Walid Shoebat: Ex-Terrorist Fraud and Clown

CNN: ‘Ex-Terrorist’ Fraud Walid Shoebat Exposed Part 2

‘Ex-Terrorist’ Fraud: Walid Shoebat Exposed Part 2

The expose on the fraud known as Shoebat continues on CNN:

Robert Spencer, watch out you’re next.

CNN:‘Ex-terrorist’ Rakes in Homeland Security Bucks Part 1

‘Ex-terrorist’ Rakes in Homeland Security Bucks

Last night CNN had a “special investigation” on the fraud that is known as Walid Shoebat. It took them years to realize that he was a fraud, even after they had him on as a “terrorist expert” in the past. We wrote about Shoebat two years ago in a piece titled, Three Stooges Coming to a Campus Near You, and Walid Shoebat:”Kill them and their Children”.

CNN provided some disturbing video of Shoebat defrauding security personnel and first responders and wasting tax payer money with his lies. Hopefully it won’t be long until Robert Spencer and the rest who get paid to hate-monger to the DHS are exposed by mainstream media.

Part 1 of the Expose on Walid Shoebat:

Watch Part 2 of Drew Griffin’s special investigative report about Walid Shoebat Thursday on AC360° beginning at 10pm E.T.

From Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston, CNN Special Investigations Unit

Rapid City, South Dakota (CNN) — Walid Shoebat had a blunt message for the roughly 300 South Dakota police officers and sheriff’s deputies who gathered to hear him warn about the dangers of Islamic radicalism.

Terrorism and Islam are inseparable, he tells them. All U.S. mosques should be under scrutiny.

“All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them,” he says.

It’s a message Shoebat is selling based on his own background as a Palestinian-American convert to conservative Christianity. Born in the West Bank, the son of an American mother, he says he was a Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist in his youth who helped firebomb an Israeli bank in Bethlehem and spent time in an Israeli jail.

That billing helps him land speaking engagements like a May event in Rapid City — a forum put on by the state Office of Homeland Security, which paid Shoebat $5,000 for the appearance. He’s a darling on the church and university lecture circuit, with his speeches, books and video sales bringing in $500,000-plus in 2009, according to tax records.

“Being an ex-terrorist myself is to understand the mindset of a terrorist,” Shoebat told CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

But CNN reporters in the United States, Israel and the Palestinianterritories found no evidence that would support that biography. Neither Shoebat nor his business partner provided any proof of Shoebat’s involvement in terrorism, despite repeated requests.

Back in his hometown of Beit Sahour, outside Bethlehem, relatives say they can’t understand how Shoebat could turn so roundly on his family and his faith.

“I have never heard anything about Walid being a mujahedeen or a terrorist,” said Daood Shoebat, who says he is Walid Shoebat’s fourth cousin. “He claims this for his own personal reasons.”

CNN’s Jerusalem bureau went to great lengths trying to verify Shoebat’s story. The Tel Aviv headquarters of Bank Leumi had no record of a firebombing at its now-demolished Bethlehem branch. Israeli police had no record of the bombing, and the prison where Shoebat says he was held “for a few weeks” for inciting anti-Israel demonstrations says it has no record of him being incarcerated there either.

Shoebat says he was never charged because he was a U.S. citizen.

“I was born by an American mother,” he said. “The other conspirators in the act ended up in jail. I ended up released.”

He said his own family has vouched for his prison time. But relatives CNN spoke to described him as a “regular kid” who left home at 18, eventually becoming a computer programmer in the United States.

Shoebat, now in his 50s, says he converted to Christianity in 1993 and began spreading the word about the dangers of Islam. He has been interviewed as a terrorism expert on several television programs, including a handful of appearances on CNN and its sister network, HLN, in 2006 and 2007.

Since al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, expertise on terrorism has been in high demand. The federal Department of Homeland Security has spent nearly $40 million on counterterrorism training since 2006. The department doesn’t keep track of how much goes to speakers, nor does it advise officials on the speakers hired by states and municipalities.

