BBC: For Mosab Hassan Yousef, everything begins and ends with God.
The startling journey of the eldest son of a Hamas leader, a Christian convert, and former Israeli spy, has shocked, angered, and intrigued.
We meet in New York on the day his new book, Son of Hamas, is published in the country he fled to a few years ago.
Before we start our interview, a burly man in his entourage asks his own question.
I take him for a bodyguard, possibly an Israeli. "Could we say our prayers first?" he asks our BBC team.
And then, they bow their heads in Christian prayer asking for God's blessing.
Green Prince
Mosab Hassan Yousef repeatedly makes it clear in our wide-ranging interview that he now sees himself walking in the path of Jesus Christ, whom devout Christians regard as the son of God.
He says he is also suffering for his beliefs, "carrying the cross," as Jesus did, as told in the Bible.
The man whose Israeli code name became the Green Prince admits how he has gone from being "a prince in my country to the lowest possible level, of being a traitor".
But he is still a man on a mission: "I want my people to understand I am not doing what they want, but what they need."
His book tells the story of a young man raised in a strict Muslim family in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in the folds of the Hamas movement.
But he lands in an Israeli prison before he is 20, experiences Israeli torture, but also witnesses torture by Hamas inmates against other Palestinians.
A young Palestinian's rage against Israeli occupation is soon matched by growing hatred of what he sees as the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, the violent ideology of Hamas and finally the precepts of his own Islamic faith.
His mood is still surprisingly upbeat.
"I am more optimistic than at any time in the past, and hopeful about the future. I am sure I will help my people as I helped them in the past, even though they didn't appreciate it."
But he expressed hope that one day they would, even if it was not in his own lifetime. Read on (with video and audio) >>> Lyse Doucet, BBC News, New York | Wednesday, March 03, 2010
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