Walid Shoebat is a fraud: - "The Palestinian 'terrorist' turned Zionist,"

For your archives when Walid Shoebat shows up in your neighbourhood to
speak.

Shoebat Walid is a fraud and a paid political prostitute for the
Zionists. If he was a terrorist and committed even one terrorist act he
would be inadmissible to both Canada and the US as a person who had
committed acts of terrorism. The Canadian Arab Federation launched a
formal complaint against him with the Minister of Citizenship and
Immigration in Canada and they reported back that he had not committed
any acts of terrorism like he alleges. He was lying about his
background. He was not inadmissible to Canada as a terrorist or
suspected terrorist. There are several like him on the payroll. He
simply lies and makes thing up. I saw him speak once and challenged him
at a public forum. However, very few people confront him and the US and
Canadian governments leave him alone, no doubt for political reasons and
he is a useful stooge for the Zionists.

Edward C. Corrigan

*The Palestinian 'terrorist' turned Zionist
Mar. 30, 2008

When he was 16, says Walid Shoebat, he was recruited by a PLO operative
by the name of Mahmoud al-Mughrabi to carry out an attack on a branch of
Bank Leumi in Bethlehem.

At six in the evening he was supposed to detonate a bomb in the doorway
of the bank. But when he saw a group of Arab children playing nearby, he
says, his conscience was pricked and he threw the bomb onto the roof of
the bank instead, where it exploded causing no fatalities.

This is the story that Shoebat, who converted from Islam to Christianity
in 1993 and has lived in the United States since the late 1970s, has
told on tours around the US and Europe since 9/11 opened the West's
public consciousness to the dangers of Islamic extremism.

Shoebat's Web site says his is an assumed name, used to protect him from
reprisal attacks by his former terror chiefs, whom he says have put a
$10 million price on his head.

Shoebat is sometimes paid for his appearances, and he also solicits
donations to a Walid Shoebat Foundation to help fund this work and to
"fight for the Jewish people."

The BBC, Fox News and CNN have all presented Shoebat as a terrorist
turned peacemaker, interviewing him as someone uniquely capable of
providing insight into the terrorist mindset.

Now he and two other former extremists are set to appear along with US
Senator Joe Lieberman, Ambassador to the US Sallai Meridor and other
notables at an annual "Christians United For Israel" conference in
Washington in July.

The three "ex-terrorists" have appeared previously at Harvard and
Columbia universities and, most recently, at the US Air Force Academy in
Colorado, in February, at a conference whose findings, the organizers
said, would be circulated at the Pentagon and among members of Congress
and other influential figures.

Last year, Shoebat spoke to the BattleCry Christian gathering in San
Francisco, which drew a reported 22,000 evangelical teenagers to what
the San Francisco Chronicle described as "a mix of pep rally, rock
concert and church service."

The paper described Shoebat as a self-proclaimed "former Islamic
terrorist" who said that Islam was a "satanic cult" and who told the
crowd how he eventually accepted Jesus into his heart.

However, 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.

Asked whether word of the bombing made the news at the time, he said, "I
don't know. I didn't read the papers because I was in hiding for the
next three days." (In 2004, he had told Britain's Sunday Telegraph: "I
was terribly relieved when I heard on the news later that evening that
no one had been hurt or killed by my bomb.")

Shoebat could not immediately recall the year, or even the time of year,
of the purported bombing when talking to the Post by phone from the US.
After wavering, he finally settled for the summer of 1977.

The Sunday Telegraph described Shoebat as a man who "for much of his
life... was eager to commit acts of terrorism for the sake of his soul
and the Palestinian cause."

In that interview he described how he and his peers were indoctrinated
as children "to believe that the fires of hell were an ever-present
reality. We were all terrified of burning in hell when we died... The
teachers told us that the only way we could certainly avoid that fate
was to die in a martyrdom operation - to die for Islam."

But an uncle and a cousin of Shoebat, who still live in Beit Sahur in
the Bethlehem area, where Shoebat grew up, said that Shoebat's education
was rather mild ideologically, and that religion did not play a dominant
role.

The uncle, interviewed at his home, said he remembered little about his
nephew, because Walid left for America at the age of 16, and because his
American mother always kept a distance from the rest of the family. The
uncle and his wife both said firmly that there was no attack on Bank Leumi.

