At 13, she was waiting to die at the hands of Islamic extremists. Now she has a warning for America.
Brigitte Gabriel doesn’t speak about Islamic extremism as an observer. She speaks as someone who lived through it.
“I was born in what used to be the only majority Christian country in the Middle East: Lebanon. We are a republic exactly like the United States of America,” Gabriel tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas.
“Unfortunately, we imported people into our country who did not share our values. And when they would say, ‘We hate you. We want to kill you. We want to transform your country,’ we didn’t believe them, because we thought, 'We are the Paris of the Middle East, we’re the banking capital of the Middle East. No one can touch us,'” she says.
“Unfortunately, they were able to destroy the country using our democracy to topple our democracy, our open-mindedness, our fairness, our tolerance, our multiculturalism."
In what she calls her 9/11, Islamists then blew up her home.
“I ended up in a hospital for two and a half months and later ended up living in a bomb shelter in an 8x10 room without electricity, without water, and very little food. And that’s where I lived, Nick, for the next seven years of my life,” she explains.
When she had to get water, she would “crawl under sniper’s bullets” because they were surrounded by Islamic snipers.
“I remember when I was 13 years old, a friend of ours stopped by, and he said, ‘Brigitte, I just want you to know we heard a lot of chatter on the radios, and we believe our town is going to be attacked tonight.’ And he said, ‘If I don’t see you tomorrow, I wish you a merciful death.’ And he left,” she recalls.
“And I remember, Nick, at the age of 13 years old, dressing in my Sunday best, my Easter dress, because I wanted to look pretty when I am dead, knowing that when they come to slaughter me, there would be no one to bury me,” she continues.
“And my parents said to me, they said, 'When they come to slaughter us tonight, we will create a distraction. You’re a young child. We’re old people. We’ve lived a long life. We’ll create a distraction, and we just want you to run towards Israel and don’t look back,'” she adds.
However, her parents' plan would never come to fruition, as Israel came to them instead.
“That’s the night when Israel came in physically, into Lebanon, and established the security zone and set up artillery bases around our towns to stop the Palestinians and Islamists from coming into our town,” she tells Freitas.
“And that’s how we stayed alive until 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, working with the Christians, helping the Christians take back their democracy and kicking out the Palestinians,” she continues.
“And that’s how I came out of the bomb shelter and [rebuilt] our lives,” she adds.
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An arguably more significant event in the West's slow demise occurred on Dec. 11, 2001: China joined the World Trade Organization.
May the 25th anniversary of our 'never forget' moment find us with something true, good, and beautiful to show for it.
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