“I am still a terrorist,” Walid laughs,

[justashooter 430]

Walid Shoebat

Yitta Halberstam Mandelbaum

The Journey from Hate to Love

There are some transformations that simply defy the imagination – and belief. When I tell people about Walid Shoebat, they mock my naivete in accepting his story as true. “Impossible!” they scoff. “He must be a charlatan perpetrating some kind of giant hoax!” “No one could ever make such an enormous change in his life.” “Maybe he’s a CIA agent,” one acquaintance suggests. “Or a member of the Mossad.”

All kinds of clandestine, scurrilous scenarios worthy of John Grisham or Robert Ludlum are proposed - scenarios far more convoluted and complex than the actual truth. But people would rather believe that Walid Shoebat is an undercover operative working for (choose one), (a ) the Arabs, (B) The Israelis, © The Americans than what he is in reality: a former PLO terrorist who repented his ways, converted to Christianity, and now travels throughout the United States, Canada, and England, advocating for Israel and the Jews - on his own initiative and at his own expense.

What a world we live in! We can more readily believe in people’s capacity for evil than in their capacity for goodness and change. A Charles Manson we can accept as flesh-and-blood reality, but a Walid Shoebat makes us wonder if he’s genuine.

I first learned about Walid from – where else? – the Internet. An online magazine published a report on Walid’s successful forays into troubled college campuses where turbulent clashes among Arab and Jewish students had taken place. In September 2002, Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, had been forcibly blocked from delivering a scheduled speech at Concordia University in Montreal by Muslim students, but Walid’s pro-Israel speech at the same campus in March 2004 went off without a hitch. Perhaps the Arab students were seized by the same insatiable curiosity as everyone else, with the oddity of a reformed PLO terrorist piquing more interest and astonishment than ire. Certainly, those were my reactions.

I tracked down Walid and learned he would be in the New York area – where I live - within a week. We made arrangements for me to sit in on two different speeches he would be delivering to Jewish audiences at HANC High School in Long Island and Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan. (An appearance originally scheduled for Pace University – where Arabs students had held an anti-Israel rally a month before - was suddenly canceled) It was instructive to watch Walid relate to high school students in the morning and adults at night. With the teenagers, he was warm, cuddly, and tender; the adults, however, made him bare his teeth.

Unsurprisingly, he was handsome. The “other,” as Alfred Kazin once pointed out, always is. Walid is short but wiry, dark-haired and olive-skinned, intense, edgy, with flashing brown eyes that alternately narrow in scrutiny, grow soft in sorrow, or blaze in anger. His bushy eyebrows and elegant mustache are reminiscent of a younger Omar Sharif, and he is equally charming. It’s hard not to feel the tug of his personality pull you into his orbit.. Walid vividly reminds me of the late Meir Kahane in the easy way in which he spellbinds an audience....

(continues in the link)

http://ducts.org/12_06/html/profiles/mandelbaum.html

shoebat also speaks the intro to one of my favourite tunes, In The Cause Of Allah, by Stuck Mojo. funny, but the text of his intro is not available in an exaustive internet search. part of it is included in this remix of Stuck Mojo tunes: