli TV station would show Holocaust documentaries. I would sit and watch, cheering the Germans while I ate popcorn. My heart was so hardened, it was impossible for me to change my attitudes toward the Jews; only a “heart transplant” would do that job.

By the grace of God, I had something that very few of my classmates had. I had a mother who was a compassionate and contrarian voice—patiently trying to reach me in the midst of the deafening cacophony of hatred that surrounded me. She would try to teach me at home about what she called “a better plan.” However, it had little effect on me at the time, for my resolve was solid—I would live or die fighting against the Jews. But a mother never gives up.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother had been influenced by an American missionary couple. She had even asked them to secretly baptize her. However, when she refused to be baptized in a pond full of green algae, the missionary priest had to plead to the YMCA in Jerusalem to clear the pool of men, and my mother was then baptized. No one from our family knew.

Many times my mother would take me on trips to various museums in Israel. This had a very positive effect on me and I fell in love with archeology. I was fascinated with it. In my many arguments with her, I would directly tell her that the Jews and Christians had changed and corrupted the Bible. Her response was to
take me to the Scroll Museum in Jerusalem where she showed me the very ancient scroll of Isaiah—still intact. My mother made some of her most effective points using no words at all. Despite my mother’s patient and gentle attempts to reach me, I was unreachable. I would torment her with insults. I would call her an “infidel” who claimed that Jesus was the Son of God and a “damned American imperialist.” I would show her pictures in the newspaper of all the Palestinian teenagers who had been “martyred” as a result of clashing with the Israeli soldiers and I would demand that she give an answer. I hated her and many times I asked my father to divorce her and remarry a good Muslim woman.

Despite all of this, it was my mother—when I was thrown in the Muscovite Prison in Jerusalem—who went to the American Consulate in Jerusalem to try to get me out. The Muscovite Prison was a Russian compound that served as Jerusalem’s central prison for those who were caught inciting violence against Israel. My dear mother was so worried over the direction that my life was taking that her hair started to fall out. Her worries were not unfounded. During my time in jail I was initiated into Yasser Arafat’s Fatah terror group. Soon after, I was recruited by a well-known bomb maker from Jerusalem named Mahmoud Al-Mughrabi.

The time had come for more than mere protests and riots. Al-Mughrabi and I arranged to meet on Bab-El-Wad Street at the Judo-Star Martial Arts Club run by his father near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He gave me a very sophisticated explosive device that he had personally assembled. I was supposed to use the bomb—an explosive charge hidden in a loaf of bread—to blow up the Bank Leumi branch in Bethlehem. Mahmoud helped me smuggle the bomb, as did the Muslim Wakf—the religious police on the Temple Mount. From the Temple Mount, I walked out onto the platform with explosives and a timer in my hand. We walked along the walls and avoided all of the checkpoints. From there, I walked to the bus station and took a bus to Bethlehem. I was fully ready to give my life if I had to. I stood before the bank and my hand was literally ready to pitch the bomb at the front doors, when I saw some Palestinian children walking near the bank. At the last moment, I threw the bomb instead on the bank’s rooftop. And I
ran. As I reached the Church of the Nativity, I heard the explosion. I was so scared and so depressed that I couldn’t sleep for days. I was only sixteen years old. I wondered if I had killed anyone. That was the first time I came to grips with what it would be like having blood on my hands. I didn’t enjoy what I had done, but I felt compelled to do it because it was my duty.

It is also with difficulty that I recall to you this next story. It was my first attempt to lynch a Jew. Like swarms of locusts, stones were flying everywhere as we clashed with the Israeli soldiers. A group of us had set fire to a row of tires to use as a blockade. One soldier was hit with a rock. He chased after the kid who had hit him. Instead we caught the soldier. Like a pack of wild animals, we attacked him with everything we had. I had a club and I used it to pound him in the head until the club broke. Another teenager had a stick with a nail sticking out. He kept whacking the poor young man’s skull until he was covered with blood. We nearly killed him. Incredibly, as if with a final burst of adrenaline, he lunged across the blockade of burning tires and escaped to the other side where the other Israeli soldiers carried him to safety. From where he found the strength I do not know. But I think how glad I am now that he ran. Now, these many years later, it is hard for me to express how deeply it grieves me that I ever committed such acts. I am not the same person that I was in those days.

After I graduated from high school, my parents sent me to the United States to seek a higher education. I enrolled at what was then called the Loop College, located in the heart of downtown Chicago. When I arrived, I immediately became involved with many anti-Israeli social and political events. I still sincerely believed that the day was coming when the whole world would submit to Islam and then the whole world would realize just how much she owed the Palestinian people for all of their losses as the vanguard in the Islamic war against Israel.