Shoebat spoke at a 2010 conference in South Dakota and was so well-received that he was invited back for the May event in Rapid City, according to state officials. He warned the police and first responders gathered in the hotel conference rooms that the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah had operatives working in Mexico and that drug cartels were raising money with Islamic groups. He also asserted that federal agents could have prevented the 9/11 attacks by looking for a chafed spot, called “zabibah,” that sometimes forms on the foreheads of devout Muslims.

“You need ex-terrorists who can tell you what life is like and what thinking is like of potential terrorists,” Shoebat said. “But had we looked at the zabibah only, we would have deflected a suicide action of killing 3,000 Americans.”

But Shoebat also told the group there were 17 hijackers when there were 19. And perhaps more surprising from a man who bills himself as a terror expert, Shoebat said the Transportation Security Administration could have stopped them. The TSA wasn’t created until after the 9-11 attacks.

Jim Carpenter, South Dakota’s homeland security director, said Shoebat brought “a point of view that certainly is not mainstream.”

“He brings in commentary about living and being raised as a Muslim and converting over to Christianity — gives them a different aspect of breaking the mold, so to speak,” Carpenter said. But he said Shoebat’s appearance was “a small portion” of the two-and-a-half-day conference.

“It’s not like we’re talking about setting up training and a discipline we would follow, that this is the only way and that’s the particular point of view of a Muslim or somebody of the Islamic faith. That’s not the case,” Carpenter said. “That’s his point of view.”

Carpenter said there is “no fear of threat” from Islamic terrorism in South Dakota, where the last census reports showed the state’s Muslim community made up less than one-half of 1 percent of the population. According to Rapid City’s local newspaper, about two dozen Muslims live in the city.

During Shoebat’s presentation, he criticized Muslim organizations and told audience members to be leery of Muslim doctors, engineers, students and mosques.

“Now, we aren’t saying every single mosque is potential terrorist headquarters. But if you look at certain reports by the Hudson report, 80 percent of mosques they found pamphlets and education on jihad. So they’re in the mosque, the mosque in accordance to the Muslim brotherhood is the command post and center.”

The conservative Hudson Institute said it never issued such a report and has no idea why its name was invoked.

Shoebat warned that making special accommodations for Muslim beliefs was a step toward establishing Islamic religious law. And he recounted how he wore a T-shirt that read “Profile me” on a trip to the airport and approached the screeners at the security checkpoint.

“I got tapped down, I got checked, I got all these different things,” he said. “I say it’s wonderful.”

Shoebat and business partner Keith Davies run several foundations and three websites that are all linked. Shoebat said the major group, the Forum for Middle East Understanding, includes his own Walid Shoebat Foundation.

In tax records filed by Davies, the Forum for Middle East Understanding reported 2009 earnings from speaking engagements, videos and book sales of more than $560,000. The documents are thin on specifics, and so is Shoebat.

“Basically, we are in information, and we do speaking and we do also helping Christians that are being persecuted in countries like Pakistan, and we help Christians that are suffering all throughout the Middle East,” he said. Asked how they do that, he said, “None of your business” — adding that disclosing details could endanger people he was trying to help in Islamic countries that have laws against blasphemy.

Shoebat’s name doesn’t appear on any of the paperwork. As for his own salary, he said he makes “probably what a gas station makes or a garage makes.”

“Everybody thinks I’m just raking in the dough, which is absolutely incorrect,” he said. He referred details to Davies, who offered to provide a copy of the group’s tax returns — but didn’t. When asked who served on the foundation’s board of advisers, Davies gave “Anderson Cooper 360″ the name of a former pilot, who didn’t return phone calls. But he could not name the high-ranking military officers he said were on the board.

Federal officials say they don’t know exactly how much money has gone to speakers like Shoebat. But in April, the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee raised concerns about “vitriolic diatribes” being delivered by “self-appointed counterterrorism experts” at similar seminars.

Sen. Susan Collins, the committee’s Republican chairwoman, and Connecticut Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman asked the department to account for how much federal grant money went to state and local counterterrorism programs and what standards guided those grants. The request followed reports by the liberal Political Research Associates and the Washington Monthly that raised similar questions.

