A PLO member speaks out

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Well, what makes a terrorist become a terrorist? Ever since 9/11 we have heard a lot about terrorism, mostly from analysts, scholars and government officials. But now a man who says he used to be a terrorist is giving us the inside story. He tells his life story in his new book, "Why I Left Jihad."

His name is Walid Shoebat, and he joins me now from Washington.

Walid, I appreciate your time today.

WALID SHOEBAT, AUTHOR, "WHY I LEFT JIHAD": Thank you for having me.

PHILLIPS: Well, I mean, I'm going to ask you the obvious. Why were you involved in terrorism and who recruited you?

SHOEBAT: Well, you have to understand the recruitment doesn't start at recruitment centers, basically. They start from the mosque. You go daily to pray or to the Friday prayers, whether you go to the temple mount, whether you go to the local mosque. And this is not only in the Palestinian areas, this is all throughout the Middle East. It has been going on from the eons of time.

And it is eschatological teaching regarding the destruction of the state of Israel, regarding the destruction of the Jewish people and basically an Islamic country that considers Israel as an Islamic country and once an Islamic foothold was there before in the past, it must never be occupied by a non-Muslim country. The eradication of the Jewish people is top in the eschatological norm, in the schools, in the mosques, in the centers, everywhere you go.

So, from all aspects of life, if you go walk in the streets and see the graffiti around you, things like we knock on the gates of heaven with the skulls of Jews, this is the kind of mentality they have. And I always ask myself the question, what does knocking on the gates of heaven with the skulls of Jews have anything to do with the political desire to establish a state called Palestine?

Palestine has become sort of a psychosis, in a way. This is why we have Hamas now. It's escalated to the point that it's growing its tentacles all throughout the Middle East, Iran. In Pakistan, the majority of Pakistanis want a Islamist state.

PHILLIPS: But when you were a teenager, I mean, you didn't know all this as a teenager. You were, what, 16 when you joined the PLO. Why did you want to join this organization and did you realize that you were about to get involved with a group that was going to kill innocent people?

SHOEBAT: Well, you have to understand, you join at 5 years old. Going to school, we sang the song -- all the schoolchildren sang, (SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE) which means "Arabs are beloved, and Jews are dogs."

So, right, even going to a Christian school we learned that Jesus was a Palestinian revolutionist. So from the Biblical perspective and the Koranic perspective, all the religion was used as a base for teaching revolution. This is the dogma that they teach.

So when you go -- by the time I went to high school, that's when we learned the eradication of the Jewish people, when the stones and the trees will cry out, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him. So it's really -- in a nutshell, the problem is a massive, racist ideology that is growing throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world.

PHILLIPS: So, tell me what you did and how active you got. I mean, what was the worst act of terrorism you committed while an active member of the PLO?

SHOEBAT: I planted a bomb in Bank Launi (ph) Israel in Bethlehem, nearly lynched an Israeli soldier, was in every demonstration from the Temple Mount and the streets of our village. Everywhere, you know. The whole community becomes imbued with this way of life. So, stonings and you name it.

I ended up in prison and then I was recruited to do a bomb operation of a bank. My recruiter put 15 explosive charges in Israel, and he was being bailed out by Israeli lawyers. As ironic as it sounds, that's how it was. Israel was a democracy, so it allowed even to get those prisoners out.

And my cousins also got involved in terrorism. They were also released with the U.N. deals and this kind of thing. So you have thousands of terrorists being thrown back into the streets with these U.N. agreements.

PHILLIPS: No, you -- so you remain this active life of terrorism overseas, but you also came to the U.S., and you were part of the Muslim Brotherhood in Chicago.

SHOEBAT: That's right.

PHILLIPS: Tell me how you were able to carry on terrorist activities and how did you do it here in the U.S.?

SHOEBAT: Well, in the U.S., we didn't -- I didn't do any terrorist activities, but the recruitment of the preparation for jihad in America. My recruiter was -- his name is Jamal Sayid (ph). He's a colleague of Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden.

