Chapter One: THE CONFESSION

Yes, we confess we were terrorists, but only by confession can we begin to heal. For what is a man if he does not confess and say what he truly feels and not the wishes of tyrants and the words of political correctness which are killing us all. It is this nation to which I pledge my allegiance now, a nation that gives us freedom, liberty, and justice for all. For that, I spit out the bitter herb from my past and partake in the truth I so much believe in and hold dearly to my heart, which I am now committed to, and I ask all to join. We are called traitors, scorned
and rejected by our own families, yet that is not the most painful thing we endure. Rather, it’s the pain we receive from the very ones who doubt, yet nevertheless, we risk our lives for them.

So, let me start from the beginning.

I was never caught. I am a terrorist who never paid for my crimes. Yes, I was arrested when I was sixteen, but released almost immediately, when it was discovered that I had duel citizenship and one part was American (my mother is an American citizen).

You might ask why. Well, the Israeli government has released thousands of terrorists back to the streets as a result of international pressure. Israel releases more terrorists back to the streets than any other nation on earth. I have family members who had life sentences, but have been able to return to their activism. I myself have confessed my terror connection, yet Israel does not want to press charges. Thousands of terrorists have been imprisoned, then released.

I was influenced to become a terrorist by my religious education from the school, local mosque, and the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Some of the teaching I recall in my Islamic studies at Dar Jaser High School in Bethlehem was given to us by Shaikh Zakaria and Naim Ayyad. Both were influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the Jihad ideology was greatly emphasized by them.

I remember students had questions for our teacher, Naim Ayyad, after his discussion on the subject of eschatology and the end of days. He stated, when the Jews come back to the land we would kill them, and
the “trees and stones will cry out: here is a Jew hiding behind me, come O Muslim, come O slave of Allah, come and kill him.”

Ayad stated that we can have children with concubines.

“How?” I asked? “Wouldn’t it be considered adultery?”

“No” he said.

“Is it marriage?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

Then I asked the tough question – “Is it consensual?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he responded.

“Then it’s rape,” I replied. “Is it permitted for Muslims to rape the Jewish women after we defeated them.”

His response was, “The women captured in battle have no choice in this matter. They are concubines, and they need to obey their masters. Having sex with slave captives is not a matter of choice for slaves.”

He said that sexual intercourse with Jewish captives does not have to be consensual.

I asked my father for his opinion that same day when I went home. During lunch, my father told me, “Son, Allah will provide you the strength to do it. We will take all Jewish women and rape them, and when we go to heaven, we will have the Al-Kawthar rivers and have sex with as many women as we like.”

You might think, “Come on, who is this guy, is he for real?”

You will see that this type of thinking permeated my religion and culture. It’s as real as 9/11, the Iraq War, the genocide of Christians in the Sudan, and the war in Afghanistan.

The chapter of The Women in the Quran, verse 20, documents Allah’s
decree:

Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hand as slaves, this is the law of Allah for you.

A Muslim can have sex with slave captives after a war.

The chapter of The Confederates (al-Ahzab verse 50) reads:

O prophet; we allowed thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowries, and the slaves whom thy right hand possesseth out of the booty which Allah hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, and of thy maternal aunt, who fled with thee to Medina, and any believing woman who hath given herself up to the prophet, if the prophet desired to wed her, a privilege to thee above the rest of the faithful.

The prophet had the best privilege, more than four wives, limitless concubines, and women who wanted to give themselves freely to him. You might think that this is old archaic stuff, that no one believes these things anymore. Read the rest of this book and then come back and argue with me later. You can write me at walid@shoebat.com.

I was initiated into Yasser Arafat’s Fatah terror group and recruited by a well-known bomb maker named Mahmoud Al-Mughrabi, from Jerusalem. I met up with him on Bab-El-Wad Street after our release from the central prison in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound and rendezvoused at the Judo-Star martial arts club run by his father near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Mahmoud gave me a very sophisticated explosive device he had assembled. I was supposed to use the bomb – an explosive charge hidden in a loaf of bread – to blow up the Bank Leumi branch in Bethlehem. He helped me smuggle it with the aid of the Muslim Wakf, religious police on the Temple Mount, so I could enter one of the
world’s most holy places.

From the Temple Mount, I walked on a platform with the explosives and a timer in my hand. Continuing to walk on top of the wall down the street, I avoided the checkpoints. I went to the bus station and took a bus to Bethlehem, fully ready to give my life if necessary. My hand was ready to pitch the bomb forward when I saw some Palestinian children walking near the bank. Instead, I threw the bomb up on the bank’s rooftop. I ran. The bomb exploded as I reached the Church of the Nativity walking down to Beit Sahur, on my way home.

I was so scared and depressed that I couldn’t sleep. I was only sixteen years old. I wondered if anyone was killed. That was the first time I came to grips with what it would be like to have blood on my hands.

I felt both terrified and depressed. I didn’t enjoy what I had done, but I had felt compelled to do it because it was my duty. I felt that some day I had to be a martyr, to kill Jews in order to go to heaven and meet the seventy-two virgins.

During school riots against, as we called it the Israeli occupation, I would prepare speeches and slogans. In the middle of the night, I would sneak out of my home with spray paint and write anti-Israeli graffiti in an effort to provoke students to throw rocks at the armed Israeli soldiers the next day.

We shouted, “No peace or negotiations with the enemy! Our blood and our souls we sacrifice to Arafat! Our blood and our souls we sacrifice to Palestine! Death to the Zionists!”

I vowed to fight my Jewish enemy, believing that I was doing God’s will on earth. I remained true to my word as I tried to inflict harm by any means I could devise. I would participate in any riot: in schools, in the streets, and even in the holiest place, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, called by Arabs, “Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa.”

Throughout my high school I was one of the first to provoke a riot. We used terror tactics and bombs, and we organized armed assaults against Jews in an attempt to force them to leave Israel. But we never succeeded.

Do you think this happens only in Israel? Like drug pushers, hate pushers have neither sight nor insight. Sheikh Umar Abdulrahman was blind when he instigated the first bombing of the Twin Towers in New York. Blind men like Abdul-Hamid Kishk from Egypt, who gave me my weekly dose of “hate drugs” through tapes recorded in Egypt and sent to me by my father, calling for America’s destruction.

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