The Homeland Security Department told CNN that it has standards — and if training programs don’t meet them, “corrective action will be taken.”

“We have not and will not tolerate training programs — or any DHS-supported program — that rely on racial or ethnic profiling,” the agency said in a written statement.

Walid Shoebat: "Kill them...including the children"

Walid Shoebat

Walid Shoebat: "Kill them...including the children"

Walid Shoebat was one of the first loons that we took to task at our site. We exposed his buffoonery and epically vile shysterism. Now, Shoebat has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar of hate once again, this time advocating the murder of “extremists” and their “children” by which of course he means all Muslims.

Counter-terror ‘expert’ tells cops: Kill militant Muslims, ‘including children’

(RAWStory)

A counter-terrorism consultant told a meeting of law enforcement officials that the way to combat militant Muslims is to “kill them … including the children,” says a news report.

Walid Shoebat, a self-described“former PLO terrorist” who “now speaks out for USA and Israel,” reportedly made the comment at a speech during a conference of the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association in Las Vegas this past October, according to the Huffington Post’s Chip Berlet.

The comment highlights growing concerns among human rights advocates that US law enforcement is turning to extremists for training in the fight against terrorism. It also highlights concerns among senior counter-terrorism officials that standards for counter-terror training are inappropriate, and possibly harming national security.

According to Berlet’s anonymous source, Shoebat’s comments got a warm reception from at least some of the people attending the conference:

Our source had turned around after Shoebat’s speech and asked the woman in the chair behind them at the conference what she thought was the solution offered by Shoebat.

“Kill them … including the children … you heard him,” was the full response.

Shoebat’s Las Vegas speech was described by our source as “frightening.”

Religion writer Richard Bartholomewdescribes Shoebat as “a pseudo-expert on terrorism, Islamic extremism, and Biblical prophecy, and he teaches that Obama is a secret Muslim and that the Bible has prophesised a Muslim anti-Christ.”

In a lengthy investigation of the US’s intelligence apparatus earlier this month, the Washington Postreported that “in their desire to learn more about terrorism, many [police] departments are hiring their own trainers. Some are self-described experts whose extremist views are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI and others in the intelligence community.”

The article also notes that standards for counter-terrorism officers plummeted in the years after 9/11, as law enforcement agencies scrambled to refocus on the terror threat.

“The CIA used to train analysts forever before they graduated to be a real analyst,” Charles Allen, an ex-CIA official and former head of the DHS intelligence office, told the Post. “Today we take former law enforcement officers and we call them intelligence officers, and that’s not right, because they have not received any training on intelligence analysis.”

As David Neiwert notes at Crooks and Liars, this is not the first time Shoebat has found himself at the center of controversy. In 2008, he was accused of falsely claiming to be a former Muslim terrorist who converted to Christianity. Skeptics of Shoebat’s claims point to the fact he is not wanted on any arrest warrants in the US, as a known PLO terrorist ought to be.

Earlier this year, Shoebat was one of the speakers at an unofficial memorial for the soldiers killed in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, an event described by some reporters as being anexercise in Islamophobia.

In comments at the Huffington Post, Michael Riker, head of ICTOA, which sponsored the Las Vegas conference, defended Shoebat.

“What you hear from Walid is the TRUTH,” he wrote. Speaking about the Las Vegas conference, Riker said “the attendees were glued to what Walid had to say and the majority of them agreed. The liberal media is afraid to hear what the truth really is. Who has been planning attacks on our country? We are in a war of ideology and if you don’t know that you need to get you head out of the sand.”

Three Stooges Coming to a Campus Near You

The Three Stooges Coming to a Campus Near You!

If you live near to, or are a student at a university you might be interested in knowing that the Three Stooges are touring college campuses nationwide, but before you get your hopes up just know that it’s not the three stooges that you might be familiar with.

We’re talking about the three stooges of the Christian Right: Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani.

These three aren’t comedic geniuses in the usual sense but rather are funny in the same way that televangelists who steal money from gullible viewers searching for a cure to their ills give you fits of laughter while at the same time making you feel sick to your stomach. You know its a charade, a concocted myth but you watch to see the theatrics of the show and the usual ‘planted’ caller who declares how the televangelist’s powers cured them of their incurable disease.

