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BEscape from Lebanon

Defend Lifer’s narrow escape leaves lasting impression

When fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon on July 12, a long-time volunteer for Defend Life was there, caught in the middle of it.

His harrowing experiences and hairbreadth escape make an extraordinary tale that, seen through the prism of his strong Catholic faith, took on for him profound meaning.

George Maalouf, who has audiotaped Defend Life speakers for about 10 years, left BWI Airport with his daughter Mary on July 2, bound for Lebanon to attend his niece’s wedding.

“It was the first time my daughter or any of my children had gone over to Lebanon,” said Maalouf, who is of Lebanese descent.

Mary was unprepared for what she was about to see when they landed at the Rafiq Hariri Airport in Beirut the next day.

“As she looked down from the window of the plane, the coast looked like glittering diamonds,” Maalouf recalled.

Mary, who is 25, “thought that people would be wearing turbans and all wrapped up, like you see on TV,” he said.

But Beirut is very cosmopolitan and sophisticated.

“They are already wearing the latest style before Paris,” said Maalouf.

“In the Muslim section near the airport, you see much of the damage from the previous war.  But the commercial section has all been rebuilt.  Many of the building exteriors are marble.  Mary loved it!”

George and Mary were wined and dined by relatives and friends for several days before the wedding, which took place on July 8.

After the wedding they went touring and visiting family.

“When you walk in Lebanon, you will be stepping back thousands of years in history,” said Maalouf.

“Hannibal, Alexander the Great, the Greeks, the Romans – you see many places where the great dynasties and military leaders have left their names.”

On the Mediterranean seacoast near Beirut, the two visited the ancient town of Byblos, famous for its parchment, on which the Bible was written in 395.

They went to the tomb of St. Charbel Makhlouf in the mountains of north Lebanon.

They also visited Baalbak, a town dating from the time of the Phoenicians, in the northern part of the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold and training area.

Maalouf’s sister, Affaf, then took them to Beshwat, a small village 10 kilometers from Baalbak, where, in 2004, a statue of the Blessed Mother had reportedly opened her eyes and moved, and where she had been performing miracles.

As they drove into the town, crowds of people, both Muslim and Christian, were flocking to the little church of Our Lady of Beshwat.

The latest miracle had occurred to a crippled Shiite boy of 9 or 10 who had never spoken.

“His mother brought him there because they believe in the Blessed Virgin,” said Maalouf.

“The child looked at the statue and said in his heart, ‘Lady, I believe in you.  If you want to heal me, I appreciate that.  If not, I still believe in you and love you.’”

At that moment, he talked, and walked out without his crutches.

Maalouf, who is devoted to Our Lady, lit a candle in the church and thanked her for bringing him there although, he said, he didn’t understand why she had until later.

On July 11 Affaf received a strange text message on her phone from the French embassy (her number had previously belonged an ex-employee of the Embassy), a warning to “take cover and be prepared.”

The next day they returned to Beirut.

It was July 12 – the day on which Hezbollah guerillas attacked an army patrol inside Israel, killing three soldiers and capturing two others.

Israel responded the same day with the beginning of an overwhelming retaliatory air and ground offensive.

“That night, bombing started everywhere,” said Maalouf.  “We saw the airport being blown up, and they started bombarding bridges to the south.”

Maalouf and his daughter stayed one more night in his sister’s apartment in Beirut.  That night the Israelis bombarded the gasoline storage tanks in the city.

“We could see the fires in the gas tanks,” Maalouf recalled.  “It was unbelievable.”

During their sightseeing, Maalouf and Mary had stayed in Affaf’s house in the mountains, in the town of Zahle, a Catholic stronghold surrounded by many Muslim and Shiite villages.  They decided to return there.

“My sister said, ‘I think you should try to get out of here,’” said Maalouf.  “I wanted to stay with my sister and her two daughters – but I was responsible for my daughter.”

Day after day, they called the American embassy.  There was no answer.

“On the evening of the third day, my daughter got somebody.  He told her to call in the morning and hung up on her,” said Maalouf.

In the meantime, hearing on the news that one runway at the airport was still usable, they had returned to Beirut, only to learn that the Israel Defense Forces had blown it up.  Once again, they returned to the mountains.

“That night my daughter stepped out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette,” said Maalouf.  “Suddenly, there were two large explosions that shook the whole building.

“My daughter ran inside, palefaced, crying, ‘What was that?’”

Maalouf knew they were 500-pound bombs; he had experienced them before, when he had covered previous wars in Lebanon as a cameraman for Tele-Orient, a BBC  affiliate.  

“To calm her down, I said, ‘Don’t worry – a plane just broke the sound barrier.’”

She didn’t believe him.

He learned later that the Israelis had blown up a bridge coming down from the mountains, 10 kilometers from where they were.

“We had just crossed that bridge,” said Maalouf.

The next day Maalouf drove his sister’s car along the road toward Damascus, to try to find a way out.  He was also hoping to run into a CNN crew, on the chance that he might see a cameraman friend of his.

Instead, he came upon two scenes that, he said, “I can’t get out of my mind.”

The first was in a village not far from Zahle.  There, he saw a firefighter holding the charred body of a 9-month-old baby, with no arms or legs.

“Its face was black.  Part of its head was blown off,” said Maalouf.  “The rescuer said, ‘This is barbaric!’ with tears in his eyes.”

Outside the village of Shtawara, on the crossroads to Syria, he spotted a press car and crew.  He ran to where they were filming, but his cameraman friend was not there.

Instead, a local cameraman was filming a man who was weeping and wailing.

“He pulled the sheet off the bodies of his two children, aged 7 and 9.  He said, ‘What do I have to live for?’

