Aaron Keith Harris: Walid Shoebat: An advocate with real courage

May 28, 2010 - PRLog -- BALTIMORE -The University of Southern California defeated Notre Dame in a pretty good football game last Saturday night, but announcer Brent Musburger, as usual, made it hard to watch. He repeatedly called Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn “courageous” for no reason. Musburger’s blather made me think of one of the most courageous men I know, who is winning some television coverage of his own lately.

Walid Shoebat has been featured in two recent cable news specials about the link between Islam and terrorism: “Exposed: The Extremist Agenda” on Glenn Beck’s CNN Headline News program and the Fox News Channel’s “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”

The reason? He’s an ex-Muslim and former member of the Palestine Liberation Organization who tours college campuses and churches in the United States denouncing terrorism and supporting Israel. About two years ago, I spent a day with Shoebat and learned why he does what he does. I’m glad to see none of the death threats he often receives have been acted on since we met. The first came soon after his conversion to Christianity in 1993 — from his brother.

“If go back home, I have five minutes to live,” Shoebat said. Even in America he lives cautiously. His name is not his given one, and security personnel protect him at lectures.

Home for Shoebat, 46, was the West Bank town of Bethlehem, where he was born to a Jordanian Muslim father and an American Christian mother. His anti-Jewish indoctrination began in kindergarten, where he was taught to sing “Arabs are beloved and Jews are our dogs,” Shoebat said. Shoebat volunteered for the PLO as an adolescent. For his first assignment he threw rocks from atop the Al-Aqsa mosque complex onto Jews praying at the Western Wall below.

At 16, Shoebat, said the PLO ordered him to bomb a Jewish-owned bank in Bethlehem with a device he smuggled from Jerusalem inside a loaf of bread. He was supposed to plant it near the bank’s door, but Palestinian children played nearby. He decided to throw it onto the roof of a nearby building instead, where it exploded without harming anyone, he said. Later that year during a riot in Bethlehem, Shoebat led youths in an attempt to lynch an Israeli solider. Shoebat and a friend beat the solider bloody with clubs before other Israeli soldiers arrived.

Shoebat’s parents then sent him to study in America at Loop College in Chicago, now Harold Washington College, where he shirked class in favor of working with the PLO student network to raise money and recruit new members.

Shoebat ended up in California working as a software designer and eventually became a U.S. citizen. There, he met and married his third wife, a Catholic Mexican-American. Determined to convert her to Islam, he accepted her challenge to prove to her “how the Jews corrupted the Bible.”

Instead, Shoebat was overwhelmed by the Bible’s messages of moral accountability and love. “I couldn’t believe that in the Bible, David’s sins were out in the open and that Nathan the prophet was allowed to confront him,” said Shoebat, who had always been taught that the prophet Mohammed could do no wrong.

Now a committed evangelical Christian, Shoebat doesn’t proselytize in his talks to non-Christian audiences. But he emphatically sticks to his anti-terrorist message.

“The hope of the future is to destroy terrorism, and you have to destroy the theology behind terrorism just like you destroyed Nazi Germany. You have to close the tap on the source of this education system … and hope to reeducate the coming generations in the Middle East to live with the West and live with the minority Jews living in the land,” Shoebat told a somewhat skeptical crowd at the lecture I attended.

That’s what I call courage.

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About Walid Shoebat
Walid Shoebat is an active advocate against Islamism and a fervent supporter of the State of Israel. He has appeared on mainstream media around the world and has been portrayed as an expert witness on a number of documentaries on Islamism.He is the founder of the Walid Shoebat Foundation, an organization that works to fight for Israel in the Media.