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Lebanese-American author and anti-Islam activist

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Brigitte Gabriel بريجيت غابرييل
Brigitte Gabriel speaking in 2016
Born	Hanan Qahwaji (1964-10-21) October 21, 1964 (age 60) Marjayoun, Lebanon
Nationality	Lebanese and American
Other names	Nour Semaan (alternative nom de plume) Brigitte Tudor
Occupation(s)	Author, political activist, lecturer, journalist
Years active	1986–present
Website	American Congress for Truth, ACT! for America

Brigitte Gabriel (Template:Lang-ar; born Hanan Qahwaji, 21 October 1964) is a Lebanese-American conservative author, anti-Islam activist, and founder of the anti-Muslim group ACT! for America.

Early life and education

Brigitte Gabriel was born in the Marjeyoun District of Lebanon to a Maronite Christian couple, a first and only child after over twenty years of marriage. She says that during the Lebanese Civil War, Islamic militants launched an assault on a Lebanese military base near her family's house and destroyed her home. Gabriel, who was ten years old at the time, was injured by shrapnel in the attack. She says that she and her parents were forced to live underground in all that remained, an 8-by-10-foot (2.4 by 3.0 m) bomb shelter for seven years, with only a small kerosene heater, no sanitary systems, no electricity or running water, and little food. She says she had to crawl in a roadside ditch to a spring for water to evade Muslim snipers.

At one point in the spring of 1978, a bomb explosion caused her and her parents to become trapped in the shelter for two days. They were eventually rescued by three Christian militia fighters, one of whom befriended Gabriel but was later killed by a land mine.

Gabriel wrote that in 1978 a stranger warned her family of an impending attack by the Islamic militias on all Christians. She says that her life was saved when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in Operation Litani. Later, when her mother was seriously injured and taken to an Israeli hospital, Gabriel was surprised by the humanity shown by the Israelis, in contrast to the constant propaganda against the Jews she saw as a child. She said of her experience:

I was amazed that the Israelis were providing medical treatment to Palestinian and Muslim gunmen...These Palestinians and Muslims were sworn, mortal enemies, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of Jews. Yet, Israeli doctors and nurses worked feverishly to save their lives. Each patient was treated solely according to the nature of his or her injury. The doctor treated my mother before he treated an Israeli soldier lying next to her because her injury was more severe than his. The Israelis did not see religion, political affiliation, or nationality. They saw only people in need, and they helped.

After graduating from high school, Gabriel completed a one-year business administration course at a YWCA in 1984.

Career

Using the pseudonym Nour Semaan, Gabriel was a news anchor for World News, an Arabic-language evening news broadcast of Middle East Television, which "was then run by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to spread his politically conservative, Pentecostal faith in the Middle East." The broadcasts covered Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Gabriel reported on the Israeli withdrawal from central Lebanon, the Israeli Security Zone (occupied South Lebanon), and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. She moved to Israel before emigrating in 1989 to the United States.

In February 2017, Gabriel said that she provided a "national security briefing" at the White House. She met with aides at the White House in March 2017.

ACT! for America

Main article: ACT! for America

Her organization, ACT! for America, has been described by The New York Times as drawing "on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans"; and as anti-Islamic by other sources (Newsweek and The Independent). According to The Washington Post, the organization "touted as its "first accomplishment" its 2008 campaign to shut down a Minnesota Islamic school."

Viewpoints

Criticism of religion
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The Southern Poverty Law Center described ACT! for America as "the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the country," and the Council on American-Islamic Relations has described it as "one of the main sources of growing anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation". According to The Guardian, the organization has been "widely identified as anti-Muslim".

According to Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, "the organization has condemned cities with large Muslim populations for serving halal food in public schools. In 2013, its Houston chapter urged members to 'protest' food companies that certify their meat as compliant with Islamic dietary law. ACT! for America tries to dissuade Jews and Christians from conducting interfaith dialogue with Muslims. And in state after state, it has lobbied state legislatures and school boards to purge textbooks of references that create 'an inaccurate comparison between Islam, Christianity and Judaism.'"

According to Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times, Gabriel "presents a portrait of Islam so thoroughly bent on destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to those who study or practice the religion." Goodstein says that Gabriel "insists that she is singling out only "radical Islam" or Muslim "extremists"—not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and her two books, she leaves the opposite impression."

BuzzFeed News described her as "the most influential leader in America's increasingly influential anti-Islam lobby." The Washington Post describes her two books as "alarmist tracts about Islam." Beinart described her as "America's most prominent anti-Muslim activist."

