Shoebat and his two "ex-terrorist" associates are already booked, along with US Senator Joe Lieberman, as speakers at the 2008 "Christians United For Israel" conference in Washington DC this summer but a rising chorus of voices has begun to challenge the veracity of Shoebat's claims to having been a major PLO terrorist. Shoebat has recently managed to offend a Princeton pro-AIPAC group (PIPAC) through his use of the epithet "judenrat" and has also alienated a former fan, right wing blogger Debbie Schlussel who wrote in a comment attached to a post on her blog,

"AS FOR SHOEBAT, HE IS A COMPLETE CREEP AND AN APPARENT FRAUD, WHO IS IN THIS FOR THE BUSINESS ASPECT OF IT FOR HIMSELF. IN MY OWN PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS WITH HIM, HE COMPLETELY REPULSED ME AND ENTIRELY CHANGED MY VIEW ON HIM (I HAD PRAISED HIM, PREVIOUSLY, ON THIS SITE). HE STOLE A COLUMN I WROTE--WORD FOR WORD--ON IMAD HAMAD AND USED IT IN A PRESS RELEASE. WHEN I CAUGHT HIM AND PINNED HIM DOWN, HE ADMITTED TO IT, BUT STATED HE DOES NOT WANT TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH CONSERVATIVES (WHO MAKE UP HIS WHOLE BASE) AND THAT'S WHY IT WAS OKAY TO STEAL FROM ME UNATTRIBUTED. HE PROMISED TO CORRECT, BUT WHEN HE DID NOT AND I CALLED HIM. HE SAID, "F-CK YOU, BITCH," AND HUNG UP."

Walid Shoebat has made a career for himself by painting Islam as a religion bent on world domination. Along with Brigitte Gabriel-- who I heard as a speaker, last summer at the Christians United For Israel conference where she proclaimed in  speech that "Arabs and Muslims "have no SOUL !" --Walid Shoebat and his "former terrorists", converts to fundamentalist Christian zionism Christianity (apocalyptic premillenniallist dispensational Christianity to be exact) have been traveling around the US, around for several years now, beating the drumbeat for a full-blown religious war between the United States and the entire Islamic world. Shoebat and his associates claim that, because of their alleged background as former terrorists in the PLO, Hamas, or Hezbollah, they knew what Islam is really about: killing Christian and Jews. Along with a large cohort of Christian Zionists and other speakers and publicists, NeoConservatives and Israelis tied to the Likud Party, Walid Shoebat has been part of an ongoing PR campaign seemingly bent on to whipping Americans into a frenzied panic about the alleged menace of militant Islam...

But a rising chorus has started to call out the veracity of claims Shoebat and his associates have made, on having been significant terrorist figures, and the issue seems to have come to a head recently as Shoebat and two of his "ex-terrorist" colleagues were just invited, for a paid appearance, as experts on terrorism, to a conference at the US Air Force Academy:

As the New York Times has reported yesterday, three men who spoke Wednesday at a US Air Force Academy conference on terrorism, who have been publicly billing themselves "ex-terrorists", made public speaking appearances vilifying Islam into a professional career and claim they know the real, secret and dark inner nature of Islam because they were once terrorists until they were redeemed by evangelical Christianity, may well have fabricated those "terrorist" backgrounds.

The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.

The three men were invited as part of a weeklong conference on terrorism organized by cadets at the academy's Colorado Springs campus under the auspices of the political science department.

The three will be paid a total of $13,000 for their appearance, some of it from private donors, said Maj. Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy.

The three were invited because "they offered a unique perspective from inside terrorism," Major Ashworth said. The conference is to result in a report on methods to combat terrorism that will be sent to the Pentagon, members of Congress and other influential officials, he added.

The appearance of the three "ex-terrorists" at the United States Air Force Academy further raises the issue of what the nonprofit watchdog foundation MRFF charges is a pervasive pattern both of religious coercion and improper endorsement of religion in the US military. The NYT story noted that one of Shoebat's 'ex-terrorist' group members, Zak Anani, told students at the USAF Academy that "converting to Christianity from Islam saved his life". The operating assumption that Shoebat and his group present to audiences is that Islam is an inherently evil religion. As the New York Times quotes CAIR spokeperson Ibrahim Hooper, "Their entire world view is based on the idea that Islam is evil."

The USAF Academy appearance was not an anomaly, and one of Shoebat's associates, who professes considerable knowledge of terrorism for having grown up in Southern Lebanon, Brigitte Gabriel, spoke at the Joint Command Center in Norfolk VA last summer, in 2007, and described a struggle against what she termed "Islamofascism".

Shoebat and his fellows are a staple of right wing conferences and Christian Zionist events, as speakers, and they're constantly on not only dedicated radio and TV broadcast outlets of the American Christian right but also Fox and CNN, and their consistent message to Americans could be summed up as the following:

"Two or three hundred Muslims want to kill you, they want to destroy America and they'll do it if they have to swim over here, bombs strapped to their backs, to do it. So you'd better get them before they get you. And, by the way, they're over here too. Any American Muslim you see might be one of them, you never know."

