Lebanese Christian woman loves Israel
By: TED S. STRATTON Staff Reporter

TV personality educates people about country that helped save her familyBrigette Gabriel will never forget one fateful day in 1975. One moment she was sitting in her upper-class home in Lebanon with her family. The next moment shells came screaming in from the battle taking place 50 yards above her house, and she was buried under tons of rubble.
For two-and-a-half long months, the then 10-year-old Brigette was hospitalized. When she returned to her village of Marjayoun, five kilometers from the Israel border, her once-pleasant house had become a makeshift bomb shelter. The Muslim insurgents had completely decimated her mostly Christian town and they now controlled the key positions in Southern Lebanon. (Gabriel is Maronite, which she describes as equivalent to Roman Catholic).Gabriel stayed underground for seven years while civil war between Muslim militias and Maronite Christians raged on around her. From age ten to 17, she ate grass to supplement the meager servings of chickpeas, rice and lentils her mother was able to provide. She dodged snipers to get drinking and cooking water from a nearby spring."I was robbed of my youth," says the auburn-haired, blue-eyed Gabriel, who was in Cleveland June 29 to speak to the Honor Societies of Israel Bonds. But even while she lived in her own personal hell, the youngster retained her hope. She received news of the war from squawky Radio Monte Carlo broadcasts, and when she was 13 she started going to school in a nearby town. She rode to school in a fortified tank, along with 18 other children. Pressed for time, she squeezed four years of education into two.But the most comforting thing for Gabriel was knowing that the Israeli army was only a few miles away in Metulla. "We went to the Israelis and begged them to help us. That's how we n the Christians in South Lebanon n stayed alive."In 1982, as the civil war escalated, the Israelis entered Lebanon setting up a permanent security area in the south. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) took Gabriel's mother, who had become wounded in a skirmish, to an Israeli hospital, where the impressionable teenager saw hundreds of her fellow Lebanese lying on the floor being treated. She wondered why the Israelis were helping the supposed "enemy.""I realized I was fed a fabricated lie by my government," recounts Gabriel. "As a child, all I heard was, ‘Jews are evil. They are barbaric. They are the source of trouble in the Middle East.'"Those days (in the hospital) changed my life."Now, Gabriel says, she feels a tremendous amount in common with Jews and Israel.At age 20, she moved to Jerusalem with no job prospects and certain only that she wanted to live in the country that seemed so benevolent.In a short time, she landed a job with Arabic World News, a television news service. With her telegenic good looks and multilingual skills (she speaks Arabic, French, Hebrew and English), Gabriel was a natural. Suddenly having a free designer wardrobe and a personal hairdresser didn't seem that bad after living seven years underground!Her commitment to Israel was so great, says Gabriel, that she buried both of her parents on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, even personally moving her mother's remains from her previous burial site in Lebanon.Now she lives in America, where she runs a television production company in Virginia that produces segments for popular TV shows. She also started American Congress for Truth, a group that aims to educate people on the Middle East conflict."There is such a lack of information in the mass media," says Gabriel. "Israel is the frontline on the war on terror. When Israel was fighting Hezbollah, the world was not paying attention. Now, all of America realizes it (the terrorist organization) is not just an Israeli problem, it's an American problem."Gabriel speaks often on college campuses, where she says students are being "brainwashed" by pro-Palestinian groups and Middle East studies professors. Most recently she spoke at the Palestinian Solidarity Conference at Duke University, and she supported the student protestors at Columbia against alleged anti-Israel bias in the classroom.Gabriel hopes people will learn the lesson she learned the hard way n that Hezbollah is the most dangerous threat in the Middle East and that Israel should be supported in its efforts to eradicate them."Terrorists operate on perception," she says. "They learned (suicide bombings) worked in Lebanon, so it worked in Israel as well."Gabriel says her motives don't include vengeance for what happened to her family and friends. "I'm a Christian. I don't believe in revenge."When it comes to the Palestinians, the issue instead is accountability and discipline, she says. "If you don't discipline a teenager at age 13, you are going to have a criminal at 25."If we had dealt swiftly with Yasir Arafat, we would not have had a new generation of Palestinians shouting ‘jihad (holy war).'"