The Islamic Religion...

Are Americans Being Deceived?

Remember the story of the frog and the scorpion? The frog was going to cross the lake and the scorpion wanted to cross over too. The scorpion said to the frog, "hey good fellow, might I have a ride over to the other side on your back?" Leery of the scorpion the frog answered with a strong "I think not ole enemy of mine, you will sting and kill me if I let you near my back". But, the scorpion being ever so charming in his approach, coerced the gentle frog into believing he would not sting him. "Oh no, my friend. I won't sting you or harm you in any way. I have no reason to do such a thing to you. I promise you are in safe hands. You are my friend and neighbor. I would never do that to you. You will be doing me a good deed to take me across". The frog, having been convinced of his safety allows the scorpion to climb onto his back and across the water they went. When they had swum about half way across the scorpion attacked the frog with an unmerciful full impact sting. While in excruciating pain and impending death, the frog asked the scorpion why he would do such a thing. "So why did you break your promise and sting me after all? We will both die, for you will now yourself drown." The scorpion proudly answered, "It is in my nature"!

We must always be ready to check our p's and q's when it comes to political agendas. And we surely should keep an open mind and suspicious eye on our enemies. We need to be careful to know who our enemy is and not allow the enemy to get close enough to catch us unawares like Satan did to Eve in the garden.

Brigitte Gabriel is a young Christian woman who has a story to tell and is telling it to America and other Christian nations as fast and strong as she can. Brigitte is an expert on the Middle East conflict and lectures nationally and internationally on the subject. She's the former news anchor of World News for Middle East television and the founder of AmericanCongressforTruth.com

Below are some selected excerpts from Brigitte Gabriel's speech delivered at the Intelligence Summit in Washington DC, Saturday February 18, 2006 taken from FrontPageMagazine.com 2/20/06. We have also included another speech she made to Columbia University for you to gleen more insight into your search for truth in the matter.

"We gather here today to share information and knowledge. Intelligence is not merely cold hard data about numerical strength or armament or disposition of military forces. The most important element of intelligence has to be understanding the mindset and intention of the enemy.

The West has been wallowing in a state of ignorance and denial for thirty years as Muslim extremist perpetrated evil against innocent victims in the name of Allah.

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.

As a victim of Islamic terror, I was amazed when I saw Americans waking up on September 12, 2001, and asking themselves "Why do they hate us?" The psychoanalyst experts were coming up with all sort of excuses as to what did we do to offend the Muslim World. But if America and the West were paying attention to the Middle East they would not have had to ask the question.

Simply put, they hate us because we are defined in their eyes by one simple word: "infidels." Under the banner of Islam "la, ilaha illa allah, muhammad rasoulu allah," > (None is god except Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah) they murdered Jewish children in Israel, massacred Christians in Lebanon, killed Copts in Egypt, Assyrians in Syria, Hindus in India, and expelled almost 900,000 Jews from Muslim lands. We Middle Eastern infidels paid the price then. Now infidels worldwide are paying the price for> indifference and shortsightedness.

Tolerating evil is a crime. Appeasing murderers doesn't buy protection. It earns one disrespect and loathing in the enemy's eyes. Yet apathy is the weapon by which the West is committing suicide. Political correctness forms the shackles around our ankles, by which Islamists are leading us to our demise.

America and the West are doomed to failure in this war unless they stand up and identify the real enemy: Islam. You hear about Wahabbi and Salafi Islam as the only extreme form of Islam. All the other Muslims, supposedly, are wonderful moderates. Closer to the truth are the pictures of the irrational eruption of violence in reaction to the cartoons of Mohammed printed by a Danish newspaper. From burning embassies, to calls to butcher those who mock Islam, to warnings that the West be prepared for another holocaust, those pictures have given us a glimpse into the real face of the enemy. News pictures and video of these events represent a canvas of hate decorated by different nationalities who share one common ideology of hate, bigotry and intolerance derived from one source: authentic Islam.

An Islam that is awakening from centuries of slumber to re-ignite its wrath against the infidel and dominate the world. An Islam which has declared "Intifada" on the West. America and the West can no longer afford to lay in their lazy state of overweight ignorance. The consequences of this mental disease are starting to attack the body, and if they don't take the necessary steps now to control it, death will be knocking soon.

