"I am the Anne Frank who lived to tell about it, and I'm trying to warn the world."
These rather intense words were spoken not by a survivor of the Holocaust but by Brigitte Gabriel, a well-known Lebanese-American Islamophobe and self-styled "national security expert" who in 2017 discussed her "childhood under brutal terrorism" with US talk-show host Dave Rubin.
The author of such predictable (and bestselling) titles as Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America and They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, Gabriel is the founder of the ACT for America organisation, which specialises in the profitable dissemination of anti-Muslim propaganda (see, for example, this advisory: "If you live in a warm state such as Florida or Arizona and see someone dressed in an overcoat or unusual clothing for the season and the location, they may be hiding or packing explosives or a suicide belt").
But while Gabriel's tale of personal victimisation by "Islamic terror" may be an easy sell in a post-9/11 era of intensified bigotry - particularly given apparent Trumpian efforts to Make Fascism Great Again - her version of history isn't exactly reconcilable with reality.
As Gabriel tells it, she was born in the "once peaceful, idyllic Christian town" of Marjayoun in southern Lebanon - a country whose capital, Beirut, was "commonly called the Paris of the Middle East". A lengthy Buzzfeed report by journalist David Noriega points out that Gabriel was in fact born Hanan Qahwaji, but perhaps this name was too Middle East and not enough Paris. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.