Nonie Darshish, the "Daughter of Hamas"...
"I was born and raised as a Muslim in Cairo, Egypt. But I grew up as a child in the 50s in the Gaza Strip. And uh the reason I was in Gaza was because Gaza at that time was part of Egypt. I attended Gaza elementary schools where we learned hatred, vengeance, retaliation. Peace was never an option. The concept of peace was something foreign. Actually the word peace was never even mentioned in the services of any mosque. We recited poetry every day in the school wishing upon ourselves to die as martyrs. You know I used to see girls reciting this poetry while they're crying. They would wish upon themselves to die as a martyr. See our value system was about victimhood. thinking of ourselves as victims or to be a martyr to go kill everybody and die as a martyr. Either a victim or a martyr. There is nothing in between. Women don't go to mosques but we used to hear the service of the mosque either on radio or on TV. And I remember every Friday prayer the sheikh would be at the end of the sermon he would curse. May God destroy the Jews and the infidel and the even the Christians and non-Muslims. And he would call non-Muslims the enemies of Allah. If you grow up with cursing as a form of prayer, it can feel and sound normal. Hatred can be normal because who am I to judge? I never noticed that this is not not holy. So this is how I grew up.
22 Arab countries did everything they could to make life impossible for Israel to exist. The Arab League forbade absorbing the so-called Arab Palestinians rejected to give them citizenship in any Arab country. So you could see a Palestinian born in Cairo, for instance, and never get the citizenship and die in Cairo. They born and die in Syria, a Palestinian, and they never get a citizenship. Why? Because the Arab League wanted the Palestinian problem never to be solved. This is not their agenda. The agenda is to keep them refugees from birth to death. The culture was so for sacrificing. They encouraged women to stand up in front of the cameras and say, 'I gave my son to the jihad and I want my other children to die in the jihad.' Women who are for life, for peace, were looked down upon. Women who would be radical, if not more radical than men, who will promote jihad for their children were lifted up as honorable women to be respected in society. So for a woman to be respected in Islamic society, you have to be as radical, if not more radical than men. And that is why a lot of women are silent. They are proud to give their children to jihad. It's the only way to go to heaven is to go and kill the infidel and die in the process.
The Arabs of Israel were pushed constantly. They are rejected from being absorbed and constantly pushed against the borders with Israel in order to keep the problem alive. The Arab world doesn't have a shortage of land. If you look at the Arab world from the Atlantic Ocean, Morocco all the way to Persia, from Turkey all the way to Sudan. At that time when I was a child, the Sinai was practically empty desert. Nobody lived in the Sinai. Like today there is Sharm el-Sheikh, you know, all the nice beaches. This this was a military zone and there is absolutely no need no pressing need for Arabs to be so dwelled on wanting to throw the Jews in the sea. You know, this international conflict called the Arab-Israeli conflict really is a fabrication. This is not a conflict over land. And anybody who thinks it's a conflict over land is misguided because we don't see the truth. The truth is Arabs, there is something in Islam, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, especially anti-Jewish.
And I will tell you why. Those people calling themselves Palestinians who live in the Gaza, the West Bank are the pawns of the Arab world. I don't believe that they care about their happiness or welfare. They are set up to live a miserable life on purpose in order to show the world that we're victim. Do you think Saudi Arabia with all the money they have, the Gulf countries, all these oil money, they can't give them good roads and good homes and good police and turn it into a productive area of of the Middle East? They can, but that is not their objective. There is a hidden objective. And I don't understand why Western culture doesn't get it. Why Western media doesn't get it? It's so obvious.
So the unemployed people in Gaza and the West Bank, all this high unemployment, where do they go to work? Do they stand on the border of Egypt to get a job? Do they stand on the border of Syria or Jordan? No. They line up on the borders of Israel, the very people they are supposed to kill. It's a very unnatural way of living and nobody sees it. But they go and blame Israel. They compare the living standard of the West Bank and Gaza with Israel, a democracy, the only democracy in the Middle East. Why don't they compare the living conditions of Gaza and the West Bank with Egypt, with Syria, with Jordan? And if they do, they will find that the standard of living is even higher than many areas of the Arab world. But Western media are too lazy to compare apples with apples. They want to compare apples and oranges. I don't know how can I call Western media ignorant. They should not be ignorant.