So now we have another group of individuals using and abusing Christianity in the name of profit. Former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief and expert on Christian Fundamentalism Chris Hedges describes them to a tee:

These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges—a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy—to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic.Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims.Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called “Why We Want to Kill You,” promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how “Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how “perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by Muslims. (emphasis added)

In fact their tour isn’t simply limited to Christian colleges but extends to colleges and universities that have no affiliation with religion. As noted above they have spoken at the Air Force Academy and most recently (minus Anani) at Western Michigan University.

The fundamentally obvious question that seems to escape people is, “If these guys really are ‘ex-terrorists’ why are they allowed to roam free, campus to campus, lecture hall to lecture hall without being monitored or questioned by the FBI?” The logic of a lot of their supporters in answering this concludes that: if a terrorist repents and accepts Christianity they should be spared prosecution for any crimes committed beforehand.

The looniness in the case of these stooges doesn’t require a great deal of research but can be gleaned from their own words as the best material for their hilarity comes from their own mouths.

For instance, Zachariah Anani claim’s in his biography posted on Shoebat’s hate-site that:

“Every time I killed someone and two or three fighters witnessed it, they would give me a point on my chart. I carried 223 points.”Even his comrades feared him. “Although we had a sense of loyalty to each other,” he says, “we were ready to take out enemies or friends.” When a fanatical Muslim joined his regiment and began knocking on doors to wake the others for prayer at 3 A.M., Anani warned him: “I don’t want to pray. Don’t come and wake me.” When he heard the knock early the next morning, Anani picked up his gun, shot him, and went back to sleep.

LoonWatchers, we can’t make this stuff up!

According to his own admission he has killed at least 223 people and that’s only in those cases in which there were two or three witnesses. You’d think the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security would be all over this murderer but no one knows who he is or what he’s talking about. Also, what kind of insane and pathological individual non-chalantly shoots someone and then simply goes back to sleep; Anani it seems!

The other two stooges are just as bad if not worse in attempting to sell their outlandish and fantastical stories.

Kamal Saleem and Walid Shoebat

Kamal Saleem claim’s to be the descendant of someone called the “The Grand Wazir of Islam,” which  Hedges points out is ”a title and a position that do not exist in the Arab world.” It can be further noted that the religion of Islam has no clerical hierarchy similar to the Catholic Church with defined positions such as the Pope, Bishops, Priests, etc. Kamal’s blooper in his bio is either a result of an ignorance of Islam and its structure or an attempt to manipulate the ignorance of his audience.

Shoebat may be the most outlandish of them all, he is also the most well known. He has in the past equated Islam with “Satanism” and “Nazism.” He also stated in front of an audience at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee that ”Palestinians keep Jewish testicles and breasts in jars.”

He claim’s to have planted a bomb at Bank Leumi in Bethlehem but his story has been debunked by several sources including the Jerusalem Post and Shoebat’s own family members. Bank Leumi itself states that they have no record of a bomb attack for the time period asserted by Shoebat.

Simon Altaf, a former Muslim and a convert to Christianity was a close friend of Shoebat and along with him co-authored a book titled This is our Eden, This is our End. Altaf states that,

Walid wanted to be an ex-Terrorist to make money, pure and simple.

In the end the goal is to make money off of these speaking engagements, television appearances, and Church gatherings. This is an easy sell, after 9/11 many Americans were rightly afraid of another terrorist attack;  in this climate Anti-Muslim and Islamophobic sentiment grew making it a ripe time for someone to capitalize on the growing fear and paranoia in the country.

These three stooges hit on the jack pot and saw that there was a cottage industry developing to bash Muslims and Islam and so jumped on the bandwagon, taking their loony lies and hate-caravan all the way to the bank.

