Talk:Brigitte Gabriel

Notes from 2004 interview
According to a 2004 interview at Duke University (see link on lower lefthand corner of American Congress for Truth home page), Brigitte Gabriel grew up in a southern Lebanon town near the Israeli border. The town, which appears as Marj 'Uyun (at coordinates H-9) on the 1976 map and as Marji'yun on the  1986 map, is located less than five statute miles from the "Armistice Line" with Israel.

In the interview, Gabriel says that her family's home was half-destroyed when bombs meant for a nearby military base accidentally struck her home.


 * "... Klayaa near the south Lebanese army base in Marj Uyun. The army worked to prevent Hezbollah outposts from growing near the Israeli border ..." "Lebanese Catholic expresses solidarity with Israeli soldiers," Catholic News Service, August 4, 2006.

In the interview, Gabriel says that her parents had been married 22 years without issue, then, when her mother was 55 and her father 60, they had her and she was an only child. She first says that they were both retired by this time, but then adds that her father operated a restaurant and was involved in real estate, and that she grew up hearing talk about religion and politics. Discussion was anti-Israeli, equating Israel with the devil. She says that she attended a private Christian school but that her Bible did not contain the books of the Old Testament as those were associated with the Talmud and were not allowed.

Following the bombing of her home, she says that they hid in a bomb shelter, without electricity, water or food, and that she and her mother foraged for grass, etc., to eat. She says that the renters who rented from her family also lived in the bomb shelter and that there were 9 children living in a single room. She was the oldest child.

She describes Palestinian atrocities against Christians. She says that the Palestinians would park their tank(s) and cannons in front of their bomb shelter and shoot at Israel, then drive their tank away, knowing that Israel would shoot back and kill them hiding in the bomb shelter.

She says that Christians were massacred by Palestinians for no other reason than that they were Christians.

People from the village, she says, would go to the Israelis and beg for help and the Israelis would come in the night to bring milk to the children and food, and ammunition. They would take the Christian men and take them and train them inside Israel. Even though the Lebanese were educated, they didn't know how to defend themselves. This was how they stayed alive for seven years.

The Israelis came into Lebanon to liberate them in 1982 because Hezbollah had joined with the Palestinians, she says. Her mother was wounded in the shelling, taken to a shelled-out hospital in the village tended by an Israeli doctor and two Israeli nurses, then taken in an Israeli ambulance (with a Lebanese driver) (a ten minute drive) to Israel for medical treatment. (At this time she was a teenager.) At the border, the driver becomes an Israeli driver who took them to an Israeli hospital an hour away.

After relating an experience of kindness at the Israeli hospital, she says that she broke out sobbing as she had "experienced civilization for the first time" in her life. After 22 days at the Israeli hospital, Gabriel and her mother returned to Lebanon and she cut her hands on the barbed wire, holding so tight that they bled, because she did not want to return.

She returned to Israel three years later, in 1985, after she got a job as a news anchor with Middle East News. She also buried both of her parents in Jerusalem at Mt. Zion. She dug up her mother and brought her body to be buried in Jerusalem at the Oscar Schindler Cemetery before she left for the U.S.


 * Actually, Oskar Schindler is buried at the Christian Cemetery at Mount Zion in Israel.

Note: Very similar information and nearly exact phrases, sentences and passages as those in the 2004 video-taped interview (actually more of a narrative than an interview) can be found in this August 11, 2005, "interview"&mdash;"Islam’s Torture of Lebanon-Brigitte Gabriel, blood her family, nation shed for being Christian"&mdash;by Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMag.com (posted by Free Republic).

From "Freedom's Promise"
"Freedom's Promise," American Family Association Journal, July 2005:

"As a first generation immigrant to this great land of the free and home of the brave, I am proud of America, the dream that became my address.

