'They Need to Be Liberated'

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. From the Stupidfada to the the start of the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank.

Yet, as his book — Son of Hamas, released this week — reveals, Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity and became one of the top spies for Israel's internal security service, the Shin Bet.

Wall Street Journal has a profile of the "Green Prince" whose double conversion has rocked the Middle East.

"There is a logical explanation," he says of his story, which shames his family and shocks old friends. "Simply my enemies of yesterday became my friends. And the friends of yesterday became really my enemies."

It started in an Israeli prison where he claims to have been beaten and tortured badly in custody. "I wanted revenge on Israel," he writes. But when he was sent to serve his term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by the way the maj'd, Hamas's security wing, dealt with other prisoners.

"Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!" he writes. The Muslims he met in jail "bore no resemblance to my father" and "were mean and petty ... bigots and hypocrites."

By agreeing to work with the Shin Bet, he got out of prison early. The General Security Service did not ask much of him, though he stayed on payroll. Then he met a British cabbie who gave him an English-Arabic copy of the New Testament and invited him to attend a bible study session at their hotel.

"I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about," he writes.

With the outbreak of the Stupidfada in September 2000, Yousef was fully activated as a spy.

A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas's support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat's compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef's account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat.

Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people." He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven." So, as he writes in the book, "At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet's only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas's military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions."

Yousef claims some significant intelligence coups for himself, and he says he isn't telling the world everything. While it is easy to dismiss his claims as part of a publicity stunt with a book intended to launch a new life in America, sis handler — now retired from the Shin Bet — corroborated many of the stories to Haaretz.

So many people owe him their lives and don't even know it. People who did a lot less were awarded the Israel Security Prize. He certainly deserves it. I knew him for six years, as a coordinator and as a district director. And I tell you, that if we had X number of intelligence coordinators in the region, thanks to him we had X+1. He was the extra coordinator. You know what? He was better than most of us - no offense to anyone.

The paper said the Shin Bet considered Yousef "the most reliable and most senior agent."

Why did Yousef betray his people? It was not just the hypocrisy of those in the movement his father founded, or the arrogance of Palestinian leaders like Arafat who would waste Palestinian lives for PR. The motivation, he says, was to save lives.

I'd seen enough killing. I was a witness to lots of death... Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful... no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives—or in other words they owe my Lord their lives.

Yousef says he used his influence at Shin Bet to get the Israelis to try to arrest Hamas and other Palestinian figures rather than blow them up with missile strikes. He says he saved his father from the fate of Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas leaders whom the Israelis killed by secretly arranging to have him arrested. "I know for sure that my father is alive today, he still breathes, because I was involved in this thing."

Yousef is a living example of what we call Zionism for Palestinians' sake. Yet the personal cost was high.

"Unfortunately, my father, the sheikh [Hassan Yousef], was forced to say that he is renouncing me as his son," Yousef told Haaretz.

My father's announcement that he is disowning me came because Hamas forced him to do it. But this will cause me to fight even more stubbornly against their god and against his movement. I love my father, but his movement is arrogant and evil.

They want me to lose my father forever, and my response will be to fight his god until he is finished. I am fighting the god of hate, the god of Islam, by means of my God - that of Christianity, which is the God of love.

As the son of a Muslim cleric, he echoes other defectors from Islam when he says that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam.

Like his father, Muslims are trapped, he told the Journal.

He's not a fanatic. He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic god. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist god. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims. The problem is with their god. They need to be liberated from their god. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to." Mosab Hassan Yousef While he does not seek to convert all the Middle East, the Palestinians, or Israel to Christianity, he recognizes the fundamental danger of Islam and its god of hate.

"The problem is not in Muslims," says Yousef. "The problem is with their god. They need to be liberated from their god. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

For the past two years, since he decided to leave Shin Bet's services, Mosab Yousef has lived near San Diego, and the US is currently weighing his application for political asylum. With the publication of his book, there is no doubt that his life is in danger.

The book is available at bookstores in the Kansas City area, including Barnes & Noble, or at Amazon.

You can download the first chapter in English for free or listen to the audio in English from his publisher's website.