My early childhood could be described as idyllic. As my parents' only child, I was lavished with all of their affection. They were also financially comfortable, so, along with their care and love, they could afford to give me lots of toys and material possessions. After retiring from his job with the Lebanese government in his late fifties, my father became a landlord and restaurateur. He built a restaurant on our property, as well as a few small homes attached to our main residence, which he rented out to other families.
Like most of the buildings in Lebanon, our house was constructed of light brown stone quarried from our mountains. Each room had high ceilings, and across the front of each story were the main doors and eight wide arched windows. My father’s restaurant was located to the left and front of our property, facing the main road. A long driveway to the right of the restaurant went up the hill to our house.
My parents kept big, elaborate gardens bordered by jasmine bushes both in front and in back of our house. They planted strawberries, about ten different kinds of grapes, and every kind of fruit tree you could imagine: apple, orange, grapefruit, peach, plum, pear, persimmon, apricot, lemon, fig, and cherry. They also planted mint, parsley, and many types of vegetables: three kinds of beans, artichokes, squash, eggplant, cauliflower, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, watermelons, and cantaloupe. In addition to fruit-bearing trees and bushes, they grew roses. In the springtime, all the trees and bushes would bloom in a variety of colors. We lived in a virtual Garden of Eden.
My day always started with a long breakfast, usually hot milk and eggs with both of my parents. Papa and Mama woke early, at six thirty. Papa would make his list of fresh restaurant supplies to buy for the day from the market while Mama made breakfast.
For me, every day was like a party. The people renting in our apartment complex became one big family. We were nine children all about the same age—within five years of each other—and we always played together. We might start the day outside or in one of the apartments, but since I had so many toys—and my own playroom—we usually ended up at my house. Our moms would also gather there each morning, bringing with them whatever they were going to fix for lunch. While preparing lunch, they would drink coffee, share news and gossip, laugh and cry.
When I turned four, it was time for me to go to school. My parents sent me to a private school, Le Saint Coeur, one of the most reputable Catholic primary schools in the country. Le Saint Coeur was on the edge of a tall hill from where we could look down and see the entire green valley and smaller hills covered with wildflowers. We had a breathtaking view of historic Beaufort Castle, as well as one of the most famous rivers in the Middle East, the Litani. The winding, sparkling Litani flows from Syria to Lebanon, supplying most of the country with water and hydroelectric power.
Our lessons were taught in both Arabic and French, and the teachers, especially the nuns, were strict and demanding. Homework was assigned from the very first day. But I loved school, and I wanted to be a “good girl,” so I worked hard, learned quickly, and soon, I could read and write in both languages.
Our school day was finished at 2:00 p.m. After we were released, I would go home and eat lunch with Papa and Mama. In Lebanon, the midday meal is the main meal of the day. It’s the time when family members gather around the table to eat and talk over the morning’s events and their plans for the rest of the day.
It was always a joy to come home from school and find my parents standing outside on the balcony waiting for me. They would greet me with a big smile, a hug, and a kiss. Driving rain, summer heat, freezing snow—it didn’t matter to them. In the wintertime, they would stand shivering in their coats or under umbrellas until I arrived. My mother would greet me by telling me all the special things she had done for me that day. She would say, “Look, I made you your favorite cake,” or “You know what? The dress that I was sewing for you is finished. I can’t wait for you to try it on.” The house would always smell wonderful when I came home from school. Our meal would include fresh bread from the bakery and a variety of delicious fruits. I would proudly tell my parents about what I had learned in school that day, and then we would take a nap, as was customary. I remember the roads would be empty at that hour because everyone in town would be sleeping. Today, as a mother and businesswoman in American society, I really miss that custom.
Around three o’clock in the afternoon, Marjayoun would wake up from its community nap. Papa would go down to his restaurant to be ready when all the shops and businesses reopened at around four. On some afternoons Mama would take me along while she went to visit her friends. Some of them owned businesses, and we would walk to them and buy ice cream and visit. The wives worked alongside their husbands running the stores, as my mother helped my dad.
