Brigitte Gabriel

Early life Gabriel was born on 21 October 1964 to a family of Maronite Christians in the Marjeyoun District of Lebanon. During the Lebanese Civil War, militants launched an assault on a Lebanese military base nearby which destroyed her home. Gabriel, who was ten years old at the time, suffered shrapnel injuries in the attack. For the next seven years, she and her parents were forced to live underground in an bomb shelter with only a small kerosene heater, no sanitary systems, no electricity or running water, and little food.

In the spring of 1978, a bomb explosion caused Gabriel and her parents to become trapped in their shelter for two days. They were eventually rescued by three Christian militiamen, one of whom had befriended Gabriel before being killed by a landmine.

Gabriel wrote that in 1978, a stranger warned her family of an impending attack on the Christian populace in her area. However, the attack was thwarted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Later, her mother was seriously injured in an attack and subsequently taken for treatment at a hospital in Israel. During this period, Gabriel's views on the Israelis changed as she began to question anti-Israel propaganda she said she had witnessed as a child.

The facts surrounding Gabriel's upbringing and claims made in her autobiography have been widely disputed, with American author Dave Gaubatz calling her account of growing up in Lebanon as "dramatically fabricated.”

After graduating from high school, Gabriel completed a one-year course in business administration at a YWCA in 1984.

Career Using the pseudonym Nour Semaan, with the former reaching number 12 on The New York Times Best Seller list for political books.

In February 2017, Gabriel said that she provided a "national security briefing" at the White House. She has written for Breitbart News.

ACT for America

Gabriel founded the advocacy group "ACT for America" in 2007. It has been described as anti-Muslim. According to The New York Times, ACT for America draws "on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans".

The Southern Poverty Law Center described ACT! for America as "the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the country," and the Council on American–Islamic Relations has described it as "one of the main sources of growing anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation". According to The Guardian, the organization has been "widely identified as anti-Muslim".

According to Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, "the organization has condemned cities with large Muslim populations for serving halal food in public schools. In 2013, its Houston chapter urged members to 'protest' food companies that certify their meat as compliant with Islamic dietary law. ACT! for America tries to dissuade Jews and Christians from conducting interfaith dialogue with Muslims. And in state after state, it has lobbied state legislatures and school boards to purge textbooks of references that create 'an inaccurate comparison between Islam, Christianity and Judaism.'" The Washington Post describes her two books as "alarmist tracts about Islam."

Stephen Lee, a publicist at St. Martin's Press for Gabriel's second book, has called her views "extreme," and Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine, who interviewed Gabriel in August 2008, described her as a "radical Islamophobe". According to Clark Hoyt from The New York Times, over 250 people wrote in to protest that label in the days that followed. Gabriel disputes the charge, saying that "I have no quarrel with Muslims who wish to practice the spiritual tenets of their religion in peace". In June 2014, Gabriel said that "The radicals are estimated to be between 15 to 25 percent" worldwide. In an interview with The Australian Jewish News, she stated that "A practising Muslim who upholds the tenets of the Koran—it's not that simple—a practising Muslim who goes to mosque every Friday, prays five times a day, and who believes that the Koran is the word of God, and who believes that Mohammed is the perfect man and [four inaudible words] is a radical Muslim."

When Gabriel was invited to speak as part of a lecture series organized by Duke University's Jewish community in October 2004, many in attendance were angered by her referring to Arabs as "barbarians." The Freeman Centre for Jewish Life at Duke University later apologized for her comments.

In March 2011 while being interviewed by Eliot Spitzer on CNN, Gabriel defended the speech, saying "I was talking about how Palestinian mothers are encouraging their children to go out and blow themselves up to smithereens just to kill Christians and Jews. And it was in that context that I – that I contrasted the difference between Israel and the Arabic world, was the difference between democracy and barbarism."

Arab–Israeli conflict

Regarding the two-state solution, Gabriel stated: "Forcing Israel to accept a two-state solution is not going to work unless the Palestinians first are forced to clean up their act and eliminate hatred from their schoolbooks, teach tolerance to their people, and preach acceptance of Israel and the Jews as a neighbor."

Iran–Israel proxy conflict

In a speech at a conference sponsored by the UN Permanent Mission of Palau and the Aja Eze Foundation, Gabriel said that she viewed Israel as the vanguard in the world's fight against Islamic terrorism, equating Israel's fight against Hamas and Hezbollah with the global fight against the Islamic State.

Raising the voting age After record youth turnout in the 2022 US midterm election helped avert an expected 'red wave' of Republican wins in state races, Gabriel tweeted, "Raise the voting age to 21." on the social media platform Twitter.