When questioned on this discrepancy, Shoebat was adamant that he did
carry out such a bombing, and that his relatives deny it to cover up for
another cousin who was with him during the attack and still lives in
Bethlehem.

Shoebat evinced no particular surprise that his family could be tracked
down simply by asking Beit Sahur locals where they lived, even though
his Internet site claims that his is an assumed name.

Shoebat describes his conversion to Christianity as a transformation
"from hate to love." He told the Post that he believes "in a Greater
Israel that includes Judea and Samaria, and by this I mean a Jewish state."

He argued that Israel should retake the Gaza Strip and rehouse Jews
there, regarding Gaza as Jewish by right. "If a Jew has no right to
Gaza, then he has no right to Jaffa or Haifa either," he said.

He advocates that the government of Greater Israel introduce a law
providing for the exiling of anybody who denies its right to exist,
"even if they were born there."

He has little sympathy for the PLO or Hamas. "The Palestinians have not
met a single demand from Israel," he said, and added, "Both the PLO and
Hamas have not given up the goal of destroying Israel."

"The Jews are not aware of the true threat," Shoebat said. "They are
still fighting dead Nazis. It is easy to fight dead people. But they
don't have the will to fight the living Nazis, the Islamic radicals."

He told the Post he had set up his Walid Shoebat Foundation to educate
Americans as to why the US should support Israel. Shoebat said the
foundation had reached out to over 450 million people. He said it held
events where he and others like him - whom he called "ex-terrorists" who
have become Zionists - spoke about their views to Jewish, Christian and
secular audiences.

A New York Times report last month on the Air Force Academy event,
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."

The Times quoted Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the history of the
modern Middle East at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as
saying after he heard Saleem speak last November at the college that he
thought the three were connected to several major Christian evangelical
organizations.

"It was just an old time gospel hour: 'Jesus can change your life, he
changed mine,'" Howard said.

The professor told the Times that his doubts about the authenticity of
the three grew after he heard stories like that of the Golan Heights
tunnels, "as well as something on Mr. Saleem's Web site along the lines
that he was descended from the grand wazir of Islam. The grand wazir of
Islam is a nonsensical term."

The newspaper said Arab-American civil rights organizations have
questioned "why, at a time when the United States government has
vigorously moved to jail or at least deport anyone with a known
terrorist connection, the three men, if they are telling the truth, are
allowed to circulate freely."

A spokesman for the FBI, the paper reported, said there were no warrants
for their arrest.

The Times said the three men were to be paid $13,000 for the Air Force
Academy event.

Visitors to Shoebat's Internet site are encouraged to make a donation to
his foundation to enable him to disseminate his message. However, a
notice on the page states that for "security reasons," the money will
not be debited to his foundation, but rather to a company called Top
Executive Media. The name Top Executive Media is used by a greetings
card firm from Pennsylvania called Top Executive Greetings, a company
with an annual turnover of $500,000. When one makes a donation through
the Shoebat Internet site, the Web address changes to
topexecutivegreetings.com/shoebat.

This seems to be the only active page for the company; its homepage is
blank.

Asked by the Post whether the Walid Shoebat Foundation is a registered
charity, Shoebat replied that it is registered in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania State Attorney's office said it had no record of a
charity registered under this name.

Questioned further, Shoebat said it was registered under a different
name, but that he was not aware of the details, which are handled by his
manager.

"I remain separate to the running of the charity so that I am not
constrained by church rules," he explained, adding that the
organization's connection to certain churches meant it would be
difficult for him to speak to secular audiences if he became too
involved in running it.

Dr. Joel Fishman, of the Allegany County Law Library in Pennsylvania,
expressed doubts about this donation process. If the money were being
given to a registered charity, the charity would have to make annual
reports to the state and federal government on how it was being spent,
he noted.

Shoebat insisted donations were not being misused, however. "I survive
by being an author," he said. "I only get paid for being an author. All
the money that is donated gets put back into events."

If the Bank Leumi bombing claim is unfounded, it is unclear why Shoebat
would have wanted to manufacture a terrorist past. True or not, however,
it has plainly brought him some prominence and provided him with a means
to speak in favor of Israel and be paid for doing so.

This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1206632362598&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull