Listen to the Lion:

Here's an Examiner piece about one of the bravest and most interesting men I've ever met.

Below is the piece I did on him orginally in 2004 as a grad school project that never got published:

Before I met Walid Shoebat, I visited his hometown of Bethlehem. Situated on a crescent-shaped hill just six miles south of Jerusalem’s Old City, to the Western traveler the town seems a world apart from the Israeli capital, which, because of the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is. Because the city is in the occupied West Bank and I was an American journalism student interning in Jerusalem, I wasn’t supposed to go to Bethlehem, having been warned by the U.S. State Department and prohibited by my university and by my employer.

But the pull of being so close to the birthplace of Jesus proved too strong and, on the spur of the moment on the second-to-last Saturday I was to be in Israel, I hired an Old City shopkeeper to take me to see the Church of the Nativity. Sam told me he was a Palestinian Christian from East Jerusalem and we left for Bethlehem in his battered, decade-old European mini-car.

The Israeli troops at the checkpoint Bethlehem road checkpoint waved us through after a cursory check, but we soon pulled into a makeshift parking lot where a few cabs were idling. Sam explained that his car had the yellow Israeli license plate which could cause trouble in the West Bank, so we hired a cab with the white Palestinian plates an went toward Bethlehem. At one point, the cab driver said something to Sam in Arabic and I asked what it was. They pointed into the distance toward a recent Jewish settlement, Hat Homa, and complained about it and other Jewish settlements that had been established on the Palestinian side of the “Green Line,” the border that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War that pitted Israel against Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

In Bethlehem, we drove down streets guarded by Palestinian Authority policemen in black berets. Some of the shops were abandoned, others looked busy. One even had what appeared to be flat-screen TVs for sale. We stopped in another that sold dozens of different types of freshly-made pastries. The patrons inside eyed me curiously, but I never felt uncomfortable.

After a quick stop at the church we stopped near the tomb of Rachel, the wife of the biblical Jacob, Abraham’s grandson. Even though Israelis and Palestinians are supposed to have equal access to the site, day-to-day security concerns often make that impractical. When I got out of the taxi to snap a picture, a short man, as big around the middle as he was tall, who was minding the service station across the street from the tomb began shouting at the top of his lungs for us to clear out. Sam said he was worried that our presence there at dusk would bring gunfire from the Israeli troops guarding the tomb. We got back in the taxi and drove off toward the road to Jerusalem with the angry fat man still shouting.

So that was my visit to Walid Shoebat’s hometown, a place that wasn’t under Israeli occupation when he was born there in 1960 and a place that Walid Shoebat will likely never visit again.

“If go back home, I have five minutes to live,” Shoebat said.

I met Walid Shoebat on the afternoon of October 26, a few hours before he was to give a talk at Penn State University. Sitting across from him at a table in a private residence, he was remarkably open about certain things, close-mouthed and cautious about others. To get a private interview with Shoebat, I had to provide a reference to an associate of his, and, I found out soon, the name Walid Shoebat is an assumed one.

But the 44-year-old former software engineer is not paranoid. He has a relaxed, easy manner. He chats amiably with everyone he encounters in a warm voice that speaks accented but excellent English with a faint California lilt. And he speaks candidly of engaging in terrorist activities in Israel and in the United States.

The caution around my visit is not prompted by a fear of the FBI or the Mossad, and Shoebat is not worried that Israel’s Shin Bet would catch him in Bethlehem. He is afraid that his brother would make good on his threat to have him killed.

Shoebat said his brother has made that threat because, about 10 years ago, he renounced his past involvement with the PLO and left the Muslim faith in which he was raised in order to embrace Christianity and to speak out in favor of the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel.

Shoebat now works full time promoting what some would call an extreme form of Zionism by sharing his personal testimony and his analysis of the current Israeli-Palestinian situation in print and in speaking engagements in churches and synagogues and on college campuses across America.

Shoebat’s October talk at Penn State, sponsored by campus Jewish groups and by both the College Democrats and Republicans, went, he said, about like most of his campus talks do. At his request, two campus security personnel were on hand, both to check bags at the entrance to the small auditorium and to be on hand in case of an over-zealous protestor attempts to be disruptive.

At that night’s event, there were about 150 people, mostly undergraduates but with some older adults. “Most people stand up and say I’ve done something horrible in my life,” Shoebat began. “I used to be a terrorist. I carried a bomb at a young age. I tried to lynch an Israeli at a young age. But I’m here tonight to share with you what the root cause of terrorism is and what the solution for the causes are.”

Just after Shoebat began, three young men, who by their appearance could be thought to be Arab or Palestinian, entered the room together, but then spread out to sit in three seats apart from one another, though there was room for them to sit together. Shoebat bristled at their entrance and watched them for a moment with widened eyes, but he kept speaking. He spoke with a quiet, passionate insistence that visibly irritated a minority of the crowd, including the three late arrivals, but enthralled most of the rest.
By way of his speech that night, my talks with him and other recorded interviews and talks, I’ve managed to piece together a short biography of Walid Shoebat.

Born in Bethlehem the son of a Jordanian Muslim father, who served in the Jordanian army, and an American Christian mother of European descent, Shoebat said that anti-Jewish indoctrination began for him in kindergarten, where he was taught to sing that “Arabs are beloved and Jews are our dogs.” Shoebat recounted this and other examples of inflammatory teachings not only in English but in Arabic as a way to try and convince any Arab speakers of their authenticity. He also compared Arab anti-Semitism to Nazism, claiming not only ideological similarities, but cooperative ties between personalities like Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate period (and a friend of Shoebat’s paternal grandfather, he says), and Adolf Hitler. Shoebat also blamed the Israeli government for allowing anti-Semitic curriculum from Jordan to be used to distort his generation’s education.

