Mosab responds
'Son of Hamas' Mosab Hassan Yusuf has written a response to the article about him that was published by Walid Shoebat at Pajamas Media last week (Hat Tip: Orde). After reading the article, I reached the following conclusions:1. Mosab is not 'pro-Israel' although he is not anti-Israel either. He is motivated solely by his Christian missionizing.
2. His motivations for helping the Shin Bet are not clear to me. Perhaps he was just trying to fulfill the Christian command of loving one's enemy. Or perhaps he was trying to ensure - as he claims he did - that Hamas terrorists who were caught would be arrested and not killed. I hope to have more insight about that when I read his book.
3. The translations that Shoebat gave of Mosab's words were largely accurate. Mosab claims that some of them would have been understood differently in Arabic than in English. Maybe yes and maybe no. I don't speak Arabic so I can't really say.
4. He does not answer some of the more serious charges that Shoebat levels against him.
4. I am not ashamed of my work with the Israeli Shin Bet, but my purpose has never been to promote Israeli’s political agendas. I love Israel as a nation and I love the Israeli people, but I also have problems with state policies. While I was a Shin Bet agent, I often disagreed with what they did and how they did it. It’s all in the book for anyone to read. It is very important that everyone understands that I am not political or ideological. I am neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestinian. I love both. I loved my enemy and risked my life for them, but I do not and cannot hate my own people.Read the whole thing.
5. When I appeared on Al Hayat TV a week after the release of my book, I had just been disowned by my family. I was hurt, alone, and broken. The only thing on my mind was to protect Al Hayat. My main message to its viewers was that I am not ashamed of my work with Israel, but I am not here to encourage people to work for Israel. I am here to encourage you to recognize your real enemies—hatred, anger, bitterness, unforgiveness, jealousy, greed, lust, and every other spirit that works to divide us and separate us from the love of God. And I made statements to stimulate their thinking and lead them into areas they had never allowed themselves to enter before.
One caller was a new believer in Christ from my hometown of Ramallah. Rashid, the host of the show, asked this young brother an innocent question, which Walid Shoebat translated in his article as: “If you were in Mosab’s position and have two choices: either someone from Hamas will be killed, or school children in a bus will be killed, will you report it?” In the Palestinian territories, you cannot just make an anonymous call to 911. If you give information to Israel, even if it saves lives, you are dead. Any Palestinian has the right to kill you.
Palestinian Christians are under no obligation to work or die for Israel. I risked my life in the most dark and dangerous places to save lives. That was my choice. I did it for my own reasons. As Christians, we are all obligated to die for Christ, if necessary, but not for any political regime.
Based on this reality, therefore, I said (again, addressing Walid Shoebat’s translation from Arabic): “If I was in your shoes, you should not report it to Israel. If anyone hears me right now and they are in relation to Israeli security, I advise them to work for the interest of their own people—number one—and do not work with the [Israeli] enemy against the interest of our people. They should collaborate with the Palestinian Authority only.” By this, the caller understood me to mean, “Then don’t report to Israel. I am not here to encourage you to work for your enemies or giving them any information. Report to the Palestinian Authority.” If God does not require a Palestinian Christian to do as I did, who am I to put a burden on thousands of brothers and sisters by asking them to risk their lives for a political regime?
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8. Again, I was quoted as saying: “It appeared at first that my desire was to seek revenge against Hamas.… How could I do such a thing … revenge [against] my own father? He is one of the leaders of Hamas.”
Rashid had asked me if my motivation for working with the Shin Bet was revenge, based on what Hamas did in prison. My answer was no. I worked against the agendas of Hamas, exposed their plans and cells, yes, but revenge was never my motivation. To me, the men and women in Hamas were victims who needed to be stopped, then helped. The Shin Bet knew this. I used to cry when a Hamas leader was assassinated, especially one I knew personally, whose wife and children I knew and loved. I did not even want to kill the most dangerous terrorists, like Ibrahim Hamid, who would not have hesitated to kill me if he had discovered that I was Shin Bet. I had many personal problems with Hamas leaders, and I could easily have hurt them if I was out for revenge, because the Shin Bet was trying to assassinate them. But before I told the Shin Bet where to find a terrorist, I made them agree not to kill him. If Walid had not gone to the United States, he would have been one of them. In fact, I don’t see that Walid is any different than they are, if even part of what he claims to have done is true.
9. Arabs process information very differently from Westerners. Their culture, mentality, expressions, and environment are as different as their language. So I talk to them differently—not just in a different language but in all these ways as well. And when it is translated literally, not only outside the context of the entire interview but apart from the understanding of that culture, mentality, expression and environment, it sounds very different. You may have experienced something similar yourself, when you try to understand someone during a telephone conversation. You lose a lot when you cannot see facial expressions and body language, and there is always danger of misunderstandings and even offenses when none are intended.
Labels: Hamas, Mosab Hassan Yousef, Shin Bet, Walid Shoebat
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:01 PM
4 Comments:
Forgive me for not reading the whole post here, but Yousef is very anti-Israel. I've read his book.
There's just about every anti-Jewish slur ever written in his book, including the modern twist on the blood-for-Passover claim, that the IDF harvests Palestinians internal organs.
The closest Yousef gets to discrediting the anti-Israel libels is stating that the death of Mohammad al-Dura (the staged killing of a boy which sparked the 2nd intifada into overdrive) was rumoured to be 'controversial'.
Carl, I'll be happy to give you my copy of his book; alternatively borrow it from a friend or from a library but just don't give this cretin any of your money!
Yousef has both specifically said what his motives are not, and specifies in his book by point-by-point list what his motives are for each particular target audience:
p247 of English hardback:
(1) for "Palestinian followers of Islam...that the truth can set them free"
(2) for "Israeli people know that there is hope. If I, the son of a terrorist organization dedicated to the extinction of Israel, can reach a point where I not only learned to love the Jewish people but risked my life for them, there is a light of hope"
(3) "for Christians too. We must learn from the sorrows of my people, who carry a heavy burden trying to work their way into God's favor...we must love people -- on all sides of the world--unconditionally...We should be happy to be persecuted for his sake."
(4) To Middle East experts, government decision makers, scholars, and leaders of intelligence agencies...hope that simple story will contribute to your understanding of the problems and potential solutions..."
and the comment by The Caped Crusader is just not correct on so many levels...for ex, Yousef did not speak of al-Dura as "rumoured to be 'controversial'" but that it "would be an international controversy", a true statement, and then details correctly why. And in that same section on the 2nd intifada Yousef goes into great detail specifically saying the intifada was staged, that they were looking for a pretext, that the context of Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount was Sharon was given assurances by Palestinian leaders, that it was after the Waqf had refused Israel all oversight over the artifact destruction the Palestinians were doing as they were bulldozing and dumping etc, on & on, not at all the idea The Caped Crusader gives. p127: "Conventional wisdom...tells us that the bloody uprising ...was a spontaneous eruption of Palestinian rage triggered by ...Sharon's visit...As usual, the conventional wisdom is wrong." p132 "Arafat and...had been determined to spark another intifada...planning it for months...waiting for a suitable triggering pretext."
Thanks Carl for posting and Caped Crusader for saving me ordering the book. I cut a piece out of my local paper. I live in the country not far from London in a small town. Every week they go on the local high street to ask people their opinion on various topics. This time was whether people thought we were any safer now bin Laden is dead. They asked 8 people one of which was a Turk who has lived and worked in England for over 30 years and is married to an English woman. He was the only one to not answer the question but to complain about bin Laden's "murder". The point here is that mozlems never change, even if they have apparently been absorbed into the local culture.
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