Brigitte Gabriel

Brigitte Gabriel (بريجيت غابرييل; born Hanan Qahwaji, 21 October 1964) is a Lebanese-American conservative activist, author and lecturer, and critic of Islam.

She is the founder of ACT for America, which has been described as "the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group" in the United States.

Gabriel was born on 21 October 1964 to a family of Maronite Christians in the Marjeyoun District of Lebanon.

She says that during the Lebanese Civil War, Muslim militants launched an assault on a Lebanese military base near her family's house and destroyed her home.

Gabriel, who was ten years old at the time, suffered shrapnel injuries in the attack.

For the next seven years, she and her parents were forced to live underground in an 8 by bomb shelter with only a small kerosene heater, no sanitary systems, no electricity or running water, and little food.

Gabriel also stated that she had to crawl in a roadside ditch to evade Muslim snipers on her way to collect water from a nearby spring.

In the spring of 1978, a bomb explosion caused Gabriel and her parents to become trapped in their shelter for two days.

They were eventually rescued by three Christian militiamen, one of whom had befriended Gabriel before being killed by a landmine.

Gabriel wrote that in 1978, a stranger warned her family of an impending attack by Muslim insurgents on the Christian populace in her area.

However, the attack was thwarted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Later, her mother was seriously injured in an attack and subsequently taken for treatment at a hospital in Israel.

During this period, Gabriel's views on the Israelis changed as she began to question Lebanon's anti-Israel propaganda that she had witnessed as a child.

After graduating from high school, Gabriel completed a one-year course in business administration at a YWCA in 1984.

Multiple facts surrounding Gabriel's upbringing and autobiography have been disputed, with American author Dave Gaubatz calling her account of growing up in Lebanon as "dramatically fabricated.”

Using the pseudonym Nour Semaan, Gabriel was a news anchor for World News, an Arabic-language evening news broadcast of Middle East Television, which "was then run by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network to spread his politically conservative, Pentecostal faith in the Middle East."

The broadcasts covered Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

Gabriel reported on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from central Lebanon and the "Security Zone" in southern Lebanon, as well as the First Palestinian Intifada.

She then moved to Israel before emigrating to the United States in 1989.

According to The Washington Post, the organization "touted as its 'first accomplishment' its 2008 campaign to shut down a Minnesota Islamic school."

The Southern Poverty Law Center described ACT!

for America as "the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the country," and the Council on American–Islamic Relations has described it as "one of the main sources of growing anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation".

According to The Guardian, the organization has been "widely identified as anti-Muslim".

Gabriel and ACT!

have been described as part of the counter-jihad movement.

Stephen Lee, a publicist at St. Martin's Press for Gabriel's second book, has called her views "extreme," and Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine, who interviewed Gabriel in August 2008, described her as a "radical Islamophobe".

According to Clark Hoyt from The New York Times, over 250 people wrote in to protest that label in the days that followed.

Hussein Ibish, a Senior Resident Scholar at The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said that her "agenda is pure unadulterated hatred" and that she has "a pathological hatred of Muslims and other Arabs".

Gabriel disputes the charge, saying that "I have no quarrel with Muslims who wish to practice the spiritual tenets of their religion in peace".

According to Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, "the organization has condemned cities with large Muslim populations for serving halal food in public schools. In 2013, its Houston chapter urged members to 'protest' food companies that certify their meat as compliant with Islamic dietary law. ACT! for America tries to dissuade Jews and Christians from conducting interfaith dialogue with Muslims. And in state after state, it has lobbied state legislatures and school boards to purge textbooks of references that create 'an inaccurate comparison between Islam, Christianity and Judaism.'"

According to Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times, Gabriel "presents a portrait of Islam so thoroughly bent on destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to those who study or practice the religion."

Goodstein says that Gabriel "insists that she is singling out only 'radical Islam' or Muslim 'extremists'—not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and her two books, she leaves the opposite impression."

BuzzFeed News described her as "the most influential leader in America's increasingly influential anti-Islam lobby."

The Washington Post describes her two books as "alarmist tracts about Islam."

Beinart described her as "America's most prominent anti-Muslim activist."

In February 2017, Gabriel said that she provided a "national security briefing" at the White House.

She met with aides at the White House in March 2017, during the Donald Trump administration.

She has written intermittently for Breitbart News.

Her organization ACT for America has been described as anti-Muslim.

According to The New York Times, ACT for America draws "on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans".