They Need to Be
Liberated From Their God
The 'Son of Hamas'
author on his conversion to Christianity,
spying for Israel,
and shaming his family.
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI,
0pinion from the Web, March 6, 2010
Nashville, Tenn. -- 'I
absolutely know that in anybody's eyes I was a traitor," says Mosab Hassan
Yousef. "To my family, to my nation, to my God. I crossed all the red
lines in my society. I didn't leave one that I didn't cross."
Now 32, Mosab is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Throughout the last decade, from the
second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the
West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced
Christianity. And as he reveals in his book "Son of Hamas," out this week,
he became one of the top spies for Israel's internal security arm, the Shin Bet.
The news of this double conversion has sent ripples through the Middle East.
One of Mr. Yousef's handlers at the Shin Bet confirmed his account to the
Israeli daily Haaretz. Hamas—already reeling from the assassination of a
senior military chief in Dubai in January—calls his claims Zionist propaganda.
From the Israeli prison he has occupied since 2005, Sheikh Yousef on Monday
issued a statement that he and his family "have completely disowned the man who
was our oldest son and who is called Mosab."
For the past two years, Mosab Yousef has lived near San Diego, where he's kept a
low profile out of concern for his security. The U.S. is currently
weighing his application for political asylum, and until his confession to
espionage and the publicity blitz that accompanied it this week, only knew him
as the son of a terrorist who sometimes attends evangelical churches in
California. The book is intended to launch a new life in America.
Mr. Yousef, whose large, engaging eyes sit prominently on an oval face, says he
was confused for many years himself, and realizes many people will be as well.
His family has been shamed and old friends refuse to believe him. The
book, a Le Carréesque thriller wrapped in a spiritual coming-of-age story, is an
attempt to answer what he says "is impossible to imagine"—"how I ended up
working for my enemies who hurt me, who hurt my dad, who hurt my people."
"There is a logical explanation," he continues in fairly fluent English.
"Simply my enemies of yesterday became my friends. And the friends of
yesterday became really my enemies."
The first half of his memoir describes a childhood in Ramallah marked by close
familial ties and the Israeli occupation. He describes a kind and unusual
Muslim father who cooks dinner, treats his mother well, and cares for his
neighbors. An imam trained in Jordan, Sheikh Hassan Yousef rises to
prominence in their hometown, and in 1986—along with six other men including the
wheelchair-bound cleric from Gaza, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—forms Hamas at a secret
meeting in Hebron. The first Palestinian Intifada—or uprising—breaks out
the following year. Mosab did his part, throwing stones at Israeli
settlers and army vehicles.
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"Most people heard about Hamas after
Hamas started carrying out terrorist attacks," he says now, speaking near his
agent's home here in Nashville. "Hamas started out as an idea. Let's
say a noble idea—resisting occupation." Those early clashes with the
Israelis begat worse violence, and the cemetery near his house began to fill up
with cadavers. Palestinians also turned on each other. A corrupt and
authoritarian Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) sparred with the rising
Hamas and other groups. All of them used accusations of "collaboration" as
an excuse to torture and kill rivals or the weak.
Mr. Yousef traces his awakening to his first sustained exposure to Hamas
cruelty. In 1996, he was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons.
He says he was beaten and tortured badly in custody. It was then that the
Shin Bet approached him. He says he thought about becoming a double agent.
"I wanted revenge on Israel," he writes. But when he was sent to serve his
term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by
the way the maj'd, Hamas's security wing, dealt with other prisoners.
"Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing
its own people!" he writes. The Muslims he met in jail "bore no
resemblance to my father" and "were mean and petty ... bigots and hypocrites."
By agreeing to work with the Shin Bet, he got out of prison early. He says
he was curious about the Israelis and fast abandoned his idea to become a double
agent. Though he took money from Shin Bet and stayed on their payroll for
a decade, his handlers in the early years didn't ask much of him. They
encouraged him to study and be a model son. His code name was the Green
Prince: green as in the color of the Islamist Hamas flag, and prince as
the offspring to Hamas royalty.
During those quiet years he met a British cabbie in Jerusalem who gave him an
English-Arabic copy of the New Testament and invited him to attend a bible study
session at their hotel. "I found that I was really drawn to the grace,
love and humility that Jesus talked about," he says in "Son of Hamas."
As a spy, Mr. Yousef wasn't fully activated until the outbreak of the second
Intifada in September 2000. A few months before at Camp David, the late
PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of
the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef,
Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention.
So he sought out Hamas's support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who
accompanied him to Arafat's compound. Those meetings took place before the
Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came
when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,
site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef's account
helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated
by Arafat.
Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by
politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people."
He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the
slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven." So, as he
writes in the book, "At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet's only
Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas's military and political wings, as well
as other Palestinian factions."
Mr. Yousef claims some significant intelligence coups for himself, and he says
he isn't telling the world everything. Early on, he was first to discover
that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group born during the second
Intifada, was made up of Arafat's guards, who were directly funded by
international donors. He says he found the most lethal Palestinian bomb
maker and foiled assassination plots against President Shimon Peres, then
foreign minister, as well as a prominent rabbi. He says he broke up cells
of suicide bombers about to attack Israel. And he helped convince his
father to be the first prominent Hamas leader to offer a truce with Israel.
His handler—a "Captain Loai," now retired from the Shin Bet—corroborated many of
these stories to Haaretz. The paper said the Shin Bet considered Mr.
Yousef "the most reliable and most senior agent."
Mr. Yousef strains to justify himself, but ultimately "the question is whether I
was a traitor or a hero in my own eyes."
So we're back to why?
The motivation, he says, was to save lives.
"I'd seen enough killing. I was a witness to lots of death ... Saving a human
life was something really, really beautiful ... no matter who they are.
Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists,
many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives—or in other words they owe my Lord
their lives."
He says he used his influence at Shin Bet to get the Israelis to try to arrest
Hamas and other Palestinian figures rather than blow them up with missile
strikes. He says he saved his father from the fate of Sheikh Yassin and
other Hamas leaders whom the Israelis killed by secretly arranging to have him
arrested. "I know for sure that my father is alive today, he still
breathes, because I was involved in this thing," he says.
Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a
particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion.
He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.
"I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a
character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his
unconditional love. I didn't leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in
another box of religion. At the same time it's a beautiful thing to see my
God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he
does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.
"I'm not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of
Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the
ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace.
Those principles are great regardless, but we can't deny they came from
Christianity as well."
Mr. Yousef says he felt burned out and decided to stop working for the Shin Bet
in 2006, against their wishes. He made his way to friends in southern
California whom he'd met through bible study.
As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that
terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he
echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and
writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr.
Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not
whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God.
It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end
of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist,
terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid
this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.
"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their
God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest
enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."
These are all dangerous words. Of the threats issued to his life by
Islamists, he says, "That's not the worst thing that can happen to you.
I'm OK with it, I'm not afraid. ... Palestinians have reason to kill me.
Some Israelis may want to kill me. My goal is not to defeat my enemy.
It is to win over my enemy."
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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