“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.”

When life-saving — arguably genocide-preventing — information is systematically and deliberately misreported and concealed by the world’s largest news organizations, you can safely consider it, too, an act of lying.

On January 9, the Associated Press released a report titled “A look at the Islamic militant Hamas group.” Like virtually all AP reports on Israel-Palestine, it is loaded with examples of journalistic malpractice: omission of the most basic and vital facts, use of the most sensationalistic or flatly wrong language, contradictions, and untruths.

From the report:

NAME: Arabic for “zeal.” Is acronym of Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, or Islamic Resistance Movement. Use first was in 1987 leaflet presaging launch of first Palestinian uprising against Israel, 1987-93.

GOAL: To establish Islamic theocracy in Israel, West Bank and Gaza Strip. Does not recognize state of Israel and committed to its destruction.

OPERATIONS: Built grass-roots base through preaching and network of health, education and welfare services in Gaza Strip and West Bank. Preaches armed resistance against Israel and has staged dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks, killing hundreds. Listed as terror group by U.S., European Union and Israel.¹

In the “NAME” point, AP admits that the name of the organization reveals its main purpose (resistance). So, why do AP reports always refer to Hamas as the “Islamic militant group” or “violent Islamic extremist group”? Why is AP so troubled by the phrase Islamic resistance movement, or even Palestinian resistance group? Is it the same reason AP doesn’t mention Hamas’ raison d’être: resisting the belligerent Israeli occupation of Palestine?

In the “OPERATIONS” point, AP firstly mentions Hamas’ social and political foundations; so again, why refer to Hamas as solely “militant”? Are armed, occupying, belligerent Israeli “troops” not also “militant”? And what of their religious designations? Are they not “Jewish militants”?

In the “GOAL” point, AP uses deceitfully sensationalistic language and contradicts what it reported in “NAME.” AP is basically lying here. Hamas’ primary stated goal is to liberate Palestine from the Israeli occupation. The establishment of an Islamic state (”theocracy”) is ancillary thereto. A theocracy was, in fact, established in the Levant more than 60 years ago; it is known as Israel (”the Jewish state”).

And when reporting that Hamas is “dedicated to [Israel's] destruction,” AP omits Hamas’ peaceful and quite rational overtures these last few years, contradicting that sensationalistic and Orwellian inversion of reality. And what are the authoritative legal grounds for requiring Hamas to “recognize” Israel? There are none. And morally speaking, how can a stateless group of individuals be held at bay over their refusal to recognize an already established state? If anything, the roles should be reversed. Does Israel recognize statehood for Palestinians? Is Israel dedicated to the destruction of Palestine? Historical and ongoing facts on the ground (as opposed to loosely-interpreted and mostly irrelevant words in a charter) scream, “duh!”

AP mentions Hamas’ violent and arguably immoral tactics. Indeed, detonating a bomb, knowing that non-combatant civilians will die as a result, is immoral and deserving of public contempt. On the other hand, if AP’s readers knew that many, if not most, of those attacks were aimed at armed-to-the-teeth, belligerent “troops” and “settlers,” then perhaps AP’s readers would wonder whether there was no other feasible way of hitting legitimate military targets in resistance to the unbearable occupation. Furthermore, AP conceals another vital fact: Hamas, for more than four years now, has honored its commitment not to employ “suicide bombing” as a resistance tactic.²)

Other Huge and Unavoidable Questions

As an unspoken rule of thumb, AP’s reportage on Israel-Palestine is decidedly Israeli-centric.³

How else can AP answer the following questions honestly without admitting to blatant journalistic fraud?

• Why hasn’t AP released a similar report on the state of Israel? What is there to hide?
• AP parrots the official (and dishonest) Israeli line, that Israel launched the current carpet-bombing and invasion of Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into Israel, as if it were the Gospel; so why won’t AP even mention the Palestinian reason for firing those rockets?
• When reporting that Hamas et al. are considered terrorist organizations by the U.S., Israeli, and other governments, why not also mention that Hamas et al. consider certain U.S. and Israeli entities to be terrorist organizations? The Iranian Parliament actually made the designation official!
• Why does AP insist that Hamas are clearly and uniquely the violent, extreme, and iron-grip faction — and that their political opposition, Fatah, are clearly the “moderates” — when moderation is defined by stuff like this, this, and this?
• If it is so true, so relevant, and so worth constantly repeating that Hamas is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, then how, pray tell, should Hamas go about defeating the world’s 4th-most-powerful military, which is nuclear-armed and blindly backed and subsidized by the world’s preeminent superpower?