Stephen Lee, a publicist at St. Martin's Press for Gabriel's second book, has called her views "extreme," and Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine, who interviewed Gabriel in August 2008, described her as a "radical Islamophobe". According to Clark Hoyt from The New York Times, over 250 people wrote in to protest that label in the days that followed. Hussein Ibish, a Senior Resident Scholar at The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said that her "agenda is pure unadulterated hatred" and that she has "a pathological hatred of Muslims and other Arabs". Gabriel disputes the charge, and has said that she does not believe that all Muslims are the problem.

Opinions on Islam

In 2009, Gabriel said that there is a "cancer called Islamofascism" that permeates a Muslim world in which "extreme is mainstream." In June 2014, Gabriel said that "The radicals are estimated to be between 15 to 25 percent" worldwide. In an interview with The Australian Jewish News, she stated that "A practising Muslim who upholds the tenets of the Koran—it's not that simple—a practising Muslim who goes to mosque every Friday, prays five times a day, and who believes that the Koran is the word of God, and who believes that Mohammed is the perfect man and is a radical Muslim."

When Gabriel was invited to speak as part of a lecture series organized by Duke University's Jewish community in October 2004, many in attendance were angered by her referring to Arabs as "barbarians." The Freeman Centre for Jewish Life at Duke University later apologized for her comments. Following her speech at a women's campaign event for the Jewish Federation of Ottawa (JFO) in November 2008, many in attendance registered their protests, leading Mitchell Bellman, president and CEO of the JFO, to write a letter in which he acknowledged that Gabriel made, "unacceptable gross generalizations of Arabs and Muslims," distancing his organization from her views.

In 2007 at the Christians United for Israel annual conference, Gabriel delivered a speech that included the following:

The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It's the difference between good and evil ... this is what we're witnessing in the Arabic world, 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... because our God is the God of love.

This speech was characterized by journalist Bruce Wilson as being "hate speech" and stated that Brigitte Gabriel "paints a wide swath of humanity as subhuman", comparing her speech to Goebbel's propaganda. In March 2011 while being interviewed by Eliot Spitzer on CNN, Gabriel defended the speech, saying "I was talking about how Palestinian mothers are encouraging their children to go out and blow themselves up to smithereens just to kill Christians and Jews. And it was in that context that I – that I contrasted the difference between Israel and the Arabic world, was the difference between democracy and barbarism."

Arab–Israeli conflict

Regarding the two-state solution, Gabriel stated: "Forcing Israel to accept a two-state solution is not going to work unless the Palestinians first are forced to clean up their act and eliminate hatred from their schoolbooks, teach tolerance to their people, and preach acceptance of Israel and the Jews as a neighbor."

Iran–Israel proxy conflict

In a speech at a conference sponsored by the UN Permanent Mission of Palau and the Aja Eze Foundation, Gabriel said that she viewed Israel as the vanguard in the world's fight against Islamic terrorism, equating Israel's fight against Hamas and Hezbollah with the World's fight against the Islamic State.

Because They Hate

Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America
Author	Brigitte Gabriel
Subject	Islamophobia, criticism of Islam
Publisher	St. Martin's Press
Publication date	September 5, 2006
Publication place	United States
Media type	Hardcover
Pages	272
ISBN	978-0312358389
Followed by	They Must Be Stopped

Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America is a 2006 book by Gabriel. It describes her traumatic childhood experiences in Lebanon and criticizes radical Islamic expression in the Middle East and elsewhere. The book reached number 12 on The New York Times Best Seller list for political books.

After this book, she released another similar book, They Must Be Stopped.

Summary

The book begins with events from her childhood in Lebanon, where she was raised by her parents as a Maronite Christian. During the Israeli–Lebanese conflict in the 1980s, their house was hit by missiles, causing them to move to a barracks, and eventually to an Israeli hospital. With the help of Israeli people, she was able to start a new life, becoming a journalist and a presenter for the Israeli television World News program.

In the book, she claims that Islamic governments in Middle East are spreading negative prejudices towards "infidels" (non-Muslims, mostly Christians and Jews), and she argues that Muslims around the world are engaging in jihad against Christians and Jews, branding Islam as threat.

She explains her view of "Muslim hatred" against West and other religions, writing:

Because they hate. They hate our way of life. They hate our freedom. They hate our democracy. They hate the practice of every religion but their own. They don't just disagree. They hate. Not just Judaism. Not just Christianity. In various parts of the world today, Islamists are also waging terror war against Hindus, Buddhists, and all other "infidels." The imposition of Islam upon the entire world is not merely their goal. It is their religious duty. They are following the word of their holy book, the Koran, which is the guide to hatred of infidels, waging war, and victory through slaughter.

Responses

The book received mixed responses from critics, some feeling that it provided a critical analysis of Islam and a warning to the American people, while others criticized the tone and the distorted view of the author and her description of Islam as a 'horrible religion.'

Fox news military analyst Paul E. Vallely praised Gabriel's book as a "dire warning" to the Western world.