Different generation, different nationality, different continent, twenty-five years apart. Same enemy: radical Islam.
3.
LIFE UNDER TERROR
By the time I returned from the hospital, every aspect of our lives had changed radically for the worse. My father had bought corrugated metal and used it to replace the walls that had fallen down in our family room. He put clear plastic sheeting on what was supposed to be a small window between the metal sheets. I lay in the family room on a torn metal couch. It was a very dark room. Winter made it gloomier, since we lived in the mountains and barely had a sunny day for three months in the wintertime. It was freezing cold despite running a kerosene stove in the middle of the room. The metal walls adopted the temperature of the cold mountains more than the meager warmth radiating from the little heater. The nights were scary, as the metal sheets would bang and rub against each other in the wind. The plastic sheeting on the window would breathe in and out depending on the flow of the wind. Perhaps the worst change was that now my religion was a matter of life and death. Most of the three thousand people who lived in Marjayoun were Christians, with a few Muslims living in their own neighborhood at the edge of town. However, in southern Lebanon, a large majority of the population is Shia Muslim, and the vast majority of the Palestinians were Muslim. Marjayoun was boxed in by Palestinian enclaves and hostile Muslim villages and towns to the east, north, and west. To the south was the Christian village of Klaia, numbering barely nine hundred inhabitants. South of Klaia was Israel.
Even before that first bombardment, relations with our Muslim neighbors were tense because of clashes between Christians and Muslims in other parts of Lebanon. Now the fear had hit home.
A lot of Muslims poured in from other Muslim countries, such as Iran, the founder and supporter of Hezbollah, one of the leading terrorist organizations in the world today. They also came from Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt. The Lebanese civil war was not between the Lebanese; it was a holy war declared on the Christians by the Muslims of the Middle East.
They started massacring the Christians in city after city. The Western media seldom reported these horrific events. Most of the press was located in West Beirut, controlled by the PLO and the Muslims. One of the most ghastly acts was the massacre in the Christian city of Damour,1 where thousands of Christians were slaughtered like sheep. The combined forces of the PLO and the Muslims would enter a bomb shelter and see a mother and a father hiding with a little baby. They would tie one leg of the baby to the mother and one leg to the father and pull the parents apart, splitting the child in half. A close friend of mine became mentally disturbed after they made her slaughter her own son in a chair. They tied her to a chair, tied a knife to her hand, and, holding her hand, forced her to cut her own sixteen-year-old son’s throat. After killing him they raped her two daughters in front of her. They would urinate and defecate on the altars of churches using the pages of the Bible as toilet paper before shooting and destroying the church. Americans just don’t realize the viciousness of the militant Islamic fundamentalist. They refuse to see it even when they look today at video footage of churches being burned in Iraq or different parts of the world or synagogues being destroyed in Gaza.
I think the biggest disservice to the American people was the denial by the networks to air video of the beheading of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, or the many other hostages that were beheaded in Iraq. We as a society need to see the type of enemy we are fighting. People have been so sheltered in this country that they have not paid attention to what has been going on for the last twenty-some years. And today, even after the attack of September 11, people still cannot fathom that this type of barbarity could happen here.
As was common practice when Islamic terror prevailed, Christians fled. Any Christian who could move from Marjayoun did so. Unfortunately, when the bombs destroyed our home, they also turned my father’s savings into ashes. With no money to move, we were trapped. As the Christians left, Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims flooded into Marjayoun.
At first we were protected by the Lebanese army base up the hill from what was left of our house. As long as the Lebanese military remained neutral in the civil war, we were safe. However, that did not last long. In January of 1976, the army began to disintegrate along sectarian lines. One lieutenant, Ahmad al-Khatib, broke away, announcing the establishment of the “Lebanese Arab Army” and urging all Muslim soldiers to mutiny and desert with their weapons. Lebanese army bases throughout the country were quickly taken over by sectarian militias, Muslims in most areas and Christians in some.
One morning shortly after al-Khatib’s mutiny, the senior Muslim officer at the Marjayoun base called a meeting of the Muslims stationed there. When the Christians were told they’d better not be present, they knew exactly what was happening. While the Muslims met to plan the takeover of the base, the Christian soldiers quickly gathered as many weapons and tanks, and as much ammunition and equipment, as they could and dashed out of the base, south to Klaia.
With the army fragmented and the Christians soldiers gone, we were now at the mercy of the Muslims and PLO members who controlled the military base. And their mercy was not tender. With the military shift in power, the attitude and behavior of the Muslims living in our town and the surrounding area turned against us overnight. Even though not all of them became raging fanatics, the moderate voices of the less influential were silenced because of fear and intimidation.
The radicals started looting Christian homes and intimidating the owners. They would enter Christian businesses and demand products without paying or having any intention of paying in the future. Soldiers would enter my father’s restaurant and demand that he prepare food for them even late at night when he was closing up. After a few months my father closed the restaurant because it wasn’t worth the risk or the humiliation by the Muslims. We were nothing but kuffar, dirty infidel Christians, to them.