Ironically speaking, Jamal Sayid is freed, in a mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois. The IAP started, as a result -- Islamic Association of Palestine. And after that I left that organization. And then after that, there was training. The head of the IAP was caught in training with car -- how to manufacture car bombs and things like that. So it was -- I have clips, homemade videos that if I show your audience, it will come out of Gaza or it will come out of Iran. I mean, this stuff was happening in the heartland of America, all over in Chicago, and DeKalb and Georgia. All over the United States, it was going on in the mosque and it's going on right now.

PHILLIPS: So did 9/11 surprise you?

SHOEBAT: No, as a matter of fact, in 1993, I was -- I started my first mission in 1993, speaking in churches and synagogues. And people didn't want to believe me when I said, they're going to blow up your buildings, these people are interested in decapitating Americans. And this was too much for us to fathom. Nobody was listening. After September 11, I started getting more phone calls.

PHILLIPS: Did you ever feel guilty?

SHOEBAT: Yes, I did. In 19 -- I started studying, basically, the history. You have to understand, in the Arab mentality in the Middle East, from the beginning of Mahmoud Abbas, who is considered secular, all to the way to the fundamentalists, the denial of the Holocaust is the premise of this education.

So, we denied the Holocaust ever exited. So when we're seeing the -- if we see the footage of the Holocaust in the Middle East, we say, well, how did they have such scrawny bodies? What kind of a diet plan were they on? Because the whole thing was an enactment. It wasn't reality. This is an enactment to establish, design a state. In Germany, it's illegal to deny the Holocaust, but yet in the Middle East, denial of the Holocaust is flourishing.

So the moment I started getting a good grip that the Holocaust was a historical reality, I started to understand that evil cloaks itself in nice, fabricated fashions. Evil cloaks itself, just like Nazism does, that it's a good cause. And Israel becomes a vermin. The Jews are vermin.

This is why Nasrallah doesn't apologize for killing Jewish children. He only apologizes when Arab children are dying in Israel, proper (ph) by his rocket launchings. Why is that? Why does Nasrallah apologize for killing all the Arab children? And the answer is very simple. The problem is racism. Racism on a pandemic scale all throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world, all the way to Pakistan, all the way to Indonesia, all the way to the Philippines, all the way in Jordan, all the way in Cairo, all the way in Syria, all the way to the...

PHILLIPS: So, Walid, let me ask you, you had an epiphany. You decided this isn't the way to go about finding peace. You decided to completely step away from any acts of terrorism or any organizations or any association. But when you look at all these groups -- I mean, whether it be Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iraqi insurgents -- there are so many and it is so strong and it is all across the world, I mean, how do you reach those people? How do you -- how do you even gain the understanding that this is not going to achieve peace, acts of terror? SHOEBAT: We have to understand, terrorism is a cult-like education to convert masses of people to become remorseless killers. And it's like a drug addiction. It feeds on frenzy-like speeches. It galvanizes people in a euphoric fashion, where an Israeli, when he's killed, they come out with the blood and thy carry guts and hearts and kidneys and, you know, parade them in the streets of Ramallah.

This is a drug addiction that is permeating the teenagers of the Middle East. We have to treat it as such. We have to go to the drug pushers, we have to go to the source of the problem. We don't solve the problem by simply destroying Hezbollah only, but we solve the problem by going to the mosques where they're manufacturing of these -- this education is going on. We need to fire the clergy.

We need to understand that this type of Islam that's being taught in the Middle East and being taught in America, as well, is not a religion. Once it goes beyond that boundary, it becomes a government system. It becomes a civil code that wants to establish itself universally throughout the whole world. Once we understand that, we understand to deal with it just as we deal with drugs.

PHILLIPS: Walid Shoebat. The book is "Why I Left Jihad." fascinating perspective, Walid. I appreciate your time today.

SHOEBAT: Thank you for having me.

Israeli Arabs Face Decision

Residents of Haifa weigh the call by Hezbollah's leader to leave the city. Some are determined to stay, but others have packed up and fled.

By Henry Chu, Times Staff Writer
August 11, 2006

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HAIFA, Israel — Nobody tells Avraham Ouda where he can and can't live. Five generations of his family have called this seaside city home, and Ouda has no intention of breaking the chain.

So on Thursday morning, Ouda, 71, puttered around his fruit shop, puffed on a cigarette and poured scorn on an appeal by a fellow Arab. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah had called on Arabs to flee this city in northern Israel or risk being hit by rockets fired by the Shiite Muslim militia from across the Lebanese border.

"I was born here and my father was born here and my grandfather was born here. My destiny is in Haifa, and if it's my day to go, it's my day to go," Ouda said with a philosophical wave of smoke from his stubby cigarette. "I'm happy to stay."

Dalia Sheety is staying too, but she's not so happy about it. If she could, she would quit her job at a local hospital, bid goodbye to her family's deli where she helps out and move to southern Israel, far away from the Katyusha rockets raining down death and destruction.

"I don't want to die. I'm very young — I have a lot of plans," said Sheety, 35, a radiology technician.

Members of Haifa's small but historic Arab community awoke to a new reality Thursday, a day after Nasrallah urged them to remove themselves from harm's way as fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah stretched into a fifth week.

"To the Arab inhabitants of Haifa, I am very sad, but I'm telling you, please leave your city … because you will relieve us from being hesitant to hit Haifa," he said in a televised address in Lebanon.

Those who ignored the warning expressed fear and defiance. But there were others, unnerved by the threat of a surge in rocket attacks, who packed up and sought shelter with friends and relatives elsewhere.

Although Haifa has not been hit by as large a barrage as towns along the Israeli-Lebanese border, more people have been killed by rocket strikes on this densely populated city — Israel's third-largest — than in any other place. When sirens wail, which happens several times a day, residents disappear into bunkers and "safe rooms," motorists stop their cars in the middle of the street and run for cover, and an eerie silence descends while everyone counts down 90 seconds to see if anything hits.

The last fatal strike was Sunday, when rockets slammed into seven residential locations in the city. The impact killed three people, and a fourth person died of fright. Two of the dead were Israeli Arabs, neighbors linked by marriage who lived in a crowded but charming warren of honey-colored limestone buildings where poets, writers and intellectuals used to hold salons.

Israel's Arab minority has borne a disproportionate number of the country's civilian deaths in the war. Although they make up just 20% of the population, Israeli Arabs account for 41% of those killed, or 17 out of 41 people.

Many live in the north, within range of Hezbollah rockets, in cities such as Haifa and Nazareth or villages such as Deir al Assad, where rocket fire killed two more Israeli Arabs on Thursday: a woman and her 5-year-old son. A second son, even younger, was seriously wounded.

"Hezbollah means 'Party of God.' If he believes he's the party of God, I'd tell him he's mistaken," Diana Hajad, an Arab Christian in Haifa, said of Nasrallah. "God hates killing."

Although Hajad, a fishmonger, feels a stab of fear every time the sirens sound, she shrugged off Nasrallah's warning to Haifa's Arabs in the same dismissive manner in which she wiped her hands on her apron. "He's insulting people's intelligence. He knows that this is a mixed population here."

A city perched high above the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean Sea, Haifa prides itself on being a symbol of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs, beginning decades before Israel achieved statehood in 1948. After the country's founding, many Arabs stayed on in Haifa and became Israeli citizens.

Like their counterparts elsewhere in Israel, those of Arab descent here feel torn whenever violence erupts between their fellow Israelis and their fellow Arabs, whether they are Palestinians, Lebanese or others. But mindful of their minority status in a country where some Jewish residents consider their community a potential fifth column, the Arabs in Haifa have been careful to apportion blame in the present war to both sides, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Hezbollah leadership.

"I blame both sides for bombing civilians," said shopkeeper Abu Mohammed Osman, 47. "We bombard Lebanon, and they bombard us. We both kill Arabs."

Nasrallah's call to Arabs in Haifa to leave was a piece of "psychological warfare," Osman said, designed to put pressure on Olmert's government to accept a cease-fire or face a flood of internal refugees abandoning northern Israel and moving to the south.

Still, some of Osman's friends panicked after the warning and decided to quit the city, at least temporarily. Sheety, the radiology technician, has sisters who are frantically searching for accommodations elsewhere.

Hajad said that many families on her street had packed up and left. She was getting ready to bundle off her mother and her son Thursday for the day, if not longer, when the siren went off around noon. She quickly pressed her young son against an interior wall of her seafood store until the danger had passed and they could leave.

Then she got ready to go back to work.

"You have to be careful," Hajad said, "but you don't have to run away."