Useful tool Walid Shoebat: 'A cheerful man of peace who has learned how to love'

by: Salaam

Sat Sep 20, 2008 at 00:45:00 AM EDT

Pictured above, the soft-sell, upbeat marketing poster for Walid Shoebat's appearance in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Shoebat claims (since discredited by Richard Bartholomew) that he is a former Muslim Palestinian terrorist turned born-again Christian who wants to educate the world about the evils of Islam. He is in fact a useful tool of the Christian Zionist branch of American extremism in their effort to stoke hatred against Muslims, which is the real reason he is Sioux Falls, and probably being trotted around to a lot of other small town/exurb places in America right now.

For another look at Shoebat's peaceful, loving ways, check out this video (marketing a book written by his son: hate-mongering is a family business apparently) from his website. I love the way they save the Pat Robertson quote about Allah being the deceiver until the last 10 seconds. They probably figured that anybody who was offended would have tuned out in disgust by then:

h/t Richard Bartholomew

Christian Zionists trade in their European anti-Christ for a Muslim with Palestinian con-man's help

by: Salaam

Thu Aug 07, 2008 at 20:45:16 PM EDT

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.
....

The SF Chronice 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.")

Richard Bartholemew writes:

Shoebat's views have featured on this blog several times in the past few weeks. Having milked his alleged "I was a Palestinian terrorist" past, Shoebat is now roaming American churches with the preposterous claim that Book of Revelation contains the Arabic phrase "In the Name of Allah", but that this was misinterpreted as "666? (I deconstructed all that here). Joel Richardson, who is Shoebat's collaborator, crows that

Walid and I have put together a comprehensive Scriptural presentation as to why there is presently a revolution taking place within the world of Biblical prophecy. The revolution is away from the Roman End-Time Paradigm and towards the Islamic End Time Paradigm.

Rather than heading the revived Roman Empire based on the EU, apparently the Anti-Christ is now going to take control of the Muslim world. This is presented as some sort of advance in the understanding of Biblical prophecy, when in fact it is evidence that the whole approach is a farrago of nonsense: just like Hal Lindsey and all their other predecessors, the  method employed is simply to approach the Bible without any real understanding of literary or historical context, and then to match prophecies to whichever nation or group is currently in conflict with USA.

Story here.