And then they go and ask Israel, why don't you do some concessions for the Palestinians? I never hear them stand up to Arab leaders and ask Western media, why don't they ask Arab leaders, how about some concessions to the Israeli people? We never hear that. And it's very convenient to blame all of this terrorism on after 911 especially they blame the terrorism. Oh, it's because we have this terrorism everywhere by Muslims. It's all because of the occupation. If it wasn't for the occupation of Gaza, if it's not for the occupation of the West Bank, we wouldn't have a problem. The problem all is because of Israel. That's what they want to give the impression. And this is a big lie because I lived in Gaza as a child and I witnessed the terrorism against Israel before the occupation of Gaza and before the occupation of the West Bank and our media here doesn't even know that there was terrorism against Israel before the occupation.
So people who are Arabs who claim that they are doing terrorism now because they want freedom democracy. No, there is no freedom and democracy in any Arab country, let alone the West Bank or Gaza. So we have to really call a spade a spade now. this is too serious to just take all these lies and look the other way because it's very very hard to know the truth if you rely on Arab media if you rely on the culture around you and because of life in an oppressive society I moved to America I moved to America in the end of 7879 and my life completely changed and one time I wanted to attend a synagogue and a church because I was curious I thought they were going to curse the Arabs the same way we cursed them in our mosque, the holiness of the place. They were praying for everybody. They were praying for peace on earth. How can we leave this earth a better place? It was a totally different way of thinking, the opposite of what I grew up with.
And that's when I went to a mosque here also in Los Angeles. And I thought that because they allowed women that it was going to be different here within America. I am so glad that Islam in America must be so different. So I went I went to the mosque and I heard anti-semitism again in the mosque. And I was told, don't assimilate in America. We're here to Islamize America. They were looking down at American culture. They were looking down at this society. And I felt very uncomfortable. I said, 'Oh my god, there is an agenda here.' And I never went back again.
It hit me. How could we do this? How could we lie and accuse people of something we Arabs know very well? We have done ourselves. How could this happen? What kind of value system allows a person or allows a culture or a religion to lie and accuse their enemies of something that they know they've done themselves? They know that Osama bin Laden did that. They know that he was financed with Arab money, with oil money until today. How could they accuse the Jewish people of that?
Look at the map of the Middle East. You can hardly see Israel. It's impossible to convince any person who has an IQ of a child that this problem is over the land called Israel. It's time for the West to understand this because it's not just not good for Israel. It's not good for the Arab world. They are collapsing. A lot of people think that the Arab world is so strong and so powerful. It's rotting from the core, but they don't know. The religious leaders are telling them to keep continue the hate instead of telling them to repent and find the true God, the love and the friendship.
In the eyes of many Muslims, in the eyes of Islam itself, Jews and non-Muslims, they call them the Kath, the infidels. They don't deserve the truth. They don't deserve justice and they don't deserve mercy. How can this happen? And we accept it and we don't say no. The Arab world will never have freedom and democracy when the hatred is number one. When the jihad is number one, when killing your enemy is number one, when you're fixated on lies and slander, you will never have peace and democracy.
Nobody asks this question. Why all this lies, lies and slander against the Jewish people, against America? They call America the great Satan and Israel the the little saint. Why? Do you know that on Syrian TV, on Arabic TV, on Egyptian TV, the constant day and night lies about the Jewish people is unbelievable. There was a show that was saying and in it was not just religious leaders. There were some of them were scientists, Arab scientists saying that oh do you know why Israel went to Haiti to help with the earthquake? You know why? Because Israel really wanted to harvest the organs of the Haitian people. These are the intelligencia of the Arab world. When the intellectuals of the Arab world say that, what do you expect from the man on the street and you wonder why they hate? Because day in and day out they are told this. I was told horrific things about the Jewish people. It took me years to extract it out of my mind, my heart and my consciousness."
This covers her main continuous speaking parts in the video. The host intersperses commentary (e.g., praising her insights, summarizing her father's role as an Egyptian intelligence officer involved in fedayeen raids, and discussing the refugee issue and rejected peace offers), but the query focuses on Nonie Darwish's words, so the above is her direct speech. Note that minor filler words (uh, um) are retained where natural but smoothed for clarity; the content is faithful to the source extraction.
