Playing on US fears,author spreads anti-Islam message

Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall.

Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall. She greeted the crowd then launched into the same gripping personal story she has told in hundreds of churchesand conference rooms across the US:

As a child growing up a Maronite Christian in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s,Gabriel said,she had been left lying injured in rubble after Muslims mercilessly bombed her village. She found refuge in Israel and then moved to the US,only to find Islamic radicals who had terrorised her in Lebanon,she said,were now bent on taking over America.

US has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America, she said. They have infiltrated us at the CIA,at the FBI,at the Pentagon,at the State Department. They are being radicalised in radical mosques in our cities within the US.

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Through her books and speeches,and her organisation,ACT! for America,Gabriel has become one of the most visible personalities on a circuit of self-appointed terrorism detectors.

Representative Peter T King,Republican of Long Island,will conduct hearings Thursday in Washington on a similar theme: that the US is infiltrated by Muslim radicals.

Gabriel,46,whose real name is Nour Saman,casts her organisation as a nonreligious national security group. Yet the organisation draws on three partisan streams: Christian conservatives,defenders of Israel and Tea Party Republicans.

Her portrait of Islam has found an audience among Americans who are worried about spread of terrorism.

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Gabriel is only one voice in a circuit of counter-Islam. Gabriel said she is motivated by her love for her adopted country. She insists that she is singling out only radical Islam not majority of Muslims. And yet,in her speeches,she leaves the opposite impression. She puts it most simply in the 2008 introduction to her book,Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. In the Muslim world,extreme is mainstream, she wrote.LAURIE GOODSTEIN