It was a shock to our sensibilities. We had always shown our Muslim neighbors kindness and respect. Many of the same Muslim soldiers had eaten at my father’s restaurant before the war. Some of them had running accounts that Papa never collected because he knew they had no money. As I outgrew my clothes, Mama gave them to some of the Muslim families for their daughters. One of my friends through my five years of elementary school was a Muslim girl called Khadija, who lived in a nearby Muslim town. Khadija and I were inseparable. We attended the same Catholic school, shared the same classes, walked together on the playground, and sat together to have our lunch. I knew that her family remained in our area and was not involved in any evildoing against the Christians. There were plenty of these good-hearted Muslims, but they were subdued and silenced by the radicals. In a later chapter I will describe the far-reaching and dangerous implications of this ability of radical jihadists to subdue and influence moderate Muslims living in Christian communities.
At this point in the civil war the Communists were allied with the Palestinians. The only thing that saved our lives was Papa’s friendship with a man who was a senior leader in the local Communist Party. This man had sufficient power to put us under his protection. He sent orders that our house was not to be looted and we were not to be arrested or abused. Although these orders were followed, we became prisoners in what was left of our home.
Meanwhile, the Muslims and PLO found another way to fill our lives with terror. By 1976 Klaia was the only town in southern Lebanon still under Christian control. It held out against Muslim attacks only because of the few tanks and cannons the Christian soldiers had taken with them when they had escaped from the military base. Klaia’s conquest became the number-one priority of the Muslims. Since the Muslims and their Palestinian allies couldn’t conquer Klaia immediately, they launched a campaign of artillery and rocket bombardment. The Muslims and PLO would set up their artillery and rocket launchers in our yard (or the yard of some other Christians who had been unable to flee Marjayoun), and they would launch a barrage of rockets or s
hells at Klaia or Israel. Then they would pack up and leave, knowing that we would absorb the brunt of the return fire. The Palestinians use this tactic today in Christian neighborhoods in the West Bank when attacking the Israeli army. The Christians experienced the same punishing results.
Even though our neighbors over in Klaia were still holding out in the last remaining Christian village, their situation was becoming desperate. They were under constant artillery and rocket bombardment, and running out of bombs and bullets with which to defend themselves. They knew they needed help fast, for their own sake and so they could come and save us. They knew our days were numbered and action was of the essence. For us in the south, there was no help coming from Christians anywhere else in Lebanon or the world. With nowhere to turn, the people of Klaia asked for help from the Israelis. Since they and we were facing torture and death at the hands of the Muslims, seeking help from Israel seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Under the cover of darkness, a few men from Klaia went to the border to make contact with the Israelis. This in itself was very dangerous because the Israelis were always on alert for attempts at infiltration by Palestinian terrorists. Fortunately, there were Arabic-speaking soldiers assigned to the Israeli border patrols. After a tense moment of flagging down a jeep full of soldiers with a .50-caliber machine gun ready to shoot infiltrators coming over the border fence, the men from Klaia were able to explain their dire situation.
The Israelis were well aware of the nature of the threat that faced the Christians, and they were willing to help for both moral and strategic reasons. The Palestinians had been launching terror attacks and artillery and rocket barrages against Israel from southern Lebanon for almost ten years. The Israelis knew that if the Muslims and Palestinians completely controlled southern Lebanon, the Christians could be slaughtered as they had been in other Christian towns and villages, and Israel would face even more terror attacks and bombardments. Accordingly, the Israelis offered to equip and train the Christian men so they could defend themselves and at the same time provide Israel with a buffer. They provided food and humanitarian assistance to the people of Klaia. This was the beginning of the South Lebanese Army, the SLA, led by Christian Major Sa’ad Haddad, who had defected from the crumbling Lebanese army to help protect Christians in the south. With the help of the Israelis, Christians from Klaia began formulating plans to come back and save us.
The Palestinians and their leftist Muslim allies, infuriated that the Christians in Klaia had sought and received help from the Israelis, increased the frequency and duration of their artillery and rocket attacks on Klaia and south across the border into Israel. This prompted the Israelis and the Christians to fire back at our town, where the shelling against them was coming from.
As the shelling intensified we started spending our nights in a small underground bomb shelter behind the restaurant. My father had had this shelter built with financial assistance from the Lebanese government, given to those in southern Lebanon to protect them from the “Israeli aggressors.” Ironically, the bomb shelter my father had built with the encouragement of the Muslims in government to protect us from the Israeli enemy would be the same shelter that would protect us from being slaughtered by the Muslims. Papa, Mama, and I shared this tiny space, about ten feet by twelve feet, with Uncle Tony, Tante Terez, and their four daughters. Tony and Terez were not really my uncle and aunt, but that’s what I called them. They were renting one of our houses in our complex at the time. Like us, they had nowhere else to go.
