Last night in Chapel Hill, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a founder of Hamas turned Israeli spy, gave a speech about his experiences and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His story shed some significant light on the conflict, but the most shocking part of his speech concerned not geopolitics but religion.
“Islam is the problem,” Yousef repeated several times during a speech sponsored by Christians United for Israel, a UNC-CH student group. He came to this conclusion several years after nearly becoming a terrorist himself.
At the age of seventeen, seeing the suffering his family had endured at the hands of the Israelis, he had sought to retaliate against the infidels. Thankfully, he says now, the Israelis arrested him before he had a chance.
After torturing Yousef for three months, the Israelis asked him if he wanted to become a spy for the Jewish state. Thinking that he could be a double agent and learn more about his enemies, Yousef agreed.
However, the more he found out about Israel, the more respect he gained for his enemies and the more he saw to be wrong with the Palestinians (and Islam generally). He eventually converted to Christianity, citing Christ’s admonition to “love thy neighbor as thyself” as a key part in his conversion, since it closely reflected his own internal moral compass.
That same moral compass–and his new-found Christianity–encouraged him to help the Israelis, not because he had chosen sides in the conflict, but because he saw himself as working to prevent violence–violence that, as Yousef sees it, stems from the nature of Islam. Although he said he would try to avoid ruffling feathers, he did say that he felt Islam to be inherently violent, comparing the life of Mohammad, Islam’s founder, to Jesus, the founder of Christianity.
He said that the key to a lasting peace is not a two-state solution, one-state solution, or any other sort of negotiated settlement. The key, he thinks, is to end Islam, and win converts to Christianity.
Shockingly, Yousef said that he could foresee this–the large scale abandonment of one of the world’s largest religions–happening within ten years. New technology is making information easier and easier to spread (as an example of its power, he cited the recent wave of dictator-toppling protests across the Middle East), and, he thinks, once people see what’s wrong with Islam, they will convert as he did.
Although not going quite that far in terms of predictions, other observers have also noticed a rise in Middle Eastern Christians. Writing at National Review Online, Joel C. Rosenberg said, “Their numbers [i.e. the number of Muslims turned Christians] have swelled into the millions since 1979, despite widespread (and recently intensifying) persecution.”
A number of Muslims in attendence felt offended by Yousef’s speech. A couple of head-scarf-clad young women sitting in front of me repeatedly shook their heads in disagreement and left before Yousef finished talking.
A student-led discussion following the speech consisted mainly of hand-wringing about what questions were in-bounds and out-of-bounds when discussing religion. However, the discussion revealed that Yousef had deeply challenged some students, causing some
to be upset and others to be reflective.
Overall, it was one of the best speeches I’ve seen at UNC-CH, and Mosab Yousef is certainly someone to keep an eye on.
