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341 of 399 found the following review helpful:
 Eye popping opening Sep 08, 2006
By Kat Bakhu
This is a really great book. As I read it, I became aware that what is wrong with so many Americans (including me) is we are so uninformed, so uneducated about other parts of the world. I had little understanding, for example, of what the Lebanon "civil war" was all about. This book brought me up to speed on that and taught me so much much more. Reading the events of some 30 years ago seems very much like a deja vu for today. It's all so familiar. What happened then is happening now in exact parallel. I did not know, for example, how Lebanon of the 70s was so similar culturally (and governmentally) to the US of today. And how we are making the same mistakes that led to Lebanon's descent from a pinnacle of culture to hellish chaos.
Gabriel's story is so illuminating, so educational, so human, so revealing, so insightful passionate caring. It provided me with a still deeper picture of the true face of radical Islam than almost anything else I've read on the subject. It should be mentioned that the book is well written indeed, gripping and movingly paced. My thanks to Gabriel for writing this book, and my hope that her efforts not be wasted. She really deserves to be listened to.
136 of 158 found the following review helpful:
 By Turns Poignant, Important, and Extreme Nov 12, 2006
By Danusha Goska
Brigitte Gabriel's "Because They Hate" is a combination memoir and screed. The memoir is very strong. It is poignant and thrilling. The screed is flawed. Overall, though, the book's message is important and its importance transcends Gabriel's flaws as a writer. Throughout, Gabriel demonstrates the kind of dauntless courage that one wishes our political leaders and media elites would exercise.
Brigitte Gabriel was born to a 54-year-old Lebanese Christian woman who had had no other children. This unusual birth communicated to Gabriel that she had been born for a higher purpose, and she is determined to fulfill that purpose.
Her father was a successful restaurateur and landlord in an idyllic Lebanese village. Gabriel's parents loved her dearly.
The world came crashing down when jihadis began attacking Lebanese Christians.
Gabriel describes these assaults with all the power of a page-turning thriller and all the poignancy of many a great child's memoir of war. This portion of her book is so strong that I wish Gabriel had produced a memoir by itself.
Gabriel describes being shelled, living in a bunker, being wounded by shrapnel, and close-call visits to hospitals to have shrapnel removed without anesthesia. Again, when Gabriel barely survives being seriously wounded, her conviction that God put her on earth for a reason is reinforced.
Gabriel grows up and makes her way to Israel. In Israel she encounters humanitarian behavior that she had not encountered among Arabs. Israeli hospital employees work to save the lives of Muslims, though the Muslims curse them. An Israeli interpreter is very kind to Gabriel. Israeli doctors impress Gabriel with their off-duty conversations about literature. Israeli passers-by impress Gabriel with their cleanliness. She sees an Israeli child seek out a garbage can to throw away trash; she sees an Arab throw his garbage in the street.
Gabriel compares the compassionate, intelligent Jews she meets in real life with the stereotypical Jewish monsters, "monkeys and pigs," that are depicted in Muslim propaganda.
Gabriel has an epiphany. She realizes that the Muslim world is drowning in its irrational hatred of Jews, and that Israelis are operating under a different, more humanitarian, worldview.
These scenes are poignant and powerful.
The memoir takes up about half of the book. The rest of the book consists of a strident screed arguing that Jihad is a threat to America and that Americans are not doing enough to stop that threat.
It is not enough for Gabriel to point out the threat; she also offers solutions. These include this very important point: we need to find new energy sources. Petroleum funds jihad.
So far so good. But Gabriel could have benefited from some editing. While admiring Gabriel's blazing courage, the kind of courage that could serve as an example to everyone from political leaders to college presidents to NPR announcers, who are too intimidated by Political Correctness to speak harsh truths, Gabriel's anger does become grating.
Though Lebanese, for example, Gabriel works to distance herself from Arabs, saying that she descended from the Phoenicians. Her comments about Arabs will needlessly alienate readers. A critique of the dangerous dictate of jihad need not focus on Arab people and denigrate them racially.
Gabriel makes tacky and gratuitous comments about Bill Clinton and Dick Durbin, and expresses a great deal of anger and contempt against "ignorant and lazy" America and the West for not adequately protecting Lebanese Christians.
She hops from topic to topic, often not providing adequate background necessary for full understanding, for example, in her brief and incomplete mention of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. Though the book contains footnotes, it does not contain an index, and it should have one.
Extreme statements in the book include the following: "...it is foolish to allow Muslims to take any type of science courses..." (227). Does Gabriel really mean this? If so, how does she plan to justify such a rule, or to enforce it?
