Franklin Lamb

From Lebanon with Hate

Increasingly a marionette of the US Zionist lobby, Ms. Brigitte Gabriel has enjoyed a few lucrative and unobstructed years of increasingly hysterical Muslim and Arab bashing. Recently however, she has attracted the attention of the FBI investigating her organization, “Act for America!” (actforamerica@donationnet.net) for possible hate crimes and financial irregularities, according to US Congressional Judiciary Committee sources.

Who is Bridgette Gabriel?

“The difference, my dear Christian friends, between Israel and the Arab world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil and this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no SOUL! They are dead set on killing and destruction. And in the name of something they call “Allah,” which is very different from the God we believe in, because our God is the God of love”. – Brigitte Gabriel, speaking at John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel Convention, July 27, 2007

Marjayoun, Lebanon — One imagines that all Americans, and people from every part of the globe and of sundry faiths, are touched emotionally upon encountering the natural beauty of the northern Biblical Holy Land that is South Lebanon. With its rugged vegetation-covered hills and valleys and more than 500 picturesque villages, many quite ancient and populated by warm, devout, and peaceful people, the area is hypnotic.

So it is for this observer, visiting Marjayoun (“meadow of springs” in Arabic), one of Lebanon’s most stunning towns and the home of the historic Cathedral of Saint Peter as well as beautiful historic mosques.

A lovely, modest, bucolic town of roughly 2,300 residents in winter and 3,500 in summer, Marjayoun sits majestically on a hill facing Mount Hermon to the east, Beaufort Castle, the 1,000-year old Crusader Castle above the Litani River and overlooking Mount Amel (jabal amel) to the west. Marjayoun’s fertile plains, some of the richest in the Middle East, extend southward into the Galilee and Syria’s Golan Heights.

Maid Brigitte of Marjayoun

Marjayoun has become notorious recently, in some circles, not just for decades of Israeli crimes, but also as the base whence Ms. Brigitte Gabriel, a local woman, appeared and launched her virulent strain of Islamophobia. Joining with the US-Israel Lobby, she has been organizing perhaps the most vicious hate campaign against Islam, Arabs, and Muslims ever witnessed in America.

There is no shortage of people in Marjayoun with varying views of “what happened to Miss Brigitte” and how she became so hateful toward her countrymen and became an Israeli collaborator. “She always loved the Israeli occupation of Marjayoun and over time just came to dislike Arabs of all types, even though as a Lebanese she is totally Arab,” one of her former neighbors explained.

Another disagreed, “Brigitte never really thought of herself as an Arab at all, rather she fantasized that she was ‘Phoenician’ and pointed out to her Arabs neighbors that ‘Phoenicians were in Lebanon long before the Arabs invaded and it belongs to us!’” According to a former classmate, when she was in middle school, Brigitte preferred French and would announce to classmates in Arabic class, “I don’t speak Arabic, I speak Lebanese!”

Before moving to Israel and eventually to the United States, Brigitte worked for Middle East TV, a Marjayoun-based station run by the South Lebanon Army (SLA) and funded by Israel. It moved to Cyprus for a period and was later purchased by Pat Robertson, who is now building a Christian Zionism Center in Israel.
After obtaining a green card by marrying an American, Brigitte set up a business selling her new country “insider information not available elsewhere “about the existential dangers posed by Islam and Arabs, based, she announced, “on my unique perspective having been nearly killed by them and rescued by Israel.”

Regarding recent Lebanese affairs, according to her former neighbors in South Lebanon, Brigitte has been a close supporter of the Phalange militia and SLA since her teenage years. According to her ACT office in Virginia Beach, Brigitte hopes to host the current Lebanese Forces warlord, Samir Geagea—five times convicted of murdering various Christian opponents and their children—during his upcoming March visit to the US.

Brigitte As Student of American History

One can just forget about Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine, the Bush Administration invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and its threatening much of the world, Brigitte sees a jihadist campaign against her adopted country going back to the very day America was founded. While Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Washington and Madison considered the Barbary pirates, who had operated for centuries along the coasts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, “nothing but petty tyrants” and “nests of banditti,” Brigitte knows better.

In her view, the founding fathers were simply duped because the Muslim pirates were in fact serious Jihadists using a promise in the Koran of Paradise and virgins if they warred against infidels, so they became pirates.

Nor is Brigitte, who lives not far from Monticello, Jefferson’s birthplace, impressed by Jefferson’s liberal views about religion. It may be recalled that the author of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia’s Act for Religious Freedom was most proud of his role as a resistance leader against British occupation:

“Where the preamble [to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom —Ed.] declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment that was proposed for the insertion of the words ‘Jesus Christ’ into the preamble was specifically rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindu, and Infidel of every denomination.” (Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom)

Jefferson might have had people like Brigitte in mind when he wrote:

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” (Notes on Virginia, 1782)

While religious tolerance and the existence of other religions did not pick Jefferson’s pocket, they are filling Brigitte’s as she panders to the uninformed, the bigoted, and the xenophobic.

