I'm proud and honored to stand here today as a Lebanese speaking for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

I was raised in Lebanon. I was taught that Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and we could only have peace when we kill the Jews and drive them into the sea.

When the Muslims and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they massacred Christians in city after city. From age 10 to 17, I lived in a bomb shelter underground without electricity, eating grass to live and crawling under sniper bullets to get water.

Israel came to help the Christians in Lebanon. My mother was wounded by a Muslim's shell and was taken into an Israeli hospital. When we entered the emergency room there were hundreds of wounded Muslims, Palestinians, Christian Lebanese and Israeli soldiers lying on the floor. The doctors treated everyone according to their injury. They treated my mother before they treated the Israeli soldier lying next to her. They didn't see religion. They didn't see political affiliation. They saw people in need and helped.

For the first time in my life, I experienced a human quality that my culture would never have shown to its enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis -- who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. I spent 22 days at that hospital. Those days changed my life and the way I listen to the media. I had been told lies about the Jews and Israel.

If I was a Jew in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched to shouts of "Allahu Akbar" echoing through the hospital and the streets.

I befriended the families of the Israeli wounded soldiers, particularly Rina, her only child was wounded in his eyes.

One day I was visiting with her and the Israeli army band came to play national songs to uplift the spirits of the wounded soldiers. As they surrounded Rina's son's bed playing a song about Jerusalem, Rina and I started crying. I felt out of place and started walking out of the room, but this mother pulled me back. She held me crying and said, "It’s not your fault." We just cried holding each other's hands.

What a contrast between her, a mother looking at her deformed 19-year-old only child, and still able to love me -- the enemy, and between a Muslim mother who sends her son to blow himself up just to kill Jews or Christians.

We are seeing a difference of values and character. It's barbarism versus civilization. It's dictatorship versus democracy. It's evil versus goodness.

Once upon a time, there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now, the intentional murder of Israeli children is legitimized as Palestinian "armed struggle." However, once such behavior is legitimized against Israel, it is legitimized everywhere in the world, constrained by nothing more than the subjective belief of people who would wrap themselves in dynamite and nails to kill children in the name of Allah.

Once the Palestinians were encouraged to believe that murdering Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic, the whole world now suffers from terrorism, from Nairobi to New York, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan, with a plague of terror authored and perfected by Palestinians.

They blame suicide bombing on "desperation from occupation." But the first major terror bombing committed by Arabs occurred ten weeks before Israel was born. On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel's independence, Arab terrorists detonated a triple truck bomb on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, killing fifty-four people and wounding hundreds. Arab terrorism is caused not by "occupation," but by the very thought of a Jewish state.

In the last 100 years, citizens have stood by and allowed evil to prevail. As America rose to defeat communism, now it is time to stand up against the terror of religious bigotry and intolerance. It's time for all of us to support and defend Israel, the front line against terrorism.

Courtesy of www.frontpagemag.com