I mention these flaws in the hopes that Gabriel and her editors will correct them in her next book. In her main point, Gabriel is not only correct, she is blazingly courageous in a world where people are afraid to speak this simple truth: jihad is a threat. It takes courage to say this; the fate of people like Pym Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and Salman Rushdie alerts us exactly to how much courage Gabriel, who was nearly killed by jihadis, displays here. I hope that in her next book, she displays a bit more cool headedness. But I do hope for her next book.
427 of 506 found the following review helpful:
First hand account of Islamist Evil Sep 14, 2006
By Kendra
I had the opportunity to see Brigitte Gabriel speak the other night. She is an amazing person. I bought her book and read it within the next day. She has an important story to share and a talent for telling it.
Brigitte was raised a Maronite Christian in Lebanon but spent her formative years hiding with her parents in a bomb shelter. She saw her country destroyed by Muslims intent on Jihad and intent of the triumph of dar-al Islam.
Brigitte's history is compelling. She was raised in a society that was mostly tolerant and westernized-- to the point of being too tolerant of those that are intolerant (Muslims). This openness and tolerance and multiculturalist ideal was Lebanon's ruin. And, the free and open society the Lebanese prided themselves for having is, in effect, gone now and taken over by Islamofascist leaders (currently Hezbollah).
Brigitte reminds us (and teaches those that don't know) that the culture of Islam is truly incompatible with Western culture and Western ideals. Islam glorifies death and destruction in the name of Islam, or submission (to Allah). I am well-aware of those in the U.S. who do NOT want to recognize the truth and who do NOT want to recognize the threat we are facing. These people continually choose to ignore all the evidence that confronts them and ignore and denigrate those that speak the truth and share their stories.
The author's words of warning should be heeded. It seems those in the West continually ignore the Islamists' continual shouts of hatred and unequivocal warnings to achieve their goals of Islamic rule in addition to ignoring their continual attacks of war. The Islamists continually state their aims and act on it while the West-- at the risk of our own demise-- continually ignores the evidence that proves the Islamists are doing exactly what they say they are doing and will continue to do until their goal is achieved.
153 of 181 found the following review helpful:
Jihad survivor Oct 12, 2006
By Alyssa A. Lappen
It's a great privilege to know Brigitte Gabriel and consider her a friend. One cannot praise her enough.
For more than five years, Gabriel has sacrificed everything to bring the truth about Islamic jihad to the American public; and it is gratifying and most wonderful that her message at last is reaching the public--in this incredible book--and even through the mainstream press, which too long refused to detail the sufferings of jihad survivors.
Brigitte's is a phenomenal book--and given her awe-inspiring personal saga, it could hardly have been otherwise. She tells her own horrific experience as a south Lebanese Christian, whose family, village and friends suffered the direst of consequences during the Islamic invasion of their once peaceful nation. In addition to laying siege to south Lebanon and Beirut, the Islamic fanatics launched a cruel, decades-long attack on Lebanon's peaceful Christian majority, bombarding their homes with rocket fire, starving them out, and committing thousands upon thousands of atrocities.
By now, the international community has become well-acquainted with the 1982 massacre of 500 Palestinian Arabs in the Sabra and Shatila villages by Christian Phalangists.
But the international community does not know of the thousands upon thousands of Lebanese Christians murdered in equally--and often, far more horrific--atrocities. Brigitte Gabriel witnessed such attacks first hand--and survived. Women were raped and murdered before their husbands, forced to murder their own children, and often, dismembered. Pregnant mothers' stomachs were carved open. The people were starved out. and forced into bomb shelters for years on end. Brigitte grew up in a bomb shelter--and came out only during "lulls," risking death, to forage for edible grass and water.
The Israelis, she writes, saved her and her mother, who was severely injured during the Islamic attacks.
It is shameful that anyone attempts to disparage Gabriel, or claims that things were not so. I did not know Brigitte during the 1970s, of course. But my dear Lebanese friend, Chris Khattar, who succumbed to Hodgkin's in 1992, often spoke of his similar experiences in Beirut, where Christians too often discovered their loved ones, in dark allies, with their throats slit.
Beirut was had been the Paris of the Middle East, a jewel among Middle Eastern cities, a predominantly Christian center of culture, trade and international banking. But in 1993 it became the scene of a horrific terror attack that took the lives of 241 U.S. Marines, Sailors and Soldiers deployed to maintain a fragile peace. And for decades before it became--and for decades after has remained--the victim of classical Islamic jihad.