Jerusalem Post: The Palestinian 'terrorist' turned Zionist

The Palestinian 'terrorist' turned Zionist

by Jorg luyken (03/30/08)

When he was 16, says Walid Shoebat, he was recruited by a PLO operative by the name of Mahmoud al-Mughrabi to carry out an attack on a branch of Bank Leumi in Bethlehem. At six in the evening he was supposed to detonate a bomb in the doorway of the bank. But when he saw a group of Arab children playing nearby, he says, his conscience was pricked and he threw the bomb onto the roof of the bank instead, where it exploded causing no fatalities. 


This is the story that Shoebat, who converted from Islam to Christianity in 1993 and has lived in the United States since the late 1970s, has told on tours around the US and Europe since 9/11 opened the West's public consciousness to the dangers of Islamic extremism. 


Shoebat's Web site says his is an assumed name, used to protect him from reprisal attacks by his former terror chiefs, whom he says have put a $10 million price on his head. Shoebat is sometimes paid for his appearances, and he also solicits donations to a Walid Shoebat Foundation to help fund this work and to "fight for the Jewish people." 


The BBC, Fox News and CNN have all presented Shoebat as a terrorist turned peacemaker, interviewing him as someone uniquely capable of providing insight into the terrorist mindset. Now he and two other former extremists are set to appear along with US Senator Joe Lieberman, Ambassador to the US Sallai Meridor and other notables at an annual "Christians United For Israel" conference in Washington in July. 


The three "ex-terrorists" have appeared previously at Harvard and Columbia universities and, most recently, at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado, in February, at a conference whose findings, the organizers said, would be circulated at the Pentagon and among members of Congress and other influential figures. Last year, Shoebat spoke to the BattleCry Christian gathering in San Francisco, which drew a reported 22,000 evangelical teenagers to what the San Francisco Chronicle described as "a mix of pep rally, rock concert and church service." 


The paper described Shoebat as a self-proclaimed "former Islamic terrorist" who said that Islam was a "satanic cult" and who told the crowd how he eventually accepted Jesus into his heart. However, Shoebat's claim to have bombed Bank Leumi in Bethlehem is rejected by members of his family who still live in the area, and Bank Leumi says it has no record of such an attack ever taking place. 


His relatives, members of the Shoebat family, are mystified by the notion of "Walid Shoebat" being an assumed name. And the Walid Shoebat Foundation's working process is less than transparent, with Shoebat's claim that it is registered as a charity in the state of Pennsylvania being denied by the Pennsylvania State Attorney's Office. Shoebat's claim to have been a terrorist rests on his account of the purported bombing of Bank Leumi. But after checking its files, the bank said it had no record of an attack on its Bethlehem branch anywhere in the relevant 1977-79 period. 


Shoebat told The Jerusalem Post that this could be because the bank building was robustly protected with steel and that the attack may have caused little damage. Asked whether word of the bombing made the news at the time, he said, "I don't know. I didn't read the papers because I was in hiding for the next three days." (In 2004, he had told Britain's Sunday Telegraph: "I was terribly relieved when I heard on the news later that evening that no one had been hurt or killed by my bomb.") 


Shoebat could not immediately recall the year, or even the time of year, of the purported bombing when talking to the Post by phone from the US. After wavering, he finally settled for the summer of 1977. The Sunday Telegraph described Shoebat as a man who "for much of his life... was eager to commit acts of terrorism for the sake of his soul and the Palestinian cause." In that interview he described how he and his peers were indoctrinated as children "to believe that the fires of hell were an ever-present reality. We were all terrified of burning in hell when we died... The teachers told us that the only way we could certainly avoid that fate was to die in a martyrdom operation - to die for Islam." But an uncle and a cousin of Shoebat, who still live in Beit Sahur in the Bethlehem area, where Shoebat grew up, said that Shoebat's education was rather mild ideologically, and that religion did not play a dominant role. 


The uncle, interviewed at his home, said he remembered little about his nephew, because Walid left for America at the age of 16, and because his American mother always kept a distance from the rest of the family. The uncle and his wife both said firmly that there was no attack on Bank Leumi. When questioned on this discrepancy, Shoebat was adamant that he did carry out such a bombing, and that his relatives deny it to cover up for another cousin who was with him during the attack and still lives in Bethlehem. 


