March 08, 2011
Brigitte Gabriel, the SLA, and Khiam
Here's a question for the editors of the New York Times: when you guys ran your profile of Brigitte Gabriel today, did your reporter not know of or just choose not to report on Ms. Gabriel's ties to the South Lebanon Army? I ask because several times now, I have met fellow Christians who, when they learn that I have studied in Lebanon, tell me all about Ms. Gabriel and her tales of Muslim oppression and brutality. I usually respond that the Lebanese Civil War was a conflict in which all the armed factions were guilty of some pretty heinous crimes at one point or another during the conflict and that Ms. Gabriel herself worked for and was alligned with an Israeli proxy militia in southern Lebanon that was responsible for some particularly horrific brutality -- including widespread and systematic torture at the detention center in Khiam. Assuming Christianity is not just a sectarian identity and is actually a system of beliefs, I would like to hear Ms. Gabriel explain the crimes of the SLA to one of her evangelical Christian audiences in the United States one of these days in the same way that Peter King is now being challenged to explain his support for Irish terror groups in the 1980s.