Perhaps AP takes its readers for such ignorant fools because AP, being “the world’s largest and most trusted independent source of news and information,” is supremely confident in its ability to get away with massively misinforming them to the point of utter state-worshiping servility.

- – - – -

AP Jerusalem Bureau
PO Box 13172
Jerusalem 91131
Israel
Tel: 972-2-538-5577
Fax: 972-2-537-6083
Bureau Chief, Steve Gutkin: sgutkin@ap.org
Managing Editor, Josef Federman: jfederman@ap.org

AP Headquarters
450 W. 33rd St.
New York, NY 10001
Tel: 1-212-621-1500
Email: info@ap.org

1. “A look at the Islamic militant Hamas group,” The Associated Press, 1/9/9. Emphasis added.
2. The last time Hamas uncontroversially claimed responsibility was in August 2004; whereas, the attack in Dimona, Israel, on February 5, 2008, was contested, with armed wings of both Hamas and Fatah claiming responsibility. (See Haaretz
3. For examples, see the various articles and studies on AP in the “Analysis of Media Coverage of Israel/Palestine” section at IfAmericansKnew, and “AP’s Chronological Disorder: Israel-Gaza Edition,” by this author.

Not a day goes by in which editors like Josef Federman and bureau chief Steven Gutkin do not perpetrate a fraud on their readers for the sake of minimizing Palestinian suffering and Israeli culpability therefor. (This is on top of Mr. Gutkin’s blatant and unrepentant lies about the so-called threat of the Iranian nuclear program.)

Sometimes in their efforts to demonize the victim, they forget to act like editors, making the silliest mistakes. These can include basic spelling, punctuation, and sometimes grammatical errors while on rarer occasions they’ll repeat entire paragraphs, back-to-back.

But these are honest mistakes.

This morning’s episode of journalistic shape-shifting by the Israeli staff at AP (a.k.a. Apartheid Preservers) is silly as they come, but is far from honest. It concerns the legal status of those Israeli outposts inside the Palestinian West Bank, where some of AP’s objective Israeli editors and reporters reside.

In the opening paragraph of the headline “Rice: settlements unhelpful to peace talks,” under the byline of Jewish-Israeli Matti Friedman, we learn that “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday urged Israel to stop expanding settlements on disputed territory hours after a new report came out saying the Jewish state has nearly doubled such activity in the past year.”

Now, AP never matter-of-factly informs readers that under international law the “settlements” are, in fact, illegal and not “disputed”; so there is nothing new or unusual here. But to any shrewd reader, a question should arise: how do you explain Ms. Rice’s constant objections — directed solely at the Israeli government — if the “expanding settlements” are simply “disputed”? Why not settle the dispute in court after all these years if it’s a simple dispute?

Furthermore, women, children, and elderly Palestinians are illegally imprisoned and abused by Israel, but we never hear a peep out of U.S. government officials about that travesty. Unarmed Palestinian civilians of all ages are harassed, beaten, and murdered all the time by the “most moral army in the world“; but there’s no outcry from our impassioned, conscientious leaders to that. So what’s the big deal about these “disputed settlements”?

The answer arrives implicitly in paragraph two. There, we find that “Rice is visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories in hopes of furthering the announced goal of brokering a Mideast peace deal by year’s end …”

Did you catch that?

The editor doesn’t make the fact clear; but in the process of contradicting himself from one paragraph to the next, he allows the more discerning reader to figure that those “settlements” are referred to as “disputed” and “unhelpful” because they are in fact being constructed on other people’s land. The settlements are being built inside the “Palestinian territories.”

In other words, they are illegal colonies.

But to AP and corporate media, it’s not so cut and dry. You see, when a foreign state bulldozes your house and farmland; steals your land from you and your neighbors at the point of a gun; builds a colony there; and transfers its militant, fanatical, armed-to-the-teeth population into that colony — well, that land becomes “disputed territory.”

That is, as long as you’re not a Jewish Israeli or a settlerist, like our fair and balanced editors in the W. Jerusalem bureau of The Associated Press.

