Author of the week: Mosab Hassan Yousef

In Son of Hamas, the 32-year-old son of one of the founders of the Palestinian Hamas party says that he once worked for Israeli intelligence.

Mosab Hassan Yousef has just published a book that may cost him his life, said Adam Goldman in the Associated Press. In his new memoir, the 32-year-old son of one of the founders of the Palestinian Hamas party claims that he worked for Israeli intelligence for roughly a decade, assisting in the arrests of Hamas leaders and in thwarting dozens of the group’s violent plots. Now, instead of lying low as readers absorb the details of his account, this Christian convert is marking the release of Son of Hamas by attacking both the God of the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed. “Muslims are good people. But their God is absolutely bad,” he said last week. “The more you follow the steps of the prophet of Islam and the God of Islam, the more you get close to being a terrorist.”

Yousef, who currently lives in Los Angeles, says he first became disillusioned with Hamas at 16, when he was sent to an Israeli prison with other militants and witnessed his fellow prisoners brutalizing suspected collaborators. “They killed people for no reason,” he told the Israeli paper Ha’aretz. Early last week, Yousef’s father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, issued a statement from his own prison cell, disowning his son and arguing that Mosab would never have been privy to Hamas’ operational secrets. The younger Yousef didn’t take the denunciation personally. “I know his heart. My dad is a loving person. He would never disown me,” he said. “At some point we will be together again.”

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