If you want to understand the nature of the enemy we face, visualize a tapestry of snakes. They slither and they hiss, and they would eat each other alive, but they will unite in a hideous mass to achieve their common goal of imposing Islam on the world.

This is the ugly face of the enemy we are fighting. We are fighting a powerful ideology that is capable of altering basic human instincts. An ideology that can turn a mother into a launching pad of death. A perfect example is a recently elected Hamas official in the> Palestinian Territories who raves in heavenly joy about sending her three sons to death and offering the ones who are still alive for the cause.

It is an ideology that is capable of offering highly educated individuals such as doctors and lawyers far more joy in attaining death than any respect and stature, life in society is ever capable of giving them.

The United States has been a prime target for radical Islamic hatred and terror. Every Friday, mosques in the Middle East ring with shrill prayers and monotonous chants calling death, destruction and damnation down on America and its people. The radical Islamists' deeds have been as vile as their words. Since the Iran hostage crisis, more than three thousand Americans have died in a terror campaign almost unprecedented in its calculated cruelty along with thousands of other citizens worldwide. Even the Nazis did not turn their own children into human bombs, and then rejoice at their deaths as well the deaths of their victims.

This intentional, indiscriminate and wholesale murder of innocent American citizens is justified and glorified in the name of Islam. America cannot effectively defend itself in this war unless and until the American people understand the nature of the enemy that we face. Even after 9/11 there are those who say that we must "engage" our terrorist enemies, that we must "address their grievances".

Their grievance is our freedom of religion. Their grievance is our freedom of speech. Their grievance is our democratic process where the rule of law comes from the voices of many not that of just one prophet. It is the respect we instill in our children towards all religions. It is the equality we grant each other as human beings sharing a planet and striving to make the world a better place for all humanity. Their grievance is the kindness and respect a man shows a woman, the justice we practice as equals under the law, and the mercy we grant our enemy. Their grievance cannot be answered by an apology for who or what we are.

Our mediocre attitude of not confronting Islamic forces of bigotry and hatred wherever they raised their ugly head in the last 30 years, has empowered and strengthened our enemy to launch a full scale attack on the very freedoms we cherish in their effort to> impose their values and way of life on our civilization.

If we don't wake up and challenge our Muslim community to take action against the terrorists within it, if we don't believe in ourselves as Americans and in the standards we should hold every patriotic American to, we are going to pay a price for our delusion. For the sake of our children and our country, we must wake up and take action. In the face of a torrent of hateful invective and terrorist murder, America's learning curve since the Iran hostage crisis is so shallow that it is almost flat. The longer we lay supine, the more difficult it will be to stand erect".

Brigitte Gabriel delivered this stirring speech before the Columbia University Conference on the Middle East and Academic Integrity in New York City in March, 2005.

Indoctrination in the Arab World and propaganda advocacy in American university classrooms.

I'm honored to bring Columbia a unique perspective concerning the academic freedom issue. I see similarities between the issue and my personal experiences growing up. I was raised in an Arabic society in Lebanon that took impressionable young minds and filled them with propaganda. Minds that were young and didn't know any better. I am an eyewitness and a victim of the indoctrination of hate education, racism, intolerance, intimidation and fabricated lies by my government and religious influences.

This indoctrination was for one purpose: To eradicate the newborn state of Israel; to foment hatred and wipe out Jewish presence in an Arab dominated world. For Arabs, the simple existence of Israel was viewed as a catastrophe...al nakbah! This pan Arab hate indoctrination was a reaction to Jews returning to their homeland after Arabic and Islamic belief for 1400 years that the Yahuds were vanquished and subjugated as Dhimmi.

I believe hate-motivated indoctrination fosters irrational thinking and faulty reasoning whether it influenced my education as a child in Lebanon or the "advocacy education" that roils the classrooms here at Columbia. This is the root cause for the controversy swirling around several members of the Middle East Asia Languages Arts and Culture (MEALAC) faculty and their alleged intimidation of students and other faculty.

What is at stake is our future, the students of today who will become tomorrow's leaders. If their minds are poisoned with irrational hatred and the hate is not combated and eliminated, then academic freedom and free speech in an open marketplace of competitive ideas is dead.

But let me begin by talking about my experience growing up in Lebanon where doctrinal hatred of Jews and Israel was ever present.