A few weeks ago however, Canada's top terrorism expert suggested that autobiographical details provided by one of Shoebat's three "ex-terrorists", Zachariah Anani, didn't add up:

Last January 20th, 2007, the Windsor Star featured the reaction of Tom Quiggen to self--described "terrorism expert" Zachariah Anani, who had made some speaking appearances in Canada. Tom Quiggen is "Canada's only court-qualified expert on global jihadism and a former RCMP intelligence and national security expert" and Quiggen stated that in his studied, polite but unequivocal opinion self-proclaimed "former terrrorist" Zachariah Anani's story, about his alleged terrorist background, just isn't credible. In short, Quiggen pegged his professional reputation on the likelihood that Zachariah Anani has been lying about his background. As Quiggen said in the Windsor Star article,

"It appears to be that Mr. Anani is nothing more than an extremist who is trying to create an imaginative history from a contemporary set of fears and stories," said Quiggin. "Mr. Anani's myths that he has built up around himself lack validity on a number of key points...

"His story of having made kills shortly after he joined and having made 223 kills overall is preposterous, given the lack of fighting during most of the time period he claims to have been a fighter," Quiggin said. "He also states he left Lebanon to go to Al-Azhar University at the age of 18, which would mean he went to Egypt in 1976. In other words, according to himself, he left Lebanon within a year of when the fighting actually started.". . .

Quiggin said Anani's description of himself as a Muslim terrorist also "defies logic" based on the time frame.

"Most the groups involved in the fighting in Lebanon were secular and tended to be extreme leftists or Marxists," he said.

Quiggin said religious-based terrorism as part of the warring in Lebanon didn't begin until after 1979, following the revolution in Iran, the Soviet attack on Afghanistan and the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni Muslim extremists.

Anani's claim to have survived a beheading attempt is also questionable, said Quiggin.

"This was not a common practice in Lebanon at any time and again it appears as though he is attempting to build up his past mythology by playing on current Iraqi-based fears," Quiggin said.

Now, a woman who says she has tracked down and talked to one of Walid Shoebat's Palestinian-American relatives- who supposedly has said Walid Shoebat's story is fraudulent -has now called Shoebat out to the extent of refusing to retract her story, which contradicts Shoebat's story of having been a major PLO terrorist, despite a lawsuit threat from Shoebat's agent.

As reported by Eileen Fleming, on her blog, a relative of Shoebat's told Fleming that:

"The biggest act of 'terror' he ever committed was to glue Palestinian flags on street posts. But, when he was in jail he met someone who invited him to join a group against Israel. In 1977 Walid and his friends put packages behind a bank, but there were no explosives in it. That year he also met some Jehovah Witnesses and joined them for a while."

As Fleming's account, of this alternative and somewhat drab alternate chronicle of Shoebat's past, continues it descends to a sad, tawdry level:

"Walid came to the U.S. in 1978 and met an Afghani friend and they went into business together, but it didn't work out, so he moved to Chicago in 1981 where many cousins live and asked for help. He went to Loop College [now Harold Washington College] and was appointed as a foreign student advisor; a position offered him so he could pay his tuition."

"The repo man took Walid's truck and after that he went back to California. He met a Palestinian girl there and they got married and had a son. But, he beat his wife and that marriage broke up."

Following Fleming's account of Shoebat's past, depicting his 'terrorist' pedigree as marginal and mainly invented, Walid Shoebat-- who has appeared multiple times on television, for CNN and Fox as a supposed expert on Islamic terrorism --has issued a long rebuttal on Op-Ed News [note: this story originally mistakingly stated that Shoebat's rebuttal ran on World Net Daily] which only seems to have further degraded his credibility. Walid Shoebat has repeatedly said his name is assumed because there is a ten million dollar price tag on his head but, in his rebuttal to Eileen Fleming, Shoebat contradicted that story and said that 'Walid Shoebat' is actually his real name and that's an apparent pattern; several Internet critics have charged that details Shoebat has provided, at different media appearances, on the same purported incidents from his alleged "PLO terrorist" are self-contradictory.

In an OP Ed News post following Shoebat's rebuttal, Eileen Fleming wrote that Shoebat's agent, Keith Davies, has threatened her with a lawsuit unless she retracts her story challenging Shoebat's account of his supposed terrorist past. But Fleming, in her post, has refuses to retract her account.

At 1 AM on Fat Tuesday morn, Keith Davies, Walid's handler sent me an email threat of a lawsuit unless I issued "a full apology and retraction"

Walid's OP followed his threat, which OPN has published in full and from which I only excerpt. Before I reply to Walid's epistle, I begin with my email reply to his handler:

Hi Keith,

No apology and no retraction will come from me.

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