An exiled Iranian opposition group claimed Wednesday that Tehran was speeding up a program to develop nuclear weapons. “The Iran regime entered a new phase in its nuclear project,” said Mohammad Mohaddessin of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran.

The NCRI is the political wing of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, which advocates the overthrow of government in Tehran. The Mujahedeen has been designated a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union as well as Iran.

Mohaddessin said his group got the information from “hundreds” of reports and sources from within the Iranian regime, whom he did not name.¹

The PMOI—a.k.a., the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MeK)—made the same claim in December 2002. The allegation then—that the Iranian regime was enriching uranium at weapons-grade level within secret facilities—turned out to be only partially (and irrelevantly) true: the facilities existed (not a violation in itself), but contrary to the group’s claims, were not weapons-production sites. Still, the information from the MeK—contrived in conjunction with Israeli entities—was used by U.S. hawks to pass sanctions against Iran. But their case has been so weak; the neocons have had to use blatant coercion to persuade UNSC nations to vote in favor.

The most notable and dangerous in all this is that the unproven MeK-Israeli, nuclear weapons claim is the basis for the main finding of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate: that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.” Iran never had a weapons program—at least not one that has been confirmed by U.S. intelligence, the IAEA, or anyone else but Iranian “dissidents” and Israelis and neocons, i.e., the ones who have been wrong all along.

Further deconstruction of the Iranian nukes fraud and the neocons’ nuclear shakedown of Iran:

Iran was late in reporting which is a Safeguard issue. Tehran voluntarily stopped the process of enriched uranium; it also allowed the IAEA to carry out intrusive, spot inspections. No country has allowed as many inspection hours as Iran. [Tehran] proposed to operate Iran’s enrichment program as joint ventures with private and public sector firms from other countries; this would ensure that the program remained transparent and could not be secretly diverted for military purposes, at the same time it would maintain Iran’s sovereignty by having an indigenously enriched uranium cycle. Although this was rejected, Iran continued to cooperate.

Iran suspended its enrichment activities for two and half years, but each time under pressure from the U.S., the burden of proof was transferred to Iran knowing the negative could not be proved.²

“Coverage”

All this occurs, when in fact no evidence has ever been verified that supports the weapons charge, as AP surprisingly points out (albeit in the last two sentences of the story and about a year late on the timeline). What media always fail to mention, however, is that the lack of damning proof of an Iranian weapons program, then and now, undercuts the misleading NIE conclusion and the nuclear leg of the neocons’ aggressive campaign.

But by omitting such vital facts, major media are perpetuating the prevailing U.S.-Israeli-NCRI conjecture, asserting that Tehran had a viable nuclear weapons program at one time, has resumed it, and is now accelerating the manufacturing process.

In that regard, news media are lying and abetting terrorism and treason. Terrorism, because all individuals who harbor, fund, arm, train, feed, or employ terrorists are terrorists (George Bush’s words—not mine). Treason, because the Mek and their handlers in and around the U.S. government are violating U.S. and international law and constantly lying to the people of the United States and the world in an effort to drum up support for further violent insurrection and aggressive war in the Middle East.

Nothing dubious here

Major news media conceal the U.S. government’s dubious relations with the MeK. It is of no consequence that the United States has been harboring, funding, training, and employing U.S.-designated terrorist groups in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.³⁴⁵

Some news media provide extra “coverage” by inserting a misleading historical context in an effort to soften the image of the Iranian “opposition group.” From the EU Observer’s report on the NCRI press conference:

[T]he PMOI was persecuted by the Iranian government, with thousands of their members killed. They were subsequently sheltered by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.⁶

The insinuation that the “persecut[ion]” was unprovoked is absurd. Prosecuted is more like it, according to the U.S. State Department:

According to a 2003 report by the State Department, “During the 1970s, the MEK killed US military personnel and US civilians working on defense projects in Tehran.… The MEK detonated bombs in the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Premier’s office, killing some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials…. In 1991, it assisted the Government of Iraq in suppressing the Shia and Kurdish uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the north.” In other words, the MEK was a terrorist group—one that took its orders from Saddam Hussein.⁷

But to “mainstream” news media, it doesn’t matter that the same Iranian opposition group with a history of committing terrorism on U.S. and Iranian civilians is relied upon as the means to justify and accomplish the neocons and the Mek’s mutual ends of regime-change and resource procurement in Iran.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, spokesman for the MeK, has appeared intermittently over the past few years as a “Middle East Expert,” or “Terror Expert,” on CNN and Fox. Of course there’s never a hint as to his affiliation with the MeK, much less its terrorist designation. But hey, how can he be a terrorist when he heads his own D.C.-based think-tank!

Nothing illicit here

The most thoroughly unreported facts about U.S.-Iranian affairs are the most incriminating ones.

The Algiers Accords, signed by Iran and the United States on January 19, 1981, clearly states, “The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”⁸

Yet, from the Iraq-Iran War, during which the United States funded Saddam Hussein and supplied him with WMDs which he then used against Iran—to the current war build-up against Iran, whereby groups like the MeK and Jundallah are being harbored, funded, and employed—the laundry list of Algiers Accords violations by the United States is long and ugly. And every violation is a violation of the U.S. Constitution, which states that such contracts are to be treated as law of the land.

Move along, folks

One of the most irony-deficient (and shamelessly self-effacing) examples of U.S.-Iran media coverage came in the Observer’s uncritical account of the NCRI’s use of fallacious war propaganda to emotionally blackmail and upbraid the EU into taking a more aggressive stance toward Iran:

Referring to the “huge trade” between Europe and Iran, Mr Mohaddessin said: “The EU is trying to achieve security through appeasing the Iranian regime. The EU is appeasing the Iranian regime and it is a disaster for the Iranian people. You remember what happened in the 1930s? They carried out exactly the same policy with Hitler that the EU is doing now with the Iranian regime.”⁹

This reality-inversion of a comparison is trumpeted almost exclusively by fringe pro-war elements within and around U.S. and Israeli governments and in “pro-western” think-tanks; the other 99.7% of the world laughs it off, knowing that the only Middle Eastern regime with a modern history of aggressive war and secret nuclear weapons production is the one in Israel.

In 1986, former Israeli nuclear facility worker, Mordechai Vanunu, revealed to a foreign news news reporter that Israel was developing nuclear weapons in secret facilities—a confirmation of what the rest of the world had already hypothesized. He was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Italy, charged with treason, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Unlike the MeK and others, he didn’t confide in or collaborate with a foreign government, and wasn’t revealing information that wasn’t already known outside of Israel. Nevertheless, he has been a political prisoner for the last 21 years. Even his 2004 release gave him little freedom: he is not allowed to leave the country and is under, among other restrictions, curfew and gag order, not allowed to talk to foreigners.¹⁰

Although Vanunu’s claims about Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons program were true and were made on moral and legal grounds—and the treatment he has received is unlawful and at times barbaric—his story is still ignored by mainstream media.

On the other hand, the NCRI-MeK is a U.S.-designated terror organization with a verified history of terrorism against Iranian and U.S. targets and treason against their people; yet they are treated by the U.S. government and major news media as trustworthy allies, and their flawed, Israeli-assisted intelligence is considered more credible than that of any U.S. intelligence agency.

And to top it all: By not giving in to U.S.-Israel-MeK demands for aggression toward Iran—the demands of U.S. and EU-branded terrorists—the EU is “appeasing the Iranian regime.” Such is the criminal hypocrisy of deceptive and aggressive war, and the irony of appeasement.

1. Raf Casert (AP): “Group Claims Iran Speeding Up Nuke Plans“: Associated Press: February 20, 2008.
2. Soraya Sepaphour-Ulrich: “Iran Intelligence Report: Another Psychological Warfare?“: CounterCurrents: December 5, 2007.
3. Rostam Pourzal: “Who Among Iranians Fears the NIE?“: ZNet: December 19, 2007.
4. Ardeshir Ommani: “U.S. Support for Terror in Iran“: CASMII: April 10, 2007.
5. 
   Larisa Alexandrovna: “On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say“: The Raw Story: April 13, 2006.
6. Leigh Phillips (euobserver.com): “Iran opposition group accuses EU of ‘appeasement’“: EU Observer: February 20, 2008.
7. Craig Unger: “From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq“: Vanity Fair: March 2007.
8. Algeria, the United States & Iran: “The Algiers Accords“: Pars Times: Accessed on February 22, 2008. More on the 1981 Algiers Accords and the neocons: “US Wants to Have It Both Ways on Iranian Nonintervention Pact,” by Reese Erlich.
9. Phillips/EU Observer
10. Eileen Fleming: “The Vanunu Saga: 2008“: We Are Wide Awake: February 2008.