Brigitte attracted attention from this observer, who previously had not heard of her, when she posted her July 2006 ‘Thank You Israel!’ letter expressing “heartfelt gratitude” for Israel’s attack on Lebanon. According to a former colleague of hers, this was drafted at Virginia Beach while working on her suntan in a period during which much of her birth country was being destroyed.

In nearly every speech, Marjayoun’s Maid routinely mentions the essential reminder that Israel, with its estimated 250-plus nuclear weapons and superpower military, needs more US money and servicemen to die in order to protect the apartheid regime from the fantastic threats from the Lebanese resistance and its supporters, which include a majority of her fellow Lebanese Christians.

Not your run of the mill democrat, Brigitte regularly complains to her audiences that:

“Hezbollah’s Shiite extremists began multiplying like rabbits and are out producing moderate Sunnis and Christians. Twenty-five years later they have produced enough people to vote themselves into 24 seats in the Lebanese parliament and now are a majority in Lebanon. Hamas is doing the same thing with the Palestinians as part of their ‘Resistance to Occupation.’

This is the same Hezbollah that Iran is threatening to unleash in America with suicide bomb attacks if America tries to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon to bomb Israel. They have cells in over 100 cities in the United States. Hamas has the largest terrorist infrastructure on American soil. This is what happens when you turn a blind eye to evil for decades, hoping it will go away.”

Recently Brigitte has been telling her audiences about a Des Moines, Iowa imam who not long ago offered the prayer to open the Iowa legislature. In this prayer the Muslim gentleman made a plea for “victory over those who disbelieve,” i.e., those who are atheists. That John Hagee and his ilk and countless rabbis say the same thing every day does not appear to have dawned on Brigitte.

While reassuring her audiences “that Islamic terrorism is, of course, a serious, global threat that we must — repeat, must — defeat,” Brigitte has recently been seeing another dark penumbra on the horizon: “But there is another threat to our safety, security and liberty that we must also defeat and that is the increasing threat of Cultural, Social and Civilization Jihad aided by the forces of American political correctness”:

“I am very troubled that in the name of tolerance and educating American children about the Muslim empire in history liberal American teachers get away with giving beginning Islamic teaching which may cause many to perhaps one day become Muslims. We have reports that in some classes teachers are allowing students to use calligraphy to copy parts of the Quran in Arabic as an enrichment activity. This has got to stop!

Westerners must mount a united front against Islamic law!

“I believe that the way Sharia will insinuate itself into our law would be through arbitration and mediation of domestic and financial disputes through an extra-judicial arbitration system condoned by our courts. That would entail setting up separate a Sharia law section of the American Arbitration Association overseen by Islamic law panels. Many agree with me and this should be a warning to all about how Sharia will spread through the proverbial legal back door.”

Brigitte urges Americans not to allow mosques to be built and suggests that if citizens observe one being constructed, it should be immediately reported to the FBI. Brigitte has joined Daniel Pipes and the thought-policing and silencing actions of AIPAC and its Zionist affiliates and instructs students that “if a college professor or public figure criticizes U.S. policies you have a patriotic duty to report this un-American activity to the Dean, or alert the media and authorities.”

For her Valentine’s Day message nest month Brigitte warns that “We must start doing more than exposing or resisting the advances of Islamofascism — we must go on the offensive to roll it back and fight for the bedrock values that made America the beacon of hope to the world. … The only real question is: Do we have the will to do what is necessary to stop Islamofascism, in whatever form it takes? Because, simply put, if we do, we will. If we don’t, we won’t. That’s it. Bottom line.”

Her message of hate, ridicule, and incitement to action against Islam is akin to shouting Fire! in a crowded theatre, and constitutes egregious and condemnable hate speech. Her rantings and extreme vitriolic hate speech are fundamentally un-American, un-Lebanese, and un-Christian. Her campaign should be vigorously rejected by all people of good-will, including those seeking simplistic explanations and solutions for the consequences of a catastrophic Bush Administration Middle East policy, which has caused so much death, destruction and desperation across the region.

The coming weeks may shed light on what US authorities intend to do about Bridgette’s violations of American hate laws.

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Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon

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Franklin P. Lamb, LLM,PhD
Director, Americans Concerned for
Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut

Board Member, The Sabra Shatila Foundation and the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Beirut-Washington DC
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp
fplamb@palestinecivilrightscampaign.org