Brigitte Gabriel Makes Islamophobia Sexy
Gabriel asks, “where’s my honorarium?”
A short New York Times interview with one of the anti-Arab native informants on the scene, Brigitte Gabriel, further demonstrates the potentially ludicrous market for Arab and or Muslim public figures who will tell the American conservatives and liberal pro-Israeli-types what they want to hear.
She comes from a growing line of scoundrels who assuage the Islamophobia of western book buyers with non-analytic, personal tales of the terrorist-infused Middle East. They go on speaking tours offering no insight into policies, scholarly history, or even an attempt to communicate their important messages to the communities they want to reform — Arabs and Muslims.
These third-rate poseurs, sometimes marketed preposterously as “former terrorists,” make best seller lists for mostly crude writings drawing broad, highly skewed and personalized conclusions about subjects much bigger than their limited-expertise should allow. And they hawk their wares at Jewish community centers, right-wing churches, and campuses around the country for honoraria — thus proving P.T. Barnum correct.
It’s rank opportunism of the worst kind and September 11, 2001 was their payday. They’re still cashing in.
Gabriel, who founded the ambitiously and ambiguously titled group, American Congress for Truth, reveals what can only be a latent idiocy and blatant pomposity in this short interview. The interviewer, Deborah Solomon, draws these out with her questioning and challenges her on a few points, but misses some larger criticisms of Gabriel’s messages and past affiliations.
LATENT IDIOCY
Her proof she’s not backed by the CIA — she voted for Gore in 2000 (she did not mention her 2004 vote, curiously). She falls back on conflating the CIA and Republicans, as when she holds up a Democrat, a DOJ prosecutor on her board, as an example. Solomon’s skepticism did not meet a convincing, or even logical, response.
Solomon properly called out her non-sensical self-exhibitionism while Gabriel claimed to also fear for her life. She says she’s in danger because an Al-Qaeda website mentioned her, and “sent a press release” about her work. I was not aware that Al Qaeda has a media outreach office, issuing press releases and such. If she is in danger, then mentioning where she lives is far less hazardous then putting her image up on her book.
Most hilarious is her “analysis” about last year’s non-story http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291569,00.html about the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s decision to install some foot-washing basins for Muslim students. She described this as shoving Islam down America’s throat and warned, “This is the way they are taking over the West. They are doing it culturally inch by inch.” Who knew foot-washing basins would bring down the West? What next, halal food products at McDonalds? Solomon is correct to point out the banality of such basins. Gabriel’s alarmism looks silly in contrast.
BLATANT POMPOSITY
Her lame get-up in her photo — gold-on-gold-on-gold — is her version of “glamorous.” It is the worst of boater chic, an outfit I would not let my aunt wear to a wedding.
Forget my fashion critique though, I am in no position to talk even if I know gaudy when I see it. She betrays the vanity that also colored her response about her best-selling book. No, she was not surprised it was a best-seller, because she has a universal experience to share (except, presumably, one that Muslims cannot relate to – especially the civilian-victims of Sabra and Shatila, who were massacred at the hands of her former employer, the South Lebanon Army).
The arrogance is grotesquely transparent. Who refers to herself as “glamorous”? Apparently, fashion is not all she got from the French.
We can be sure that Gabriel’s first loyalties lie with Israel, even before her SLA comrades. Otherwise she would mention their struggles in Israel. Last week over 100 former SLA members and their families protested for more state benefits from Israel. They complain about discrimination from the state and many are working menial jobs despite their long service to Israel as its proxy in Lebanon.
I doubt she mentions this when she speaks publicly as a Hasbara fellow – hasbara, which means “explanation” in Hebrew is better known as “propaganda” in Israel. After all, she’s no longer on SLA’s payroll.
Gabriel’s own “hate” record did not come up in the interview neither. There was no mention of her work with the South Lebanon Army, which “had a reputation for cruelty, confirmed when its torture chambers at Khiam were opened after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000,” according to Charles Glass.
There was no questioning of her infamous equation of “Arabs” with “Barbarians” at a speech at Duke University in 2004. It was condemned by the event’s organizers, Duke’s Freeman Center for Jewish Life, and by Barbaric… I mean Arab students at the University. One of the event’s sponsors wrote,
Had we known Brigitte Gabriel’s speech would have been as inflammatory and offensive as it was, we would have unhesitatingly removed her from the speaker list. Despite her detestable aberration, the message of the concert and rally still came through.
When her own sponsors turned against her, she turned against her own words. In her book, “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America,” she backtracked from the Duke speech:
I admit today that some so called “terrorists” do not, I repeat, do not represent the bulk of all Arabs and Muslims. Terrorists supported the killing of innocent civilians but Arabs and Muslims were willing to criticize and condemn terrorism.
But they also want foot-washing basins so they could safely perform wuduu’ before they pray. And Gabriel treats them as wanting to destroy the West for doing this.
Gabriel needs to make up her mind. Is it the practice of Islam or purveyors of violence against civilians we should condemn? Right now, she only attacks Muslim terrorists and spreads fear about the harmless practice of Islam in the West – freely conflating the two. She would have more credibility if she condemned related terrorism done in the name of other country’s and principles – whether it is Christianity, Judaism, freedom or national security.
Gabriel is a proponent of hatred, plain and simple. And it pays.
[Tarboush tip: Sarah, Fadi]