Shoebat evinced no particular surprise that his family could be tracked down simply by asking Beit Sahur locals where they lived, even though his Internet site claims that his is an assumed name. Shoebat describes his conversion to Christianity as a transformation "from hate to love." He told the Post that he believes "in a Greater Israel that includes Judea and Samaria, and by this I mean a Jewish state." He argued that Israel should retake the Gaza Strip and rehouse Jews there, regarding Gaza as Jewish by right. "If a Jew has no right to Gaza, then he has no right to Jaffa or Haifa either," he said. 


He advocates that the government of Greater Israel introduce a law providing for the exiling of anybody who denies its right to exist, "even if they were born there." He has little sympathy for the PLO or Hamas. "The Palestinians have not met a single demand from Israel," he said, and added, "Both the PLO and Hamas have not given up the goal of destroying Israel." "The Jews are not aware of the true threat," Shoebat said. "They are still fighting dead Nazis. It is easy to fight dead people. But they don't have the will to fight the living Nazis, the Islamic radicals." 


He told the Post he had set up his Walid Shoebat Foundation to educate Americans as to why the US should support Israel. Shoebat said the foundation had reached out to over 450 million people. He said it held events where he and others like him - whom he called "ex-terrorists" who have become Zionists - spoke about their views to Jewish, Christian and secular audiences. 


A New York Times report last month on the Air Force Academy event, headlined "Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims," noted that "Academic professors and others who have heard the three men speak in the United States and Canada said some of their stories border on the fantastic, like Mr. Saleem's account of how, as a child, he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights. 


No such incidents have been reported, the academic experts said. They also question how three middle-aged men who claim they were recruited as teenagers or younger could have been steeped in the violent religious ideology that only became prevalent in the late 1980s." The Times quoted Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as saying after he heard Saleem speak last November at the college that he thought the three were connected to several major Christian evangelical organizations. "It was just an old time gospel hour: 'Jesus can change your life, he changed mine,'" Howard said. 


The professor told the Times that his doubts about the authenticity of the three grew after he heard stories like that of the Golan Heights tunnels, "as well as something on Mr. Saleem's Web site along the lines that he was descended from the grand wazir of Islam. The grand wazir of Islam is a nonsensical term." The newspaper said Arab-American civil rights organizations have questioned "why, at a time when the United States government has vigorously moved to jail or at least deport anyone with a known terrorist connection, the three men, if they are telling the truth, are allowed to circulate freely." 


A spokesman for the FBI, the paper reported, said there were no warrants for their arrest. The Times said the three men were to be paid $13,000 for the Air Force Academy event. Visitors to Shoebat's Internet site are encouraged to make a donation to his foundation to enable him to disseminate his message. However, a notice on the page states that for "security reasons," the money will not be debited to his foundation, but rather to a company called Top Executive Media. 


The name Top Executive Media is used by a greetings card firm from Pennsylvania called Top Executive Greetings, a company with an annual turnover of $500,000. When one makes a donation through the Shoebat Internet site, the Web address changes to topexecutivegreetings.com/shoebat. This seems to be the only active page for the company; its homepage is blank. 


Asked by the Post whether the Walid Shoebat Foundation is a registered charity, Shoebat replied that it is registered in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania State Attorney's office said it had no record of a charity registered under this name. Questioned further, Shoebat said it was registered under a different name, but that he was not aware of the details, which are handled by his manager. "I remain separate to the running of the charity so that I am not constrained by church rules," he explained, adding that the organization's connection to certain churches meant it would be difficult for him to speak to secular audiences if he became too involved in running it. 


Dr. Joel Fishman, of the Allegany County Law Library in Pennsylvania, expressed doubts about this donation process. If the money were being given to a registered charity, the charity would have to make annual reports to the state and federal government on how it was being spent, he noted. Shoebat insisted donations were not being misused, however. "I survive by being an author," he said. "I only get paid for being an author. All the money that is donated gets put back into events." 


If the Bank Leumi bombing claim is unfounded, it is unclear why Shoebat would have wanted to manufacture a terrorist past. True or not, however, it has plainly brought him some prominence and provided him with a means to speak in favor of Israel and be paid for doing so.