The Loop College was full of various Islamist organizations. When I walked into the cafeteria, it was almost like walking into an Arab café in the Middle East. Various Islamist groups operated out of the school in those days, each competing for the recruitment of the other students. I immediately began devoting
my energies to serving as an activist for the PLO—the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I was supposed to be officially working as an interpreter and counselor for Arab students through an American program called CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) in which I was paid by grants from the United States government. The truth, however, is that much of what I did involved interpreting advertisements for events whose goal it was to win American sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Actually, “win sympathy” may be a rather misleading expression. We were attempting to brainwash the Americans—all of whom we viewed as being incredibly gullible. In Arabic, the advertisements for these events would openly use
jihadist
, anti-Semitic descriptions such as: “There will be rivers of blood. . . Come and support us to send out students to Southern Lebanon to fight the Israelis. . .” The English versions of the signs, on the other hand, would utilize fluffy and innocuous descriptions such as: “Middle Eastern cultural party, come and join us, we will be serving free lamb and baklava. . .” That was 1970.

Then came Black September. Black September is the month known throughout the Middle East as the time when King Hussein of Jordan moved to quash an attempt by the PLO in Jordan to overthrow his monarchy. Many Palestinians were killed during the conflict, which lasted for almost a year until July of ‘71. The end result of all this was the expulsion of the PLO and thousands of Palestinians from Jordan into Lebanon.

Of course, the conflict spilled over and affected the various Arab student organizations at the Loop College. It was very disheartening and frustrating for me to watch, as I knew that without unity, the cause of Islam—the cause of the
jihad
in America—would get nowhere. It was at this time that I joined Al-Ikhwan— the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a father organization to dozens of other terrorist organizations throughout the world. I was not alone in joining the Brotherhood, either; there were hundreds of other Muslim students from all over the United States that also joined in those days. I believed that working as an activist for the Muslim Brotherhood was the best way to help bring about a much-needed
unity among Muslims; not Palestinian Muslims or Jordanian Muslims, but rather one Muslim
ummah
—one universal Islamic community—under the one umbrella of Islam. To this end, a Jordanian
sheikh
named Jamal Said came to the United States to recruit students. The recruitment meetings were held in basements or rented hotel rooms. Muslim students flocked from all over the U.S. to attend the meetings and listen to Sheikh Jamal Said. Jamal had an almost legendary status and reputation. He was an associate of Abdullah Azzam, who is famous throughout the Middle East for being the mentor of none other than Osama bin Laden.

People often ask me if I think that there are terrorist cells operating within the United States. There can be no question that there are. While so many of America’s college students in the ‘70s were experimenting with drugs, protesting their government, and participating in the birth of the “flower child” movement, they were oblivious to the other underground revolution that was being birthed by radical Muslim students across the country. Within Islam, it is taught that when the Muslims enter a country to conquer it for Allah, there are various stages to that “invasion” if you will. Those were the early stages of the most subversive movement that this country will ever know. It was the birth of the
jihadist
movement in America.

I eventually moved to California, where I met my wife, a Catholic from Mexico. I wanted to convert her to Islam. I told her the Jews had corrupted the Bible and she asked me to show her some examples of this corruption. She issued me a challenge: She challenged me to study the Bible for myself to see if indeed all of the things that I had been taught about the Bible and the Jews were true or not. Thus began a radical life-changing journey. At this point I had to go and buy a Bible and I started reading it and it had the word “Israel” all over it. The very word I hated was throughout the book. I thought,
how do you explain this?
I started thinking the Jews really didn’t do us any harm but we hated them and accused them of this horrible stuff.

This was a journey that for a time, until I found resolution to my questions, was an obsession. I would stay up late at night and read, poring through the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. I read
the Old Testament and the New. I studied Jewish history. I prayed and I wrestled with all of the things that I was discovering. Many of my beliefs that formed the very foundations of my Islamic worldview were beginning to crumble. Confronted with the obvious conflict between the worldview and the religion of my youth and the piercing quality of the Bible, I prayed to God for guidance. In the mid-1990s, I went to a family reunion in southern California where a row broke out after I defended the biblical matriarch Rachel, whom my uncle had called a “Jewish whore.”

“You deserve to be spat at,” my uncle said, and they threw me out of the house.

I realized they knew nothing about history; all they knew was the same propaganda that I had been taught.

My convictions led me to renounce violence and convert to Christianity, but it was at a price: My family disowned me and my own brother threatened to kill me for abandoning Islam. Now I hope that by speaking the truth I will open other people’s eyes.

Today, I am the founder of the Walid Shoebat Foundation. My life mission and driving passion is to bring the truth about the Jews and Israel to the world, all the while allowing Christ to bring healing to my own soul through repentance and the pursuit of reconciliation. I have set out to untiringly bring the cause of Israel to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. I thank God for giving me the opportunity to seek forgiveness and reconciliation from the Jewish people everywhere throughout the world. To anyone who will listen, I tell my story. In addition, despite numerous threats to my life—including a $10 million bounty issued against me—I continue to speak out against the hatred and the Islamo-Nazi lies that I was indoctrinated under. Until they come for me, I will continue to speak out. Yes, today I say to the whole world,
I love Jews!
And I truly believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people whose purpose is to give light to Arabs and to the whole world—if only we would allow them.