 Media Credit: BENJI FELDMAN Walid Shoebat was invited to speak by Concordia Hillel.
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Walid Shoebat, a self-proclaimed "PLO terrorist turned Zionist" spoke to a packed crowd at Concordia University on Wednesday. His talk, organized by Concordia Hillel and entitled "A Journey: From Hate to Love" told his story, which he called a confession.
"To confess is the beginning of healing," he said.
Shoebat admitted to carrying a bomb in a loaf of bread to a synagogue and blowing off the roof. He also confessed to the attempted murder of an Israeli official, saying he would have finished the job, but the official ran away.
Born and raised in Bethlehem to a Protestant-turned-Muslim American mother and an Arab Muslim father, Shoebat was raised Islamic. He began his tale with an anecdote about his childhood and the anti-Semitism that surrounded him.
"I asked my father, 'Who are the Jews?'" he said. "It was portrayed to me that the Jews were prophet killers, that they stole our land [and] were colonizers."
He went on to discuss his childhood at greater length, citing the Six Day War as the key incident that created Palestinian identity.
"I remember I was parading King Hussein as a child, identifying myself as a Jordanian," he said. "Then all of a sudden I became a Palestinian overnight... regardless of the fact that in history Palestine never existed. It was always Israel."
Shoebat, who converted to evangelical Christianity in 1993 after being arrested for his crimes, also defended Israel's use of force against Palestinians.
"If you kill somebody in a car accident, you don't deserve the electric chair because it is an accident," he said. "The intent of Israel is always reactionary... We (Palestinians) act, and they react, and that is what's called an endless cycle of violence.
"It is useless dialoguing with the Hitlers of the world," he continued, citing Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat. He compared Muslim fundamentalists to Nazis, saying that the real occupation "is the occupation of children's minds" through propaganda.
"When you occupy a child's mind with hatred to the point that they would go on a bus and blow themselves up, to me that is the real occupation," he said.
Shoebat said that many people consider him a traitor.
"[People say] that I betrayed my religion, my country, and I deserve to die," he said. "But who is a traitor, me or those who stand at the mosques telling children to wrap up themselves in bombs and die, killing Jews. Who loves their children more? Don't I love my children more when I protect them?"
Shoebat's appearance comes just a few weeks after the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights brought Norman Finkelstein to Concordia. Several members of the SPHR made an appearance at the event. During the question and answer period following the lecture, Shoebat was criticized as using his lecture as a means to bash Islam and was called a Christian fundamentalist. However, there was no clash between student groups and both parties left peacefully.
