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

“Why did they do this to us?” He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say. “The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us.” This hate was not because we had armies in the Middle East or because we supported Israel or for any of the reasons people easily turn to today. It was because we were Christians, infidels.
    As a child, I was just too young to understand all the political implications, but I understood one thing: people wanted to kill me simply because I was a Christian. As I grew older I would discover more by watching television, and seeing the massacres, kidnappings, suicide bombings, and destruction inflicted by Muslims against non-Muslims worldwide. I would hear the hatred and bigotry espoused by mullahs in mosques televised throughout the Middle East and eventually throughout the world. Today I live on another continent eight thousand miles away from Lebanon. I sat watching television with my American children on September 11, 2001, crying as I heard the screams of family members looking for their loved ones buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center. It was my children who now looked at me and asked: “Mom! Who is Osama bin Laden and why does he call us infidels?"
    Different generation, different nationality, different continent, twenty-five years apart. Same enemy: radical Islam.

3.
     

LIFE UNDER TERROR
     
    By the time I returned from the hospital, every aspect of our lives had changed radically for the worse. My father had bought corrugated metal and used it to replace the walls that had fallen down in our family room. He put clear plastic sheeting on what was supposed to be a small window between the metal sheets. I lay in the family room on a torn metal couch. It was a very dark room. Winter made it gloomier, since we lived in the mountains and barely had a sunny day for three months in the wintertime. It was freezing cold despite running a kerosene stove in the middle of the room. The metal walls adopted the temperature of the cold mountains more than the meager warmth radiating from the little heater. The nights were scary, as the metal sheets would bang and rub against each other in the wind. The plastic sheeting on the window would breathe in and out depending on the flow of the wind. Perhaps the worst change was that now my religion was a matter of life and death. Most of the three thousand people who lived in Marjayoun were Christians, with a few Muslims living in their own neighborhood at the edge of town. However, in southern Lebanon, a large majority of the population is Shia Muslim, and the vast majority of the Palestinians were Muslim. Marjayoun was boxed in by Palestinian enclaves and hostile Muslim villages and towns to the east, north, and west. To the south was the Christian village of Klaia, numbering barely nine hundred inhabitants. South of Klaia was Israel.
    Even before that first bombardment, relations with our Muslim neighbors were tense because of clashes between Christians and Muslims in other parts of Lebanon. Now the fear had hit home.
    A lot of Muslims poured in from other Muslim countries, such as Iran, the founder and supporter of Hezbollah, one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world today. They also came from Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt. The Lebanese civil war was not between the Lebanese; it was a holy war declared on the Christians by the Muslims of the Middle East.
    They started massacring the Christians in city after city. The Western media seldom reported these horrific events. Most of the press was located in West Beirut, controlled by the PLO and the Muslims. One of the most ghastly acts was the massacre in the Christian city of Damour, 1 where thousands of Christians were slaughtered like sheep. The combined forces of the PLO and the Muslims would enter a bomb shelter and see a mother and a father hiding with a little baby. They would tie