a staunch pro-Zionist
Walid Shoebat tells his story
to hundreds in Winnipeg
By MATT BELLAN
T wenty-five years ago, Walid Shoebat was a teenage Palestine Liberation Organization activist in the West Bank, organizing demonstrations and confronting Israeli troops.
Today, that former PLO rioter and wouldbe bomber is a strident activist for Israel, defending the Jewish claim to "Judea and Samaria".
Shoebat, who claimed he wasn't much of a speaker, proved a gifted orator, speaking emotionally, and sometimes switching to Arabic to demonstrate the anti-Semitic songs he learned as a child and teenager. He mesmerized a capacity audience of hundreds at the Canad Inns April 15, 2004, explaining how he changed from a PLO terrorist to an "ardent Zionist".
He also described the deep hatred of Jews he was fed from childhood onward in his 45-minute lecture, sponsored by the Asper Foundation Lecture Series in association with the Winnipeg Zionist Initiative.
Born in Bethlehem in 1960, Shoebat has an American-born, Christian mother, and a Palestinian father. He recalled his experiences as a youngster living with his family in Jericho, then part of the Jordanian-ruled West Bank.
"As a six-year-old, in Kindergarten, I sang a song, 'Arabs are beloved and Jews are dogs,' constantly repeating the song.
"I remember the news broadcasts when I was a child, that they would throw the Jews into the sea.
"When the Six Day War erupted, the males in Jericho left their posts before a shot was fired. They took off their uniforms, except for their underwear."
The reason? They were afraid of "what those monsters, the Jews would do to them" if those conquering Israelis discovered they were soldiers.
Muslim Arab hatred of Jews goes back far earlier than the creation of the State of Israel, Shoebat added. His wealthy grandfather, a Muslim chieftain, was a close friend of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem and friend of Adolf Hitler.
Al-Husseini helped organize the "8th Division of Hitler's Army", and had a lot to do with Arab "pogroms against Jews" in British Mandate Palestine.
He also persuaded the Nazis not to let "half a million Hungarian Jews" or "5,000" European Jewish children emigrate to Palestine. "They went to death camps as a result of his intervention." Al-Husseini used "Islamic fundamentalism" as a weapon against the Jews "way before" Saudi Arabia started the "madrassas" - the religious schools he claims teach Muslim children to hate Jews today.
The "Islamist agenda" was to "destroy the Jews" way before the Six Day War and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Before the Six Day War, even the PLO's founding covenant didn't call for the liberation of the West Bank. That was added in 1967, after the area came under Israeli rule.
As a teenager in the mid-1970s, Shoebat joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and became a local activist, organizing demonstrations, printing fliers and confronting Israeli troops.
"Putting (anti-Israel) graffiti was my job." But the school curriculum, whether art, history, social studies, "you name it, had something to do with Jew hatred."
"Jews are evil, Jews are the enemies of the prophets," students were taught.
As for the Holocaust, that was a fiction, he learned. He and his pals used to joke that the emaciated Jews in the liberated concentration camps were "all actors".
"In our view, Jews were the most detestable beings that existed on Earth."
One day, in the middle of a riot, he and a group of friends nabbed an Israeli soldier that was trying to put down the riot; they almost killed the soldier, but he escaped.
Shoebat, then 15, was arrested, and sent to jail in Jerusalem, where the PLO recruited him for more violence.
He went on a bus to Bethlehem on his release, to bomb a branch of the Israeli Bank Leumi. Shoebat was carrying a "sophisticated" explosive, hidden in a "loaf of bread".
Seeing Palestinian children playing nearby, he thought to himself, "This is ridiculous," and threw the loaf onto the bank roof, where it didn't explode.
At age 18, the young PLO militant went to college in Chicago, where he became president of the Palestinian Students' Association, raising funds for the PLO and recruiting volunteers to fight in Lebanon.
He later moved to California, where he met his current wife, a Catholic from Mexico. Shoebat was determined to convert her to Islam. He started reading the "Tanach", the Jewish Bible, seeking proof of how corrupt Judaism was.
Instead, he was shocked to discover how frequently the Tanach mentions "Israel", and the Jewish connection to the Holy Land.
After a few months, instead of converting his wife to Islam, he decided to convert to Christianity.
Shoebat didn't dwell on it in his lecture here, but as he spoke, he revealed he had several personal axes to grind against Islam.
His mother spent decades seeking to return to the U.S., and leave her husband, a teacher in Jericho. Islamic authorities there told her if she did, she'd have to leave her children behind.
Shoebat's West Bank grandfather was also persecuted for selling land to the Jewish National Fund.
Now a California-based computer programmer, husband and father of two, Walid Shoebat spends part of his time making the rounds of the U.S. college lecture circuit, carrying his message of support for Israel.
He also has a message for Jews: stop apologizing for Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
"Israel makes mistakes. But the most I criticize Israel for was to allow (Palestinian) children to be taught to call for the deaths of Jews."
When Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Jew, killed Muslims in a Hebron mosque in the early 1980s, "Israel stood up and condemned it."
Similarly, the Israeli government punished Ariel Sharon for his role in the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps south of Beirut in 1982.
"But nobody criticizes the (Christian) Arabs who committed the massacres."
The PLO, in contrast, never apologizes - even for the Palestinian ransacking of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus and "16" other Jewish holy sites in the West Bank at the start of the present intifada, three years ago.
In fact, the Voice of Palestine continues to broadcast Nazi-like anti-Semitism, and there isn't a wall in the occupied territories that doesn't have graffiti expressing hatred of Jews.
Contrary to the world media's depiction of Palestinians as the David against an Israeli "Goliath", Shoebat argues that "we (the Palestinians and other Arabs) are still the Goliath, 150 million against the Jews."
Shoebat feels that Palestinians should be allowed to continue living in an Israel that includes "Judea and Samaria" (the West Bank), as long as they pledge allegiance to Israel and take out Israeli citizenship.
"Only the terrorists should be sent to Jordan."
The crowd at his Winnipeg lecture awarded Shoebat a standing ovation.
But one audience member wondered whether he was simply "speaking to the converted".
That lecturegoer asked Shoebat whether he's sought out and tried to apologize to the Israeli soldier he helped nearly murder decades ago.
"I spent two years looking for that Israeli soldier, through Shin Bet and other agencies," Shoebat answered, adding that he's failed so far to find the man.
"I will one day go to him. But the collective forgiveness I seek is from my Jewish friends, for hating you all. Confession is the beginning of healing."
And confession, he added, is something Yasser Arafat has so far failed to do.
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