From television programs to national songs, hourly radio newscasts and newspapers, our citizens were fed a steady diet of lies poisoning our attitudes towards the Jews. Israel - Aaesrael , Israel is the devil. Al-Yahud shayateen, The Jews are evil. Sarakou Al-Ard Al Arabiyah. They stole Arab land. Al Wakt al wahid allazi yassir endana salam huwa lamma naqtul kul al yahud wa narmihum bil bahr, The only time we'll have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea. Every time Israel was mentioned it was attached to the phrase, Al adew al Israeli. The Israeli enemy.My country saw nothing wrong with taking a generation hostage, molding them into misguided weapons.

My country and others saw nothing wrong with practicing this form of mind abuse. Of taking a generation hostage, molding them into misguided weapons; some willing to be martyred in the name of Islam or Palestinian nationalism. It's a form of mental child abuse taking place in every Arab country.

As a Maronite Lebanese I went to a Christian private school. The pervasive national animosity toward the Jews affected us there to the extent that our Bibles did not include nor did we study the Old Testament. We didn't even know it was a part of the bible. We were told that the Torah is the enemy's book. We were young. We didn't know any better. These were our teachers. We respected them and trusted them.

Had I not had the opportunity for an up-close and personal experience with the Israelis, I would have had nothing by which to judge or compare what I was being told by my society.

My eyes were opened when I spent 22 days in a hospital in northern Israel in the early 1980's. I watched unbelievably as Israeli doctors treated my mother wounded by an artillery shell before he treated the wounded Israeli soldier lying next to her. They treated Lebanese Muslims and Palestinian militia fighters on a par with wounded IDF soldiers. I was shocked that this enemy, hated by the Arabs, treated us all with utmost courtesy, compassion, and respect. It was a transforming experience countering the lies and all the propaganda that I had been indoctrinated in as a child.

Ultimately, I made a commitment to leave my home country and move to Israel to be with these people whose values I respected.

I ended up working in Israel as a television news anchor. I never felt like a second class citizen in Israel. To solidify my commitment to Israel I buried my beloved parents remains in the same Mount Zion cemetery in Jerusalem where the grave of a righteous gentile Oscar Shindler would one day be. I was tired of the lies, exaggerations and manipulations of Arabic society, which brings me to another parallel concerning academic freedom and objectivity.

Where is objectivity in the Arab world when they claim that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a CIA/Mossad plot? Where is objectivity on campuses when similar claims and distortions are made? Can there be objectivity when advocacy and hatred is involved? Professor Richard Bullet was right when he coined the term "advocacy education". How can a student get the facts by which to make a decision when professors advocate in their courses using ideological distortions to force form opinion instead of providing objective information for students to form their own opinions?The lies that Arab society tried to teach me as a child in Lebanon are the same as those spread under the guise of academic freedom on the campus of Columbia.

The lies that Arab society tried to teach me as a child in Lebanon are the same as those spread under the guise of academic freedom on the Morningside campus of Columbia. During a recent speech at a Columbia Law school forum, Professor Massad repeated 24 times in a half-hour that, "Israel is a racist Jewish apartheid oppressive state." His exercise in academic freedom ignores the facts. As a Middle Easterner brought up on this patent "Israel is a racist state" propaganda, I discovered it is total hate inspired nonsense. I've seen withmy own eyes what kind of society Israel is. I consider Israel to be one of the most multi-racial and multi-cultural countries in the world. There are no racial restrictions on becoming a citizen of Israel like there are in many Arab countries. Remember, Jews can't live in the neighboring Arab Kingdom of Jordan or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Israel's multi-racial society belies the charge of racism. More than 100 different countries of the world are represented in the population of Israel. Consider how the Israeli government spent tens of millions of dollars airlifting more than 40,000 black Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984 and 1991. Since 2001 Israel has reached out to help others taking in non-Jewish refugees from Lebanon, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Liberia, Congo and even Bosnian Muslims. How many such refugees have the 22 states in the Arab league taken in? The Arab world won't even give Palestinian refugees citizenship in their host countries.

Over one million Arabs are full Israel citizens. An Arab sits on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are Arab political parties expressing views inimical to the State of Israel sitting in the Knesset, Israel's parliament. Women are equal partners in Israel and have complete human rights. Professor Massad, show me an Arab nation with a Jew in their government. Show me an Arab country with half as many Jewish citizens as Israel has Arab citizens. I'll borrow some of your academic freedom now and say that Arab nations are the real racist and oppressive states.

