Free Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America by Brigitte Gabriel

always drowsy and slept a lot. Whenever I woke up, my mother was right there. She really did love me higher than the sky, and deeper than the ocean, and bigger than the whole wide world.
    The destruction of our house was big news in town because we were the first victims of the war that had now come to southern Lebanon. Since my father was one of the most respected community leaders and spent much of his time at the hospital with me, my room was crowded with visitors coming to check on me and offer their condolences. From all the talk going on around me at the hospital we learned what had happened on that terrible November night.
    The multiple explosions that had rained down on us were Katyusha rockets, launched from Elkhiam, the Muslim town across the valley. The Shia Muslims of Elkhiam were staunch Communists and allies of the PLO. We would come to know their Katyusha rockets well. The Palestinians and their leftist Muslim allies seemed to have an endless supply. Once primitive World War II-era rockets, these have developed over the years to become very effective in laying waste to large areas. Fired in rapid succession from multiple tubes on a single launcher, they carpet an area with high explosives in seconds, creating widespread devastation.
    The first rocket the Muslims fired to check their aim that night hit its intended target, the army base up the hill behind our house. But the force of the rocket’s firing tilted the launcher down a fraction of an inch, so the rest of the rockets fell fifty yards short, landing in and around our house. It was luck for our town that the Lebanese army base above my house didn’t take the full brunt of the bombardment and was able to return fire. That was the only thing that prevented the combined forces of the PLO and the Muslims from overrunning Marjayoun that night. The Muslims' poor aim was good for Marjayoun, but bad for us. It changed the course of our family’s life and my future.
    I spent the next few days in a fuzzy, semiconscious state. I wanted to get out of the hospital and away from the doctors and nurses. I would carry an intense fear of hospitals and people in white coats for many years to come. After I threatened to run away if they left me there, my parents talked with the doctor, and arrangements were made for me to sleep at home at night and come back to the hospital during the day so the staff could check my progress and change my bandages.
    Leaving the hospital was a relief, but I would not have been so happy if I had known what kind of life awaited us. Half of our once beautiful home was gone, and what remained was severely damaged. The living-room and family-room walls had collapsed. Blood from my injury was splattered all over my bedroom—on the walls, on the carpet, on the twisted metal of my bed’s headboard. I had lost so much blood that it had dripped from the mattress onto the floor, covering an area half the size of the bed. The edges of my mattress were burned from the fire that accompanied the blast. The only part of the mattress that wasn’t burned was the area soaked in my blood. It was a miracle that I was still alive. As we surveyed the house, we realized that my father would have been killed if my mother hadn’t forced him to come back inside with her. Yet if they hadn’t gone outside in the first place to check out what had happened, both of them would probably have been killed in the room with the heater. The table where they had been sitting was buried under rubble. For us to have survived at all could mean only one thing: there was some higher power out there that didn’t want us to die yet. That was all my young mind could comprehend. The next seven years would be miserable, the days endless, and the fear of losing my life more real than the air I breathed.
    To a ten-year-old, all this—the civil war and the attack against us— was bewildering. Just as people asked “Why do they hate us?” after 9/11, one evening I asked my father,