Believing fervently in what he was taught, Shoebat volunteered for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. His first violent activities were throwing rocks down from the Al-Aqsa mosque complex onto Jews praying at the Western Wall below. When he was 14, Shoebat joined a crowd of Palestinian youths in stoning the truck of an Israeli driver who had accidentally hit a Palestinian girl in the street. The driver escaped with his life, but Israeli troops were called out to quell the riot Shoebat helped start.

The teenager’s rock-throwing earned him a short jail stint in Jerusalem, where he first heard about making bombs. Shoebat said he was not mistreated in prison, but he heard from his comrades that Palestinians suspected of making and delivering bombs were tortured during interrogation.

At 16, Shoebat said he was cajoled by a man named Mahmud Al-Mughrabi into attempting to bomb the Leumi Bank in Bethlehem. He smuggled a bomb made in Jerusalem back to Bethlehem inside a loaf of bread and was supposed to plant it near or inside the bank’s door. While approaching the bank, Shoebat spotted some Palestinian children playing nearby and decided to throw it onto the roof of a nearby building instead, where he said it exploded without harming anyone.

“I had to die for Allah,” said Shoebat, who was still obsessed with the idea of dying as a martyr in a hail of Israeli gunfire even though he didn’t have the stomach to complete his first mission.

The same year during a riot in Bethlehem, Shoebat led youths in an attempt to lynch an Israeli solider. Shoebat and a friend beat the solider bloody with clubs before other Israeli soldiers arrived and the wounded man escaped. Even as a man nearing middle age, Shoebat still regrets his attempt at murder and has tried to locate the solider to apologize, even unsuccessfully broadcasting an appeal as a guest on Israeli radio.

Shoebat’s parents then sent him to study in America at Loop College in Chicago, now called Harold Washington College. He said he didn’t graduate from Loop because he was too busy working with the PLO student network to raise money and recruit new members

Shoebat was often I charge of publicity for what seemed like innocent fund-raisers. “On the fliers, I would change the English to suit the American audience,” Shoebat said. “I would write, ‘Come to our cultural event and you will have lamb and baklava.’ But in Arabic, we said what we were really doing.”

Staying active in the PLO and other Palestinian groups, Shoebat ended up in California working as a software designer. There, he met and married his third wife, a Catholic Mexican-American. Initially determined to convert her to Islam, he accepted her challenge to prove to her “how the Jews corrupted the Bible.” Shoebat studied the Old and New Testaments for the first time, and engaged in a study of Jewish history, art and music, a crash course that included watching and re-watching a video of “Fiddler on the Roof” many dozens of times.

“I could not figure out that with all this music, the Jews never sang about war or killing or hate,” Shoebat said. “And the rabbis had a prayer for everything!” Likewise, in the Bible and in a wide array of history books – something he said he never had access to in the West Bank - he found that the Jewish people were always defending themselves against aggression.

But an even more important transformation was taking place: Shoebat was overcome by the Bible’s messages of moral accountability and love. “I couldn’t believe that in the Bible, David’s sins were out in the open and that Nathan the prophet was allowed to confront him,” said Shoebat, saying that he had always been taught that the prophet Mohammed could do no wrong.

Ultimately, the New Testament’s message grace moved him to declare his faith in Christ in 1993. “I came to believe that if it doesn’t have love, it’s not from God,” Shoebat said.

At a family reunion in California not long after his conversion, he told his family about his new faith and questioned their continued hatred for Israel and support for Palestinian terrorism. He said they immediately disowned him and arranged to “steal” back land in Bethlehem that Shoebat had bought from them. They told him that his only way back into the family and to reclaim his property is to return to the Islamic court and re-assert his Islamic faith. Recently, Shoebat spoke to his father for the first time in nearly ten years only to find out that the death threats from his brother and others in Bethlehem are still in effect. Shoebat’s mother, who secretly retained her Christian faith for almost 40 years living in Bethlehem and Jordan, now lives in the United States.

Asked for his opinion on how to bring peace to the Middle East, Shoebat responded:

“The hope of the future is to destroy terrorism, and you have to destroy the theology behind terrorism just like you destroyed Nazi Germany. You have to close the tap on the source of this education system, you have to change the education system and hope to reeducated the coming generations in the Middle East to live with the West and live with the minority Jews living in the land. And I don’t see any hope in the future until we do so.”

Shoebat’s vision of “minority Jews living in the land” is one where Israel governs, or at least has some sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. He sees Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan for a Gaza pullout as an excuse for Palestinian terrorists to claim that violence pays off. And though Shoebat, now an American citizen, supported President Bush’s re-election, he dismisses the viability of the President’s proposal for a two-state solution.

So what sort of reception does Shoebat’s unabashed Zionism and his challenges to the historical claims of Palestinians receive on campuses? Is anyone’s mind changed or challenged? For the most part, they’re not. But Shoebat says there are always handfuls who are.

On the night at Penn State, there was one. After a few people congratulated Shoebat and a few more asked him how he intended to vote, one student asked a few politely-worded, carefully-considered questions.

Brian Stein, a sophomore philosophy and political science major, asked Shoebat to elaborate on his claims that incoming Jews bought a great deal of land from Arabs in peaceful, legal transactions and that many Palestinians fled to Jordan of their own accord– rather than being forced out by the Israeli forces – prior to the 1967 war.

“I thought he was good overall,” Stein told me later. “Certain things I think he got carried away with, but there’s a lot of food for thought there.”

Before the talk, Shoebat told me that he doesn’t proselytize Christianity in his talks to Jews or Muslims and that he has the best dialogues with college students, many of whom haven’t yet formed hard opinions on the Israel-Palestine debate.

“I’m just sowing seeds in soft soil,” Shoebat said.