We lived in the shelter for three consecutive weeks, bombarded by shelling. One night it was particularly bad. We huddled in terror, sure we would not survive the night. Just before daybreak the shelling stopped, and was replaced by an eerie silence. The silence lasted for about half an hour, and then we heard a commotion on the road in front of the restaurant. Papa peeked out of a small window and saw gunmen fleeing north on foot and in jeeps and trucks. After fifteen minutes, the commotion subsided and the silence returned. We didn’t know what was happening, but we were too terrified to move.
Suddenly, we were shaken by the rumbling of a tank pulling up next to our bomb shelter. Papa jumped to the window to see what was happening. Five men carrying machine guns climbed down from the tank and began walking toward the entrance to the bomb shelter. Papa gasped in fear, and then he started to laugh and cry at the same time. “They’re wearing crosses,” he said. “They’re Christians, come to save us!” We all rushed out of the bomb shelter crying with relief and joy. The Christians had finally been able to expel the Palestinians and Muslims from Marjayoun. We felt as if we had returned from the dead.
In a short time, Major Haddad and his volunteer army of civilians and ex-Lebanese soldiers were able to extend protection to three small enclaves in southern Lebanon. However, although Marjayoun was now back in Christian hands, the danger was far from over. In fact, it became even greater. Now death could come out of the sky at any time, without warning. We were still surrounded on three sides. The Palestinians and their Muslim Communist and leftist allies held fortified positions in the mountains on our east, north, and west. It was the perfect setting for them. No matter which way they shot, they couldn’t miss. Their largest artillery base was located across the valley to the east in the Muslim village of Elkhiam, where the rockets that bombed my home had come from. Their big guns were aimed straight at us. You could be sitting in your kitchen, or walking down the road, or visiting with friends on the porch, and suddenly there would be a loud explosion, and you could be dead or wounded. If you heard the rushing zoom-whoosh of a shell flying through the air, you were lucky, because that meant it would explode someplace else, giving you time to run to the bomb shelter before the next round landed.
And then there were the snipers. Elkhiam was so close that they didn’t need binoculars to see us walking down the street. They could shoot with either small-caliber rifles like the AK-47, or big machine guns with bullets that could go through thick metal and still take your head off. We could hear the hiss of bullets zipping by before hearing the sound of the shots being fired. Because of the echoes created by the hills and valleys, we couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from. They were bombarding or sniping at us most of the time, making us prisoners in our tiny shelter.
Our bomb shelter had one small window, which we blocked with marble tiles that my father had originally bought to decorate our living room. Now we strategically placed the tiles to stop shrapnel. Although no sunlight could get through that window, somehow a freezing wind found its way in. We covered part of the door with a big block of cement that had been a public bench next to Papa’s restaurant. A long plastic tarpaulin was hung over the remainder of the opening to partially stop the cold wind.
It’s a good thing that we were already very close to Tony, Terez, and their four daughters. All nine of us had to share the small space, deprived of any privacy. We slept on the floor almost on top of each other. The women and girls slept on one side and the men on the other. With our long hair, sleeping on a damp floor, it was not long before Mama, Tante Terez, and all five of us girls developed an infestation of lice. Mama and Tante Terez put kerosene on our heads to get rid of them. I remember getting dizzy from the fumes, but I had to put up with it. It worked, and it was better than itching.
We lived on the southern edge of town in an isolated no-man’s-land between Marjayoun and Klaia. Few people walked by, because doing so would have made them easy targets for snipers across the valley. Anyone who drove by would zoom down the road as fast as he could to avoid being hit. Every time I heard a car coming I wished so hard that it would stop, so we would have someone to talk to and tell us what was going on. But knowing they were being followed in someone’s gun sights across the valley, drivers pushed the gas pedal even more. Days would go by without seeing anyone other than my parents and Uncle Tony’s family.
I remember our first Christmas Eve in our new wartime surroundings. We stayed up until midnight singing Christmas hymns around the fire.
Our parents told stories about Christmas when they were growing up. They asked us to close our eyes and imagine that we had a beautiful new dress laid out next to us, so when we woke up Christmas morning we could wear our new clothes to church. But that Christmas Eve it was hard to dream beautiful dreams while hearing artillery shells exploding every two seconds. That’s what our militia later estimated had fallen on us during that long night. It was a Christian holiday, and the Muslims were not going to let us enjoy it in peace.
Morning ushered in a very sad Christmas. We had no gifts to exchange and no electricity. Because the shells continued to explode, we had to stay inside. We ate our breakfast by candlelight and then just sat there for the rest of the day. We didn’t have much to celebrate. It was Christmas, but for us it was just another day in a war. We had no way of knowing how long it would last, or how long we would last.
Later that week, Uncle Tony told my father that he had been looking for rental homes and that he had found an underground house at the other end of town where his family could live. It would be safer, and they would have more room. He had tears in his eyes as he told my father that they had to leave. It was very hard for us to see them go. If we had been able to move away from the front lines we would have done it too, but we couldn’t just leave our home, since we were the owners. Uncle Tony could just take the same amount of rent he was paying my dad and pay it to someone else and move. We had lost our money and had no monthly income, so we couldn’t afford to pay rent anywhere.
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 8