As much as I loved playing grown-up with Mama and her friends, my favorite afternoon activity was riding my bicycle from one end of Marjayoun to the other. This was no ordinary bicycle. It was painted red and yellow. Papa had put a light and a horn on it too, but I was never allowed to use the horn on the road. That would not have been polite or ladylike.
Whether I went with Mama to visit with her friends or riding on my bicycle, we would always end up at Papa’s restaurant for dinner. The air around the restaurant was filled with tempting aromas from the kitchen, and if the wind was right I could identify the evening’s specialty a hundred feet away. Our restaurant was known not only for the best food in town and the best prices, but also for the beautiful view. People loved sitting out on the terrace facing majestic, snowcapped Mount Hermon across the boulevard.
At seven thirty, Mama would take me up to our house and tidy up or prepare for the next day while I studied and did homework. When Papa came home from the restaurant, they would both tuck me into bed and sit with me for a while. We would say our prayers and exchange endearments, and I would go to sleep happy, comfortable, and secure.
For my tenth birthday, October 21, 1974, my parents decided to throw a huge birthday party. My mother was sixty-five years old, and my father was approaching seventy. They invited all their closest friends and all of mine for an early sit-down dinner. Even my teacher, Mademoiselle Amal, was invited. About twenty adults and fifteen children came, including, of course, our entire housing complex’s children and parents, plus Tante Madeline and Uncle Jamil with their sons Walid and Milad, and Tante Samira and Uncle George with their three girls, Rose, Violette, and Ghada. They dressed in their Sunday best and walked from the other end of town just to attend the dinner.
Mama spent the whole day chopping vegetables for tabouli, the traditional Lebanese salad, and making kebabs to cook on the shish that afternoon. She had been cooking for the previous two days, preparing stuffed grape leaves; kibbe, the traditional Lebanese meat loaf; humus; meat pies; a variety of Lebanese appetizers; and of course baklava. My father didn’t go to the restaurant that day. Instead, he spent the morning cutting roses from our garden for the table. Since it was already fall, the sky was cloudy and the air a bit chilly, so the dinner was held indoors. Our dining-room table wasn’t big enough, so my parents borrowed furniture from the restaurant. My mother got out her fancy embroidered tablecloths and arranged roses at both ends of the table. She was determined that everything would be just perfect. At three o’clock, I got dressed in a white-and-green dress that Mama had sewn just for the occasion.
Every inch of the main table was covered with appetizers, from cashews and almonds to every single dip and delicacy on the Lebanese menu. My parents were pleased and proud as their guests kept commenting on the delicious food and the wonderful decorations. Little did we know that this was going to be the last party for a long, long time. Indeed, it marked the end of my dream childhood. One month later, in November 1975, Lebanon’s national nightmare began, and with it began the destruction of our lives.
The Arab World I Was Born Into
Lebanon is considered part of the Arab world. However, as a child I was taught that my people, the Lebanese Christians, are the desce
ndants of the Phoenicians, who established independent city-states on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean in the late Bronze Age. The Phoenicians were of Aramaic (Canaanite), not Arabic, descent.1 Their skill as mariners and traders was unmatched in the ancient world. Phoenicia flourished for centuries before it was swallowed by a succession of empires: the Assyrian, the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Arab, the Ottoman Turk, and finally the French.
But the Phoenician people remained. Jesus preached among the Phoenicians, and Phoenicians were among the first gentile converts to Christianity.2 By the time of the Arab Conquest in the seventh century A.D., the ancestors of the Lebanese Christians had already been living in the land known as Phoenicia, now known as Lebanon, for more than two thousand years. And the Christians of Lebanon have been resisting the Muslim onslaught ever since. Although Lebanese Christians practiced Arabic culture because it was the environment we lived in, we never considered ourselves Arabs. We held on to our Christian heritage and practiced Western culture too. Ours was the only country in the Middle East where Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter were celebrated in the ways they are America and Europe, openly and gloriously. During Christmas stores would sparkle with decorations as shoppers set out to buy the latest in designer clothes straight off the runways of Paris and Milan. Christmas trees decorated homes and streets, and Christmas songs played on the radio and television. We sang “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” and many more American Christmas songs, but with Arabic words. During Easter, Christian towns from one end of the country to the other would color Easter eggs, exchange chocolates, and ring church bells for midnight and early masses. Christmas and Easter were the two main holidays when families would travel across the country to visit and share big meals, as kids were out of school for the traditional extended seasonal vacations.