In the David Project film, "Columbia Unbecoming," you hear a word familiar to us in the Arab world mentioned by these brave students and Rabbi Charles Sheer, the emeritus executive director of Barnard /Columbia Hillel. The word is: intimidation.

And people here at Columbia are up in arms that intimidation is mentioned? Let me tell you about intimidation. I know what using fear to deny freedom of thought is. In parts of the Arab world freely expressing your thoughts can get you killed. I said things as a news anchor that the Arabs did not like and it got my picture published in Hezbollah and PLO newspapers and magazines saying I should be killed.

What sort of academic atmosphere do you think that would foster here on American campuses? I'd like to think the ACLU would be up in arms and coming to my defense. As one who escaped repression and came to America I'm shocked that such elitists as the ACLU are the enemy to the pursuit of freedom. That people in America support the oppressive actions that I left in the Middle East simply astounds me.

Here at Columbia or DePaul I find more irony. When you speak out as a student you are told by some of the MEALAC faculty to leave the classroom. In the case of Professor Thomas Klocek at DePaul University you are suspended without due process for challenging lies about Israelis being Nazi occupiers by a Students for Justice in Palestine campus group. These are matters to be addressed by the Columbia administration, the ACLU and the AAUP now. What we're getting is people hiding behind psychobabble about "academic freedom and free speech." What we see is freedom being used to spread lies, bar the facts, bend the truth and poison the minds of future leaders.

Speaking for millions who suffered and those still suffering under tyranny and oppression... we don't understand how people in American universities, who have enjoyed freedom for so long, can abuse that very freedom by doing things that hinder the spread of freedom throughout the world.

I see another parallel involving history that is happening here at Columbia and on other campuses. Anti-Semites and anti-Israelis have tapped into that part of the DNA of most Jews that paralyzes them from being confrontational when attacked.It's as if the Arabs studied Krystallnacht...the night of broken glass November 9th, 1938 in Nazi Germany. Scare Jews off and they will not respond or won't come back. Turning academic freedom into academic intimidation is the tactic being used here at Columbia and other campuses across the nation.

These ideologues know that they are teaching students who have no background or prior knowledge of the Middle East situation. What they are doing is an extension of what is taking place in schools in Palestinian and Muslim madrasses across the Islamic crescent. Repeat a lie enough and it becomes truth. You listen to what we say. If you don't there will be consequences.

I have heard that a graduate student at the School of International and Public Affairs here at Columbia approached a professor about holding programs on global anti-Semitism. The tenured faculty member said that he would be "blacklisted." Blacklisted by other Columbia faculty for even raising the topic. Further, this young graduate student was told not to even think of bringing up the subject of Genocide in the Sudan! Sounds like intellectual fascism to me.What shocked me was how totally unprepared teenage Jews are when it comes to understanding the history of the Middle East conflict.

This brings me to something I was surprised to discover. I have always known that Jews are into studying and debating and being informed people. I knew about the Bar and Bat Mitzvah preparation and really thought that American Jewish children were prepared for life. What shocked me, really confounded me was how totally unprepared teenage Jews are when it comes to understanding the history of the Middle East conflict. The Jewish community has let freshmen down in preparing them to face what biased or hate filled college environments are throwing at them today.

Let me tell you something else about hate in the Arabic environment. Arab children are taught hatred of the Jew from their mother's milk. They are constantly bombarded with stories and information presenting the Jew as barbaric, conniving, manipulative, warmongering people. You name it. While the Jew is taught patience, humility, service and charity to all:Olam tikkun olam-to repair the world. No wonder professors with an agenda of hate propaganda can intimidate and belittle young Jewish students. It is time for the Jewish community to wake up. It is time that Jewish youths are prepared to do battle in the open cockpit of debate in college classrooms.

It is also time for tenured faculty at Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, DePaul, Duke, the University of California at Irvine to find their moral compasses and rise up with their colleagues and administrations to reclaim their campuses from the poisonous indoctrination of hate. Reclaim it and return the classroom to an intimidation free environment for young minds to learn the truth through open debate and give them, us and the world a better future.

Thank you.

Published: Sunday, May 08, 2005

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