One such propagandist is Brigitte Gabriel: a Lebanese-born Maronite Christian who, like her fellow zioneocon-funded Lebanese expatriate, Walid Phares, is well-paid to lend a veneer of credibility (via their “Arabness” or “Mideasternness”) to fraudulent zioneocon propaganda. Ms. Gabriel has made a decadent living over the years, selling herself out to zioneocon “think-tanks,” and commands the highest of fees for her apparent ability to hold unassuming and gullible audiences captive with her well-scripted and well-rehearsed black propaganda and bald-faced lies about Arabs, Muslims and Middle Eastern history and politics.¹ It should therefore come as no surprise that she is also a regular contributor on FOX and CNN as a “Middle East expert”.

According to Ms. Gabriel and just about every other neocon propagandist, Islam is a backward religion of hate and a threat to western civilization. She says that we can not trust Muslims who are elected to public office, because Muslims — unlike Jews and Christians — will always choose Islam over country. (Nevermind that the current cabal of “Judeo-Christian” zionist fundamentalists in power are raping the Constitution and committing genocide upon innocent Arab and Muslim civilians and U.S. soldiers for the sake of what many of them, including President Bush, are unashamed to publicly refer to as a calling from God.) She says that the Lebanese Civil War was a battle strictly between Muslims and Christians although anyone who has spent a minute reading about it knows that is not the case. Of course, subtleties such as historical facts don’t help to support the false dichotomies which are so vital to a successful routine of Islamophobic propaganda.

The woman is a shameless shill. Her lies and deception know no bounds. For example, she is prominently displayed as a member of an arm of the Israeli propaganda ministry known as the Hasbara Fellowship Speakers Bureau — right above the pictures of zios Dori Gold and Caroline Glick; yet, during the Q&A section of a recent speaking engagement (at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, no less) she was either too embarrassed to admit to her dubious loyalty, or was afraid to be so easily and thoroughly exposed as the zioneocon shill she is:

²

That was the defining moment of the session, but there were innumerable other juicy bits of bald-faced hackery. In order to make what she says seem even remotely considerable, people like Brigitte Gabriel must construct false mass perceptions of reality in order to tear them down and build even bigger ones:

We used to think, ‘Al-Qaeda [is] the only problem; Al-Qaeda is the only terrorist organization that is causing problems for the rest of us.’ … that way of thinking needs to be changed. … Al-Qaeda is an umbrella organization where many different organizations come underneath it, such as Hamas, such as Hizballah, such as Fatah … many different people that share the same ideology, and that is Islamofascism [sic], and they have their eyes on the West.

I kid you not. And for extra fear effect, she goes on to spew several typical, scripted, baseless, zioneocon assertions:

I want to point out that as we discuss radicalism and Islamofascism, we are not generalizing against all Muslims [oh, of course not — only those who resist zio tyranny]. We all understand that there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today; not all of them are radicals. The radicals are estimated to be between 15 and 25 percent [source???]. Now, 15 to 25 percent translates to 180 to 300 million people who have their eyes against the West, who are willing to become suicide bombers like Muhammed Ata.

Of course the lecture wouldn’t be complete without that malicious MEMRI misquote and the obligatory reminder that Israel, with its 200+ nuclear weapons and superpower military, needs more U.S. servicemen to die in order to protect the apartheid regime from the fantastic threats of a second-world country:

“Today, Iran is saying they want to wipe Israel off the map.”

“[Iran] will attack Israel if we don’t stop them now before it is too late.”

Without providing a source, she goes on to claim that by this December, Iran will have the capability to manufacture hundreds of nuclear missiles per year — some of which will have the range to reach the east coast of the United States — so we must attack Iran before they attack the U.S. You could hardly make this stuff up, but somehow Ms. Gabriel, being the Fascist fear factory she is, managed to.

In true fascistic zio form, she proclaims that Americans should give up liberties in this time of war against Islam, audaciously claiming that non-Muslims are not frustrated by time-consuming, privacy-invading airport screenings; only Muslims are affected by it, because they are the ones doing all the terrorism. Fascist to the bone.