Although we are considered by the West as Arabs, we are Arabs only by language and not by blood. We consider ourselves Phoenicians who are simply Arabophones, meaning Christians who speak the Arabic language after being conquered by the Arab Islamic invaders. Even today our church services and liturgy are said in Aramaic, the ancient language of Jesus.
We have many Christian denominations in Lebanon. There are the Maronites, the Roman Catholics, the Greek Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Orthodox, the Syrian Orthodox, the Assyrian Nestorians, and Protestants of various denominations. (Similarly, there are numerous sects of Islam in Lebanon, including the Shia, the Sunni, the Druze, the Alawis, and the Ismailis.)3 My family, like the majority of Christians in Lebanon, is Maronite. The Maronites get their name from the late-fourth- and early-fifth-century religious leader John Maron. His followers lived in the mountains of Lebanon, following his teachings and preaching the gospel.
When Lebanon gained its independence from France in 1941, its population was approximately 55 percent Christian and 45 percent Muslim. The Lebanese National Pact of 1943 created a unique democratic power-sharing arrangement between the religious communities. Under this arrangement, the president of Lebanon was a Christian, the prime minister was a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament was a Shiite Muslim.4 Representation in the Lebanese parliament was established with a ratio of six Christian deputies to five Muslim deputies, to reflect their proportions in the country’s population in the last census.5 The cabinet, the civil service, and the army were composed of both Christians and Muslims. Posts in the cabinet, and positions of authority at all levels of the civil service and military, were assigned to representatives of each community.6
This unique balance had a parallel in the United States Constitution. In the debates on representation in the new country’s legislative branch, the small states wanted each state to have equal representation, while the large states wanted representation to be based on population. In order to resolve this conflict, the Founding Fathers invented the bicameral legislature, dividing lawmaking power between two chambers: the U.S. Senate, where each state has two senators, and the U.S. House of Representatives, where each state was represented according to its population. Similar to the governmental structure created by the Lebanese National Pact of 1943, this democratic division of power represented each group fairly and equally. There was another significant similarity between the United States Constitution and the Lebanese National Pact. Like the Constitution, the Pact recognized the need to protect the rights of diverse religious communities, and institutionalized those rights in the structure of the government.
Lebanon’s governmental structure under the National Pact certainly bore a closer resemblance to that of the United States than to those in the rest of the Arab world, where totalitarian government is the norm, and minority, civil, and religious rights are routinely denied, frequently with extreme brutality. Some Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the states of the Persian Gulf, are absolute monarchies or family fiefdoms, although a facade of representative government may exist in the form of a powerless “advisory council” or a “legislature” handpicked by the ruling clique. Other Arab countries are ruled by military or hereditary dictatorships, such as the Assad family dictatorship in Syria, the presumptive Mubarak and Gadhafi family dictatorships in Egypt and Libya, respectively, and the former Saddam Hussein family dictatorship in Iraq.
We Lebanese Christians inherited the commercial skills of our Phoenician ancestors, who were renowned for their business savvy, and the budding democracy prospered. In no time at all, Beirut became a world banking capital. Lebanon was the only country in the Arab world where Arab and Western culture mixed comfortably. On Hamra Street, Beirut’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue, young Lebanese women dressed in the latest fashions from Paris, Milan, and New York mingled with Muslim women shrouded in the black hijab. All of the oil-rich sheikhs and royal families of the Arab world would come to Beirut to lavishly indulge in the Western lifestyle that they prohibited and condemned in their own countries. They would be joined by jet-set tourists and celebrities such as Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, and Brigitte Bardot, to be entertained by the finest performing artists in the world, from Frank Sinatra to Joan Baez, from Nureyev and Fonteyn to Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Beirut, like New York, San Francisco, and many other great American cities, was a cultural kaleidoscope, where different traditions from all over the world flourished side by side. This stood in stark contrast to all of the other Arab countries, where the openness and diversity of Lebanese society and culture were simultaneously envied and despised, but never replicated.