"My home in Lebanon was destroyed by shelling and I lived in an 8 X 10-foot bomb shelter for seven years between the ages of 10 and 17. I was robbed of my youth and the freedoms even the poorest of American children take for granted. I ate grass to live, drank dirty water from a nearby spring and spent evenings in candlelight covering my ears from the sound of the bombs exploding around me. Once, at age 13, I went to bed dressed in my Sunday best because I wanted to look pretty for burial if I was killed by the Muslims. My only crime was that I was a Christian in what was once the only predominantly Christian country in the Middle East before Islamic Jihad took hold and turned it into a terrorist haven."

Donation Email
The following is at the end of an email posted August 27, 2006, on Noisy Room Blog: "The 23 anti-Israel members of Congress" ... "Courtesy of the American Congress for Truth:"


 * "I at American Congress for Truth have no employees, no assistants, and no body. I am the one who reads about 40 articles per day to stay updated on current issues, read the emails to the website and answer them (we receive an average of 500 per day), give the interviews, write the thank you notes which I sent to those of you generous enough to support our cause, and return the phone calls. I also double as the janitor, the secretary, the bookkeeper and the delivery person to Office Max and to the post office. I work 16 hours a day every day including weekend. So please have some patience and some mercy with me when I come short of your expectation once in a while. I am only human.


 * "For those of you who sent nice constructive emails bringing this to my attention I thank you from the bottom of my heart. For those who sent nasty letters, threatening and questioning my credibility please count to ten next time before writing. The difference between nasty and nice is 30 seconds. Have mercy on someone who dedicated her life to fight radical Islamists, something many of you cannot and are not willing to do.


 * "I have quit my job in 2002 and formed American Congress for Truth sacrificing my livelihood. I not only have not been supported financially, but also have spent my own kids’ college fund to run the organization. ACT has grown to have thousands of members in all 50 states and 20 countries outside of America. If you see any value in what this organization does, we need your financial support.


 * "Once we are funded and have a staff, there will be a team of people who will handle this instead of me where oversights will be eliminated.


 * "I thank you for your support.


 * "Brigitte Gabriel"

Relocation pending ref
I'm relocating this section pending the addition of a reference. Without knowing the details, the suggestion that an entire population of Maronite Christians colloborated with the IDF re Sabra and Shatila strikes me as a very sweeping statement. --Bob Burton 06:56, 14 Sep 2006 (EDT)


 * Segments of Lebanon's Maronite Chrisitan population are intensely nationalistic and militant. These same populations collaborated with the Israeli military in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian refugees were murdered.

SW: Thank You Brigitte
'''I was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ, but both of my parents are of Lebanese origin, even though they were born in a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. They explained to me that the hatred of radical Islamists is embedded in their culture, just as Gabriel's book's title suggests "Because They Hate". They are taught to hate from birth until their last day on earth, and not only hate Christians and Jews, but also peaceful Muslims that do not share their radical beliefs.'''

I saw Gabriel on Pastor John Hagee's morning show on TBN this week and I was not surprised to hear her describe the attrocities and the horrendous acts that went on when she and her family lived in Lebanon.

We have to let the world know that the ultimate goal of radical Islamists IS the annihilation of Israel, and all western cultures, they want their world to live under their evil laws of tyranny, which are man-made, not God-made.

'''Seems like they have a tough time realizing that if God wanted them to have Israel, it would have happened long time ago. They tried in 1948 and they failed, they tried again in 1956, 1967, and in 1973 and failed everytime to gain control of God's land. It does not belong to the Muslims, their land is Saudi Arabia and all the other countries around it, and that's the way it's been since the days when Hagar and Ishmael were banished there, and they will not gain control of the Holy Land no matter how hard they try.'''

'The Book of Genesis 12:3 clearly states "I will bless those who bless Israel, and I will curse those who curse her",'' and time and time again, anyone who cursed Israel in the past, was cursed, the Babylonians, the Romans, The Nazis, and radical Islamic groups like the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah, and a handful of others. While their more moderate neighbors like Jordan, and pro-western countries in the Persian Gulf (except Saudi Arabia) to the east have prospered over the past few decades, radical Islamic groups only keep digging themselves into deeper pits, and I truly believe that it is God's curse on them.''' --Magnum Mike 16:12, 26 January 2007 (EST)