What happened to Beirut and southern Lebanon--indeed, what happened to that once peaceful Christian-majority Middle Eastern enclave--should be one of the most compelling lessons in the education of American political leaders (on both sides of the aisle) on what can happen to a nation laid siege by Islam. American politicians of every stripe ignore this lesson at their peril.
Brigitte Gabriel is one of several key instructors. But she is hardly alone. Others include Prof. Habib C. Malik (Between Damascus and Jerusalem: Lebanon and Middle east Peace; The Challenge of Human Rights); Prof. Walid Phares (The War of Ideas, Future Jihad and Lebanese Christian Nationalism); Pakistani Christian Patrick Sookhdeo (A People Betrayed); Beit Sahur native Walid Shoebat (Why I Left Jihad) and Nazareth native Anis Shorrosh (Islam A Threat or a Challenge).
The fact is, anyone and everyone who hopes to save Western civilization--should put the lessons of these survivors of jihad at the top of their reading lists, and learn them by heart.
During World War II, one never heard U.S., British, Canadian or Australian leaders describe either their Nazi German or Japanese foes as following political creeds--different than our own--but acceptable all the same. Indeed, the Allies mounted very successful information campaigns to counter the Nazi and Kamikaze propaganda. Against Tokyo Rose and master liar Joseph Goebbels, Britain, America and their allies mass produced films and posters, induced Americans to invest in U.S. War Bonds--and did in every conceivable way evinced favorable publicity for the war effort.
But today, leaders totally ignorant of the highly political, and warlike precepts of Islam, insist on its good core intentions.
Meanwhile, the mainstream press has often done its level best to compromise security measures that protect hundreds of millions of civilians. Even former intelligence agents unaccountably work overtime these days to undermine American security. Apart from these willing, even intentional saboteurs--a big problem facing Western civilization is the false but widespread perception that it is impossible for us to fail.
Here's where the Brigitte Gabriels are so important: They present the Western world with stark alternatives--to either recognize, understand and defeat Islamic jihad, or allow it, to borrow from Nikita Khrushchev, to bury us.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
74 of 87 found the following review helpful:
Compelling....chilling Sep 13, 2006
By Frank Bunyard
Anyone who has seen Brigitte Gabriel speak knows that she is strikingly attractive and charismatic. Her words convey deep conviction, emotional intensity, intelligence and learning. She writes in the same "up close and personal" manner.
Her account of her shattered childhood in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970's is one of the great depictions of the horrors of war. How she survived intact is nothing short of a miracle. Her harrowing experiences are not related in a self-pitying way, but to show what has led to her sense of "calling."
Ms. Gabriel was indoctrinated with anti-Semitism during her childhood schooling. When her mother was injured during the Israeli-Palestine fighting in the 70's she had to accompany her in an ambulance to an Israeli hospital. The young Ms. Gabriel was afraid of the Jews she had been taught to fear and despise. When she and her mother were treated with compassion and respect by the Israeli medical staff it was, as she describes it, a life-changing experience.
This first encounter with Western culture and its freedom, decency and respect for the individual completely turned her mind around. She had never experienced anything like it in Arab or Islamic culture. She fills in the details in her book, but to make a long story short Brigitte Gabriel eventually became an American citizen.
Her autobiography covers the first 100 pages of the book. The remaining 134 pages are a masterful polemic against Islam. Not just "radical Islam" but Islam "in toto." She argues persuasively that there is no such thing as "moderate Islam." She asks: "Where is their voice? Are they really there?" "The only liberal social thinkers in the Muslim Arab Islamo-fascist world are the dead ones."
It's amazing how much material Ms. Gabrial packs into these pages. She doesn't waste or mince words. She lists over 30 acts of terror from 1985 to 2001. Terrorist organizations and activities are described in Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Thailand and elsewhere. Demographics are shown which reveal that within a few generations Muslims will have population pluralities and majorities to change the laws and Constitutions of Western countries, including the United States. Her specifics make her arguments incontrovertible.
The final chapter of the book is titled: "What Must Be Done To Protect Our Country?" In these pages Ms. Gabriel lists numerous practical solutions to counter the insidious Islamic invasion of the West. She discusses a number of areas that can be strengthened and improved. To name but a few these include immigration reform, naturalization procedures, human intelligence, and profiling.
The appearance of this book is an important event. Brigitte Gabriel is going to leave her mark on America and the world. Her calling, as she describes it at the book's close, is to "protect America, the dream that became my address."
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