The Redhunter

What he says in his book is basically this: He was born in Bethlehem and raised on what is termed elsewhere the West Bank (they call it Judea over there). I have not been able to find his exact birthdate, but he looks to be in his mid 40s. He was raised and educated to hate not just Israelis but all Jews. He was eventually recruited into the PLO by bomb-maker Mahmud Al-Mughrabi.

Al-Mughrabi made a bomb and instructed Shoebat to blow up the Bank Leumi branch in Bethlehem. With the assistance of confederates, Shoebat managed to get through security and to the bank. He was ready to throw the bomb into the bank, when he saw Palestinian children playing in front. Not wanting to kill them, he threw the bomb onto the bank's roof where it exploded but did no damage and didn't kill anyone.

He was eventually arrested for other acts and imprisoned for a short time in an Israeli prison. Released, he returned to the PLO.

Eventually he came to the United States, working as a counselor for the Arab Student Organization at Loop College in Chicago. He married a Christian woman, and set about trying to convert her to Islam. To do so he decided he had to learn the Bible so as to prove to her that it was false. After about six months, he changed his mind and not only decided that the Bible was true and the Quran false, he converted to Christianity himself. His studies in the Bible and elsewhere convinced him that "everything he had learned about the Jews was a lie."

To say that he has since done a 180 and become an ardent defender of Israel is something of an understatement. Fanatical defender of Israel is more like it.

Back To The Beginning

I mentioned earlier that I wasn't exactly sure if his story is completely as he says. Normally I try and write these reviews without looking at what others have to say about the book, because I want to make sure these reviews reflect my own judgment and opinion without subconsciously importing those of others. Once or twice, though, I've become suspicious and did some poking around before I'd even finished the book. This was one of those times.

There's a very interesting March 2008 story in the Jerusalem Post about Shoebat that made me start to wonder. The JP is not to be taken lightly. It's a well respected newspaper. Here are few key excerpts

Shoebat's claim to have bombed Bank Leumi in Bethlehem is rejected by members of his family who still live in the area, and Bank Leumi says it has no record of such an attack ever taking place.

His relatives, members of the Shoebat family, are mystified by the notion of "Walid Shoebat" being an assumed name. And the Walid Shoebat Foundation's working process is less than transparent, with Shoebat's claim that it is registered as a charity in the state of Pennsylvania being denied by the Pennsylvania State Attorney's Office.

Shoebat's claim to have been a terrorist rests on his account of the purported bombing of Bank Leumi. But after checking its files, the bank said it had no record of an attack on its Bethlehem branch anywhere in the relevant 1977-79 period.

Shoebat told The Jerusalem Post that this could be because the bank building was robustly protected with steel and that the attack may have caused little damage....

A New York Times report last month on the Air Force Academy event (at which Shoebat spoke), headlined "Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims," noted that "Academic professors and others who have heard the three men speak in the United States and Canada said some of their stories border on the fantastic, like Mr. Saleem's account of how, as a child, he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights. No such incidents have been reported, the academic experts said. They also question how three middle-aged men who claim they were recruited as teenagers or younger could have been steeped in the violent religious ideology that only became prevalent in the late 1980s."

That certainly doesn't sound good.

On the other side, two people I respect have stuck up for Shoebat. One is Frank Gaffney, a contributor to National Review and founder of the conservative Center for Security Policy, had this to say about Shoebat

In the 25 years I have been in Washington I have never heard anything so extraordinary and the truth so eloquently told by someone like this [Walid Shoebat].

In 2006 scholar Daniel Pipes said in response to charges that Shoebat was being less than honest that

Walid Shoebat took the time to visit me in my office today and to show me proofs that his life story is a true one. I accept that it is.

My Take

Is his story true, false, or an exaggeration? It's impossible to say. On the one hand it's certainly plausible. His family (see the JP story) may be the ones who are infected with "selective memory." They are Palestinians and Muslims and their attitude towards those who leave the faith is well known. Further, they can expect retribution if they were sympathetic to Shoebat.

Another curiosity is that on the bookcover it says that "Walid is an American citizen and lives in the USA under this assumed name." Yet the JP story indicates that this may not be true either, that it might be his real name.

I don't think he's outright lying, but it's likely that he's exaggerating certain parts. At any rate even if you accept everything he says his claim to being a terrorist is fairly tenuous, as it most of it rests on the one attack on the Bank Leumi.

Either way it's a take-it-or-leave-it type of book.

The Rest of the Book

I expected most of the book to be like Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, mostly autobiography, with a minimal discussion of history and theology. However just the opposite is true. Only the first chapter or so is dedicated to his life story, and that is pretty sparse. Shoebat has the maddening habit of skipping around so that a narrative is hard to follow.

Even so, the next several chapters looked promising, and indeed there is much to recommend in them. Shoebat covers the recent history of the region, and goes into some detail on how Palestinian children are educated and raised, the definition of "jihad," and indeed even where the term "Palestinian" comes from. There is much interesting history here and the whole book is very well footnoted, although annoyingly there is no index.

Better, Shobat demolishes many Palestinian/Muslim claims, titling them "Common Claim" "Response" style, as a sort of catechism. His responses are pretty solid.

It didn't take long, though before I started to become uneasy. Rather than limit himself to secular arguments, he continually pits the Bible against Islam with the intent to show that God is on the side of the Jews and this is why they should have the land. This was ok for a bit, but the book went off the rails completely by chapter 6 or 7, the latter of which was titled "God and Magog War." We eventually see chapters like "Mystery Babylon," "The Antichrist, the Beast, and the Mark," and "How to Interpret End-Time Prophecy." The book starts out as regular biography and secular history and ends up pure theology.

Now, just so we're all clear, as a good conservative evangelical Christian, I like to study the word of God as much as any other believer. At my church the pastor goes through the Bible book-by-book, and his Sunday sermons are more Bible studies than traditional sermons. In the four plus years I've been there we've gone from the end of Exodus to Mark, and I figure in another three years we'll be back at where I started, so I'll have done a 360. All of the sermons are posted on the web here, knock yourself out and watch or listen to them. The point is that I like to study prophecy and end-times and all that as much as any other committed Christian.

But I am not one to base my study of the world on theology, and I certainly didn't buy this book to read about Shoebat's theories on the book of Revelation or the significance of ancient Babylon.

This is one of the few books I had to stop reading about a third of the way through and just skip through the rest. In the end, unless you are seriously interested in some of the more esoteric aspects of Christian and Muslim theology I wouldn't bother with this book. I'll have something much better for my next book review.