“‘You and your wife will rebuild again,’ the cameraman said, trying to console him

“The man pulled a sheet off another body.  ‘This is my wife,’ he said.”

Back at his sister’s house, Maalouf began calling all the airlines.

An agent at the Emirates Airlines, from the United Arab Emirates, said he would try to find him some seats.  He said they would have to fly out from Syria.

At 7:45 a.m. on July 16 the agent called back.

“If you can make it by 1:30 p.m., I can get you some seats,” he promised.

Affaf called an acquaintance to ask him if he could drive Maalouf and Mary to Syria.  He said he couldn’t, but he knew a Muslim who could.

The usual price for such a trip was $25.  Drivers were now asking $400 a person.

“Because he knew my sister, he dropped it to $400 total,” said Maalouf.

Maalouf and his daughter barely had time to say goodbye to Affaf before they piled into a blue Mercury with dark windows in the back.

Maalouf sat in front, Mary in the back.

“I’ll get you there,” the driver assured them.

Once on the road, they found themselves stuck behind a long convoy of foreign cars – “mostly Arabs,” said Maalouf – stretching for 4 or 5 miles, all trying to escape to Syria.

The road carried two-way traffic.

“The driver went in the left lane, put his blinkers on, flashed his lights and went 90 miles an hour,” said Maalouf.

Adding to the tension, the Israelis had just dropped flyers warning that they were going to bombard the Lebanese-Syrian border. IDF attacks usually followed several hours after the flyers.

Arriving at the border, they found themselves part of a throng of thousands trying to cross.

Americans were not being allowed across, but a Syrian customs agent said, “Let me see what I can do.”

The legal price for visa stamps was $27.

Maalouf put a $100 bill on top of the passports.

“You’ll have to make it sweeter for me,” said the customs agent.

“When there are a thousand people and only one window, you’ll give anything to get out,” said Maalouf.

He put two more $100 bills in between the two passports.

They arrived at the airport at 1:30, the scheduled take-off time for their flight.  But the plane was late.

“It took off 45 minutes late, and we were on it,” said Maalouf.

“We were the last Americans to cross over to Syria before they bombed the road – one-half hour after we crossed it.”

On the flight home George had time to reflect on “how God was guiding us through everything.”

He also pondered the meaning of what he had seen and experienced.

George was born in Haifa in 1946, of Lebanese parents.  His father worked for the British Railways in Palestine.

“After World War II, the Allies moved many of the East European and German-born Jews at night to Palestine in big shifts, and placed them around Palestine,” said Maalouf.

“The guerilla warfare started, and the Jews wanted to take over Palestine.”

When George was not quite 3, his grandmother was standing on the balcony of their home one afternoon before sunset.

“I heard the shots and saw her fall, her stomach burst open – shot by the Jewish ‘Freedom Fighters,’” he said.

George’s father decided it was time to get his children out of Palestine.  Because children were not allowed to cross the border, George, his brother and his 8-month-old sister were smuggled across.

“I was traumatized by the explosions and the shooting,” said Maalouf.  “It took me a long time to cope with it.”

In Lebanon, George’s father worked as director of warehousing for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

“They lived in tents, in camps surrounded by barbed wire.  My father often took me with him,” Maalouf recalled.

“Imagine yourself living in your home and someone kicks you out.  They put you in a tent, and promise they’ll give you another house.

“That man would say to his child, ‘You’re going to get revenge for me.’   He feeds his anger to his children.”

Maalouf grew up “hating the Jews with a passion, because they killed my grandmother.”

In school in Lebanon, his Lebanese classmates derided him as a Palestinian, “so I hated the Palestinians – I had hatred for both the Jews and the Muslims!”

Maalouf’s father was Greek Orthodox, his mother was Byzantine.  He chose to become a Roman Catholic at the age of 7.

But because of his festering hatred of Jews and Palestinians, he said, “I walked away from Christianity, because Jesus was a Jew and a Palestinian.”

Maalouf lived through many wars in Lebanon, beginning with the 1958 war, when the Egyptians and Syrians attacked Lebanon.

In 1961 his uncle was killed in the fighting.  As a cameraman, he covered the Six Day War in 1967 and the many scrimmages between the Palestinians and Lebanese in 1968-69.

In 1971 Maalouf came with his wife Susan to the United States to work for Universal Studios in California.

Many years of interior struggle and prayer and some moving mystical experiences eventually brought him back to his Catholic faith.

“After the Lord showed me the imagery, He healed my heart, but it took a while,” he said.

“I love even the Jew or anybody else, because the Lord allowed me to see Christ in every person.  If we follow what Our Lord said, how can I look at another person and say he is not a child of God?”

Maalouf now goes to daily Mass and weekly confession.

“Without the Eucharist, I can’t survive,” he said.

His trip to Lebanon helped him to see that Our Lady “is there for all; she is the mother of all.”

It also convinced him that killing and hatred are not the answer.

He fears that the present warfare in Lebanon is an incubator for future terrorists.

Asked what he thinks the United States should do, he replied, “Talk to the Muslims; they’re human.  Talk to the Jews; they’re human.

“I have the best idea,” he added:  “Invite one Jewish village, and one Palestinian or Shiite village to eat together.  Each village brings their own food – it’s pot luck.

“You alternate Jew and Muslim at the tables, side-by-side.  They are allowed to talk of nothing but the food they bring.”

Then they will discover that they all eat the same food, he said, and come to realize their common humanity.

Maalouf reflected, “I could imagine Father Abraham looking down from Heaven, shaking his head and saying to the descendents of his two children fighting with each other, ‘What happened to “Thou shall not kill?”’

“Have we, the Christians, learned  the lesson of Love?

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.”