by David M. Weinberg
Every Christmas eve,
you can count on several foreign correspondents in Israel to produce
their annual bash-Israel-for-Christmas articles. These propaganda pieces
usually focus on the plight of Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem,
laying the blame on Israel for the dramatic decline (from perhaps 70
percent to under 25%) in the number of Christians in that city.
Earlier this year, in
April, CBS’s Bob Simon produced a masterpiece of mistruth on “60
Minutes” in which he indicted Israel's “occupation” and its security
fence for the decline of the Christian population in the entire West
Bank. Yesterday, the slam-Israel doozy of the year was published by
Harriet Sherwood in The Observer.
Sherwood wickedly
evokes biblical and Christian imagery to savage Israeli settlement in
and around Jerusalem, which is “devastating” Christians in Bethlehem.
She paints a picture of a pastoral “Christian biblical landscape” with
“gnarled olive trees,” “bleating sheep and goats,” and “vine covered
terraces,” “near the site where angels announced the birth of Jesus to
shepherds in a field” — all tended to with love by Bethlehem’s remaining
Christian heroes. Then she contrasts this with the evil Israeli
security fence — “8-meter high concrete slabs casting a deep shadow,
both literally and metaphorically, snaking around most of Bethlehem,”
along with the monster “cranes, bulldozers, and concrete apartment
blocks” — all of which are “strangulating” the city.
Sherwood caps off her
predictable, tiresome slam by telling us lovingly about a Beit Jala
parish priest who “leads open-air prayers under olive trees at sunset
every Friday” to protest the route of the security fence: “a vast
concrete and steel barrier with a long steel-caged corridor with
multiple turnstiles” that chokes off the main exit for Palestinians who
want to go to Jerusalem.
The screeds published
by Simon and Sherwood seek to demonize Israel and its security fence as a
way of covering up for the real reasons behind Christian decline in
Bethlehem: the Palestinian Authority and radical Islam. Neither of them
has the courage to report the truth: that radical Islam, and not
checkpoints or a security fence, is the main threat to defenseless
Christians not only in Palestinian territories, but across the entire
Middle East.
It started with Yasser
Arafat. Ensconced in his Israeli-created Palestinian Authority, Arafat
immediately set out to suppress the Palestinian middle class across the
West Bank, which he understood could be the only real opposition to his
planned dictatorial authority. He nationalized most business sectors and
squeezed most Palestinian small businessmen out of business. Especially
hard hit were the middle class businessmen of Bethlehem, most of whom
were Christian.
Arafat then sidelined
the long-time Christian mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij, and Arafat’s
henchmen led a campaign of terror and intimidation against Christian
institutions and families in the city. Land theft, beatings and
intimidation of Christians in Bethlehem by PA security services and
other Muslim gangs became routine. Forced marriages between Christian
women and Muslim men were reported. Arafat’s terrorists even took over
and defiled the Church of the Nativity for 39 days in 2002, holding 200
priests hostage as the terrorists sought to escape Israeli justice.
The result has been an
inexorable and ongoing Christian exodus from Bethlehem, a city captured
by the PA and taken over by a very intolerant strain of Islam.
But you wouldn’t know
this from media reports. Instead, you would likely have received the
false impression that Christians are under assault by the Jews; and
worse still, that Jews are crucifying Christians smack in the heart of
Bethlehem.
Sherwood and her ilk
would be truer to Christian faith were they to bear witness to the
accelerated crushing of Christians in Palestinian and Arab lands by the
forces of Islam. Christians indeed are under fierce attack — from Arabs
and Muslims across the Middle East, often with government encouragement
and support. Over the past half-year alone, repeated attacks on churches
have occurred in recent months in Azerbaijan, Egypt, Gaza, Indonesia,
Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Uganda.
Christians have been threatened with death and imprisonment for
“blasphemy” and apostasy in Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran and
Pakistan.
The beleaguered
Christian communities in Lebanon and Gaza share Bethlehem’s plight. They
live painfully under the boot of Hezbollah and Hamas. Christians in
Syria have fled by the tens of thousands. Of the more than 80,000
Christians who lived in Homs prior to the uprising, approximately 400
remain today. Hundreds of cases have been documented in Egypt over the
past year of the abduction, torture, rape, enslavement or forced
conversion to Islam of Christians. Tens of thousands of Coptic
Christians have left Egypt. Flyers have been circulated calling for the
total genocide of Egypt’s Christian Copts, and these flyers openly
include names and mosque contact points for those Muslims who wish to
collect their rewards for killing Christians.
My guess is that the silence of
the global media regarding the systematic, rampant, chronic and deadly
persecution of Christians in the Arab and Islamic world only can be
explained by the fact that these Christians aren’t being assaulted by
Jews. After all, as Mr. Simon and Ms. Sherwood keep reminding us, the
real threat to Christians comes from Jewish construction in Jerusalem. …
David M. Weinberg
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3107
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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