FOLLOW-UP COMMENTS TO MR. FOUSE
Reader comment on item: Islamic Law in the United States?
in response to reader comment: heretics

Submitted by DANIEL REDMOND (United States), Nov 4, 2007 at 07:41

I believe that Beirut was once known as the "Paris of the Middle East." I can remember a kid I knew in junior high school who had lived in Lebanon in the early 1960s and how he always described the place as being very beautiful. He had loved living there.

According to Christian Lebanese journalist Brigitte Gabrielle, Lebanon had indeed been a wonderful and peaceful place to live. She tells of how Palestinian immigration increased exponentially for many years until the Christians became a distinct minority and were then viciously persecuted. As Christians generally tend to be peaceful people, I suspect that the incidents involving the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps was a sort of 'payback' and born out of years of resentment and anger over Palestinian persecution of Christians. [For a moving description of this persecution go to Youtube.com and enter the name 'Brigitte Gabriel' into their search engine.

You can watch a speech where she recounts the hardships and horrors of her own childhood. It is troubling to realize the we humans have not yet evolved as a species to a point where we stop killing one another over ethnic and religious differences. We've still got a long way to go.....

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened for relevance, substance, and tone, and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome, but comments are rejected if scurrilous, off-topic, vulgar, ad hominem, or otherwise viewed as inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the Guidelines for Comments. For informational purposes, we identify countries from which comments are sent.