She goes on to say that the U.S. should not allow mosques to be built, and if a new mosque is being built, it should be reported to the FBI. And if a college professor or any other public figure criticizes U.S. policies, we should report their “unAmerican” activity to the dean, or conduct a smear campaign in the press. Typical zionist thought-policing and silencing tactics.

As xenophobic, hateful and fascistic as it is, her neocon-on-crack spiel, alone, isn’t enough to make me feel the need to write this piece. After all, nobody with a mind of their own should give her and her routine a dash of credence.

But the thing that really hacks me about her, Walid Phares, and other neocon sycophants of their mold is not only that they have been loyal to Israel and sold their countrymen down the river; not only that they are pushing self-destructive, unconstitutional, and ideology-driven policies of the US-Israeli zioneocon cabal; not only that they are career quislings who have, for all their adult lives, sold their countrymen out to the zio occupying regime in Israel for wealth and “security”; but that above all that, they have had the ball-busting audacity to stand before audiences of U.S. citizens and conduct lectures wherein they begin sentences with words like “we, as patriotic Americans.” They have the chutzpah to preach patriotism in a U.S. military environment, when in fact they are the very last people who should be lecturing on things like loyalty to one’s country.

If anyone is a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer — if anyone is disloyal to country for religious or ideological reasons — it’s Brigitte Gabriel. It’s not by chance that she and her cohorts are so aggressive with their message of hatred and intolerance. It’s part of their game plan to stifle opposing viewpoints on who is and who isn’t a terrorist, and for damn good (personal) reasons. Brigitte has some skeletons in her closet which she would just as soon brainwash us not to know. Behold…

To those who are familiar with contemporary Lebanese history, the mention of the terms “Phalangist militia” and “South Lebanon Army” (SLA) will bring to mind the massacres of Palestinian refugees inside the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1982 and the detainment, torturing, and murder of anti-Israeli Lebanese and Palestinians at the Khiam Detention Center in South Lebanon between 1985 and 2000. Both tragedies were carried out by militias commanded and staffed by pro-Israeli Maronite Christians, and both were ultimately engineered and funded by the IDF. According to even the loosest of definitions, both tragedies are traitorous acts of terror; according to consensus opinion of the major human rights organizations of the world, they are also crimes against humanity.

It is indisputable that systematic torture occurred in Khiam. And the continuing partnership between Israel and the SLA on matters related to this prison implicates Lebanese and Israelis with legal responsibility for criminal actions. In addition to the periodic visits of GSS [Shin Bet] personnel, the defense ministry’s affidavit admitted that Israel and the SLA “consult each other regarding the arrest and release of people in the Khiam facility” and that “information from the interrogations in Khiam is transferred by the SLA to Israeli security forces.³

Brigitte Gabriel defends those who committed said atrocities. As a member of the Maronite sect of her erstwhile homeland, she defends her people at every turn, while baselessly claiming that it has been Hizballah and every other anti-Israeli Muslim group in Lebanon that has been doing all the unlawful detentions, torturing, and terrorism.⁴ Brigitte always fails to mention that her people were collaborators with a hostile, foreign, occupying state (Israel), and that her fellow Maronites of the Phalange Party and SLA committed crimes against humanity against their own people:

The Maronites form the base community for the quasi-fascist Kata’ib Party, better known in the West as the Phalange Party (see “Hizbullah, Israel, and the Gemayel Assassination“) and have been allies of Israel and the West in Lebanon since at least early 1980s. The Israelis killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese in the country from 1982 until 2000 (a point Gabriel seems to neglect) but it was Maronite militias who actually perpetrated the Israeli-sanctioned massacres at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. Despite this, contrary to Gabriel’s claims, the Maronites not only survive but wield considerable power in Lebanon, including 34 out of 128 seats in the current Lebanese parliament.Gabriel and her family come from Marjayoun in southern Lebanon. Marjayoun was the headquarters of Israeli occupation forces and Israel’s proxy, the South Lebanon Army (SLA). In 2000, Hizbullah drove the Israelis from the country and the SLA collapsed.⁵

More on Brigitte’s terrorist brothers of the SLA and Phalange Party, the closing of the Khiam prison, and the actual role Hizballah played:

[The SLA] was never fully trusted by the Israeli army which trained, armed and financed it. However, its members were paid salaries of $500 — a handsome sum in an economically depressed area, and many of their families found labouring jobs in Israel. The 2,500-strong force has always been left to do the dirtiest work for Israel. Most notoriously, they were in nominal charge of al-Khiam prison south of Marjayoun. On Tuesday, local villagers broke down the prison door with their bare hands as the SLA fled. Weeping and fainting with emotion, prisoners — some of them captive for more than 10 years — were reunited with their families. Many hundreds of Lebanese prisoners had been held there over the years without trial and without charge, under inhuman conditions with routine torture. … Often the detainees were held merely as hostages, because they had relatives in Hezbollah, or because they refused to collaborate with Israel.⁶

In May 2000, as the IDF started to withdraw, its proxy force, the SLA, disintegrated rapidly; within hours the whole of the formerly IDF-held strip became a rolling victory carnival for Hizbullah. The SLA men who had guarded and run the notorious prison and torture center at Khiam slipped away from their posts and the people of Khiam, a predominantly Shiite town, rushed in to free their loved ones. Hizballah’s yellow flags flew exuberantly right up to Israel’s northern border. Villagers, who had over the years been forced out of the security zone or the much-damaged areas to its north, crowded back homewards in cavalcades of cars and tractors. Some SLA members fled to Israel. But the bloodbath feared by many Israelis (and some Lebanese) never occurred. The Hizballah leadership issued strict instructions prohibiting acts of vengeance in the liberated areas as well as violations of the international border with Israel. Both orders were obeyed.⁷

So tell me, Brigitte: Who are the terrorists again?

UPDATE:

From CIA Terror Bombings, Bob Gates, and The Rise of Hezbollah, by Michael Schwartz:

Today is a banner day for aficionados of the CIA. After a 15-year Freedom of Information Act struggle, the National Security Archive has finally forced the CIA to reveal the “family jewels” — a 702 page treasure trove of documents characterized in The New York Times as a “catalog of domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists.”
[...]
Many of us remember that in 1983, during a previous crisis there, an American military barracks was bombed, killing 241 marines who were part of an international peacekeeping force sent there in 1982. That bombing was, as Morris tells the story “itself a bloody reprisal for earlier American acts of intervention and diplomatic betrayal in Lebanon’s civil war” which had been raging since 1975.

No one in the American intelligence community knew for sure (and no one knows to this day) who was actually responsible for the bombing, but CIA director William Casey decided nevertheless to undertake reprisals. He chose as his target a Shia cleric, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, “because of his reputation for fiery sermons in favor of social justice and national independence — and because allied spy agencies — Israel’s Mossad, Saudi Arabia’s GID, and Phalangist informers — claimed he led a militant Shiite group that bore responsibility for the attack on the Marines.”

Yeah. Just like Brigitte Gabriel & Co. claim that Hizballah and Hamas are part of the fantastic “Al-Qaeda”. Just like they claim that Hamas has “cells” in 40 of the 50 United States. Just like hasbaranik frauds would have us believe that the U.S. and Israel’s interests are mutual via the Hizballah “threat,” the “threat” of a nuclear Iran, and so on. Next!

1. Jewish National Fund Speaker Profile: “Brigitte Gabriel”.
2. Brigitte Gabriel: You can not trust having a Muslim in office when he has to make a decision to either be loyal to the United States or be loyal to Islam.
   Audience Member: Ma’am, thank you. I’d like to point out that I’m an American soldier, practicing Muslim, served the U.S. Army for the past 19 years very proudly [a rebuttal to your previous point]. … Two questions. Are you a member of Hasbara Fellowship? [And if you are] does that, uh—
   BG: What’s Hasbara Fellowship?
   AM: A fellowship in Israel. [An] organization—
   BG: No. No.Brigitte Gabriel on BookTV: “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America.”
3. Virginia N. Sherry: “Torture in Khiam Prison: Responsibility and Accountability” HRW
4. Aaron Klein: “Canada deports Israeli allies, allows strippers” World Net Daily
5. Peacemonger: “Islam-Basher Brigitte Gabriel to Visit Ann Arbor on 12/4″ Zionist Scout
6. BBC Mideast Report: “Bitter retreat for the SLA”.
7. Helena Cobban: “Hizbullah’s New Face: In search of a Muslim democracy” Boston Review.