Brigitte Gabriel Lebanese-American conservative activist, writer and lecturer Date of Birth: 21.10.1964 Country: USA

1. Early Life and Upheaval in Lebanon
2. Education and Controversy
3. Career in Media and White House Access
4. ACT for America

Early Life and Upheaval in Lebanon

Gabrielle Harb:A Christian Maronite, Gabrielle Harb was born in Lebanon's Marjeyoun district on October 21, 1964. During the Lebanese Civil War, she alleges that Muslim militants attacked a Lebanese military base near her family's home, destroying their home. Harb, then ten years old, suffered shrapnel wounds as a result.

For the next seven years, Harb and her parents lived underground in an 8x10-foot (2.4x3.0m) bomb shelter with only a small kerosene heater, no sanitation, no electricity or running water, and very little food. Harb also claims to have had to crawl in a roadside ditch to avoid Muslim snipers while getting water from a nearby spring.

In the spring of 1978, a bomb explosion trapped Harb and her parents in their shelter for two days. They were eventually rescued by three Christian militiamen, one of whom befriended Harb before being killed by a landmine. Harb wrote that in 1978, a stranger warned her family of a planned attack by Muslim insurgents on the Christian population of her area. However, the attack was thwarted by an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Her mother was later badly injured in an attack and was subsequently flown to Israel for medical treatment. During this period, Harb's views on Israelis changed, as she began to question the anti-Israeli propaganda in Lebanon she had been exposed to as a child.

Education and Controversy

Harb graduated from high school in 1984 and then completed a one-year program in business administration at the YWCA. Many details of Harb's upbringing and autobiography have been contested, with American author Dave Gaudebau calling her account of growing up in Lebanon "dramatically fabricated."

Career in Media and White House Access

Using the pseudonym Nour Semaan, Harb anchored the evening Arabic-language news program World News on Middle East Television, which was "then controlled by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network as a way to spread his conservative evangelical beliefs in the Middle East." The broadcasts covered Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Harb reported on the Israeli withdrawal from central Lebanon and the "security zone" in southern Lebanon, as well as the First Palestinian Intifada. She then moved to Israel and later emigrated to the United States in 1989.

In February 2017, Harb claimed to have conducted a "national security briefing" at the White House. She had met with Trump administration aides in the White House in March 2017. She has occasionally written for Breitbart News.

ACT for America

Anti-Muslim Group with Wide Reach:Harb's organization, ACT for America, has been widely criticized as anti-Muslim. According to The New York Times, ACT for America draws "on three of the most religious and partisan currents in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line supporters of Israel (both Jewish and Christian), and Tea Party Republicans." The organization has "touted as one of its first achievements" a 2008 campaign to close an Islamic school in Minnesota, according to The Washington Post.

Condemnation and Controversy:ACT for America has been described as the "nation's largest grassroots anti-Muslim group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center and "an important source of growing anti-Muslim bigotry in our country" by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. According to The Guardian, the organization is "widely recognized as anti-Muslim." Harb and ACT for America have been described as part of the counter-jihad movement.

Ideological Beliefs and Critiques:According to Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, "the group has denounced cities with large Muslim populations for serving halal food in public schools. In 2013 its Houston chapter called on members to 'protest' food companies that certify their meat as compliant with Islamic dietary law. And in state after state, it has lobbied state legislatures and school boards to scrub textbooks of any references that draw 'an inaccurate equivalence between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.'"

Lori Goodstein of The New York Times says that Harb "presents a portrait of Islam so overwhelmingly focused on its strains of destruction and domination that it is unrecognizable to people who study or practice the religion." Goodstein says that Harb "insists that she is only singling out 'radical Islam' or 'extremist' Muslims, not the vast majority of Muslims or their faith. And yet, in her speeches and in her two books, she leaves the opposite impression."

BuzzFeed News has described her as "the most influential leader of America's increasingly powerful anti-Islam lobby." The Washington Post describes her two books as "alarmist screeds about Islam."

Accusations of Extremism:Stephen Lee, a St. Martin's Press publicist who worked on Harb's second book, called her views "extreme," while Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine, who interviewed Harb in August 2008, called her "a radical Islamophobe." According to Clark Hoyt of The New York Times, more than 250 people wrote in to protest the label in the days that followed. Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute, has stated that her "agenda is pure, unmitigated hate" and that she has "a pathological hatred of Muslims and Arabs." Harb disputes this accusation, claiming that "I have no quarrel with Muslims who want to practice the spiritual tenets of their religion peacefully."