Although the rest of Lebanon was not as Westernized and cosmopolitan as Beirut, all of the people of Lebanon, Christian and Muslim alike, enjoyed the highest standard of living in the Arab world.7 All of this came without the benefit of the oil resources that were pumping petrodollars into other Arab countries.
We as Lebanese prided ourselves on our multiculturalism and diversity. We were a canvas of different colors, from the dark skinned to the blonds with blue eyes. Because of Lebanon’s geographical position on the tip of the Mediterranean, Lebanese blood was mixed with that of Europeans, as Lebanese merchants had brought Western brides with them, and with that of the Muslim Arab invaders who raped their way through the country. Just as America is a rainbow of different colors, we were that also. We did not, however, have any black people. We had bedouin tribes, Gypsies, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and a variety of Christian sects, people who wore different costumes, from authentic traditional bedouin clothing to Western clothing by Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, from conservative to flamboyant.
Lebanon was a beacon in the Middle East for different religious and ethnic groups coming together and working together as Lebanese. We celebrated Christian holidays as well as Muslim ones. In our cities you could hear the church bells ringing in the morning as well as the mosques sounding their prayers from their towers. We had open borders through which people from the surrounding Arabic countries came in and out freely. We had the best universities in the Middle East, where prospe
rous Arabs sent their children to study. Just like America, we welcomed anyone seeking an education at our universities and were eager to learn about their culture and their tradition. Some Arab students remained to work in Lebanon because it was the prosperous business hub of the Middle East. We were renowned for our hospitality, good-heartedness, and generosity, just as America is known for the same qualities today.
Sadly, those same similarities were the cause of our destruction. We were so deluded with our multiculturalism that we did not realize the risk of losing the very culture we prided ourselves on having. We did not realize that the intolerant Islamic side of our culture was gaining strength on the back of our Western openness and pride in diversity. With our open-border policy, we unwittingly allowed what would turn out to be our enemy to infiltrate our society to plot and fight with radicals within to gain control of our government.
Beneath the surface, relations among Lebanon’s diverse religious and ethnic communities were far from perfect. Despite Lebanon’s prosperity, the nation’s unique experiment in democracy was precarious because of ancient and persistent hatreds and rivalries that continued to simmer.
My parents were true Christians, not just in terms of ritual, but also in teaching love and respect for all people. That is what they taught me at home. In contrast, the Arab Islamic culture that surrounded Lebanon taught fear, mistrust, and hatred. The airwaves were filled with stories demonizing Israel, calling for its destruction. Conspiracy theories were the topic of the day, every day. There were even ghastly stories of Arab leaders ruling with iron fists. One I remember in particular was of Syrian president Assad killing twenty thousand Syrians in Hama who tried to rebel against him. Sunni and Shiite Muslims were taught to hate each other because of a theological disagreement more than twelve centuries old. Muslims in general hated the Christians over a theological disagreement even older, and the Christians hated the Muslims in return. The Christian clans mistrusted and feuded with one another, and the Druze were the odd people out. But everybody had one thing in common: we were all taught to hate Israel and the Jews. In the universal hatred that was preached against Jews, virtually no distinction was made between the Jewish religion and the Israeli state. In my Christian private school, we studied only the New Testament. I never saw the Old Testament, because it was considered the enemy’s book. All I heard was “Israel is the devil, the Jews are demons, they are the source of all the problems in the Middle East, and the only time we will have peace is when we drive all the Jews into the sea."
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 5