“Son of Hamas” takes radical new turn

“My father was such an example of humility, love, and devotion… he stood head and shoulders above anyone else I had ever known.”

Such is Mosab Hassan Yousef’s glowing description of his father in his recently published memoir Son of Hamas. Mosab’s father, Hassan Yousef, is one of seven founders of Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization voted into power in Gaza and seeking the destruction of Israel.

As a young man Mosab, as the eldest son, would accompany his father to clandestine meetings with prominent Palestinian figures. According to Mosab, his father never engaged in acts of terrorism though he acquiesced to their planning and execution.

During childhood Mosab always wanted to be a Palestinian fighter because, he said, this is what is expected of boys growing up in the West Bank. When nearly 20 years old, he was arrested and sent to an Israeli prison for illegally buying guns. He reports that he was brutally treated, being chained and made to sit on a tiny child’s chair for days with a stinking hood over his head.

But, he confides, he was more traumatized to witness dominant Hamas inmates inflict severe cruelty on fellow Palestinian prisoners who they falsely accused of various offenses.

He later wrote, “I had not forgotten… the days I was chained to that little chair. But I also remembered the screams from… the man who nearly impaled himself on the razor-wire fence trying to escape his Hamas tormentors.”

This deeply disillusioning experience fostered in Mosab a process of painful reflection on the nature of man and human conflict.

“I asked myself what Palestinians would do if Israel disappeared,” he wrote, “and for the first time, I knew the answer. We would still fight. Over nothing. Over a girl without a head scarf. Over who was toughest and most important. Over who would make the rules and who would get the best seat.”

“As long as we continue to search for enemies anywhere but inside ourselves, there will always be a Middle East problem,” he reasoned. “It is a cliché, but it’s still true: hurt people, unless they are healed, hurt people.”

Mosab became disenchanted with the idea of killing innocent people, no matter the cause. At great risk of his life he became instrumental in covertly disrupting numerous Hamas terrorist attacks against Israeli Jews.

Eventually, on a street in Damascus Mosab was invited to a multi-national Bible study. Someone there gave him a Bible. He writes, “My father had always taught us to be open-minded” and he remembered that his father, a Moslem Imam, had a Bible of his own in his large library.

Mosab recounts, “When I got to Jesus’ sermon on the mount I thought… ‘Everything he says is beautiful’… Then I read this: ‘You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ I was thunderstruck by these words,” writes Mosab. “This was the message I had been searching for all my life.”

The young man was particularly moved that Jesus personified his own teachings of love by praying for his executioners even while dying on a cross.

After several more years Mosab’s spiritual quest led him to place faith in Jesus as the divine Son of God who on the cross took upon himself, and paid for, the sins of mankind.

When the Palestinian press reported on Mosab’s experience and his rejection of Hamas’ mission and strategy, his then imprisoned father came under intense pressure to publicly disown him.

Initially, in private, Mosab’s father had assured his admiring son, “You are still my son. You are part of me… You have a different opinion, but you still are my little child.” Eventually, however, Mosab’s father did publicly disown his son.

Though anguished over the separation from his father and mother, Mosab’s faith in Christ has resulted in a new perspective on the nature of love, peace and on potential co-existence in the Middle East.

He wrote, “If I, the son of a terrorist organization dedicated to the extinction of Israel, can reach a point where I not only learned to love the Jewish people but risked my life for them, there is a light of hope.”

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Matthew 5:43-45

From original article published in stltoday, 10/19/10

Editorial updates: Mosab Hassan Yousef currently resides in the U.S., having been granted political asylum. Mosab’s father, Hassan Yousef, is currently a leader of Hamas. On October 19 he was arrested as part of Israel’s crackdown after the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7.

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