As well they should. After all, they may be making jizya payments before too long. From AFP, with thanks to all who sent this in:
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AFP) - The shrinking Christian population of Bethlehem is struggling to conceal its fears for the future after the victory for Islamists of Hamas in the Palestinian general election....Shortly after their election, some newly-elected Hamas deputies evoked the idea of introducing some aspect of Sharia law, including a general edict for women to wear a veil and for a separation of boys and girls at school.
Although the movement's leadership rapidly distanced themselves from the idea, some Christians -- who now account for only around three percent of the Palestinian population -- still fear that is the ultimate goal of the Islamists.
One woman, who gave her name as Rula, was less worried about being forced to wear a veil but was nevertheless depressed about the prospects for the future.
"They will oblige maybe the Muslim women, but not us," she said....
Maybe. But Sharia proponents haven't hesitated to oblige non-Muslim women to wear the headscarf elsewhere.
Since their election victory, Hamas' leaders have been bending over backwards to asssure Christians that they have no reason to be fearful.But the likes of Walid Andonia, wearing a cross as as he sunned himself near the church with a bunch of friends, was far from convinced.
"Sure, now Hamas says nice things, but five years from now, I don't know. They're not saying everything they want to do," said the stone mason.
"A lot of Bethlehem Christians are leaving and going abroad. They are selling their houses and their land to Muslim and leaving.
"I would go in a minute if I could. We're like in a cage, here. We hate our life, even if we love our country.
"Those who say they are not afraid of Hamas are lying to you. Give visas to America or Europe, and you'll see how fast Bethlehem Christians are going to leave."
"I tell you, my Muslim friends are as worried as I am. They drink more alcohol than us. They don't want their women to wear the veil... But they will have to."
In the Gaza Strip, Hamas's traditional stronghold, shops have long stopped selling alcohol while the United Nations social club, the last outlet to serve wine and spirits, was trashed on New Year's Eve.
That kind of influence has yet to be felt in Bethlehem where a range of whiskies were on sale at the Jacaman supermarket.
"For the time being, they didn't say a word about alcohol. Believe me, they have bigger things to worry about. They are in big politics, now, which should keep them busy for a while," said the store owner George Jacaman.
For a while.
OT: CSPAN
Robert, late last night there was a segment a caption on Cpan indicating that you would appear at 1:15 (4:15 est). Since I can't stay up that late, and have forgotten how to use the vcr timer in thsi dvd age, I missed it. Was this airing a new one?
maybe we should start filming a reality TV show so the world can see what is happening there.....
maybe the moslem council of britain and CHAIR and the equivalanet in other european countries will show us how good islam is by ensuring the minorities here are not forced to leave....
maybe the same woman at the UN who took up the case of the cartoons, most not of peado mo, as a serious international human rights violation will ensure the UN protect these minorities...
maybe the BBC will keep us updated of their plight..
maybe pigs will fly?
One thing we can be sure of though, the church, the synagogues, and human rights activists in the west will not do anything to help. They wont even balance the lies in the news with truth.
the treatment of bethlehem should be interesting, since it is as important to christians as mecca is to muslims.
if it gets islamified, it'll be the wake up call to the christian evangelical bloc in the U.S , in my view.
having said that, i dont think hamas would so stupid as to let that happen. but then again, i might be wrong.
If an election were held today among just Palestinian Christians, 90 percent of them would vote to separate the historically Christian towns from the PA and become self-governing cantons in federation with Israel.
They consider all these new Muslims to be outside invaders. This morning I talked to a woman born in Ramallah in 1946, and who left in 1966 to get married to another Ramallahi in the US. She told me that back then Ramallah was almost all Christian. "The only Muslims there were poor people who came to work for us Christians," she said, "now they act like they own Ramallah."
This woman's family were all militants in the PFLP and now they're all pro-Israel. "We don't have a choice," she told me, "the situation has completely changed."
Perhaps, Israel would be wise to simply expel all Muslims who cannot prove their families were settled in Ramallah, Bethlehem, etc. before 1948. That would be the majority of them. If this were done, many (maybe most) of the Christians would return and Israel would have an eternal ally as a neighbor, instead of a bunch of suicide-murderers. This would be justice for the exiled Christians and would be wise for Israel's future security.
"This woman's family were all militants in the PFLP and now they're all pro-Israel."
now thats interesting.
and yet that's never portrayed in the Pallywood media.
Archduke,
The original PFLP was a ideologically weird and contradictory organization. It was dominated by Christians who were mostly small shopkeepers, professionals, and students. It espoused Leninist revolution but rejected Marxist economics, even criticizing Israel for its "Zionist Socialism". Basically, it played on the resentments of the educated Christian middle class who saw Israel as a threat to their self-determination but considered most of the Muslims as ignorant cannon-fodder who could never be a threat to the sophisticated western oriented Christian Palestinians who drove the economy.
Now they've been slapped into the realization that the Islamic decline was not permanent and realize they have more in common (culturally, economically, religiously, and politically) with Jews than they will ever have with Muslims. This is an opening that both Christian Palestinians and Israelis would be foolish to squander.
An article worth reading
Tolerating the intolerable
AS USUAL, the great John Locke got it right. The world ought to be more tolerant but some things remain intolerable. Locke, the 17th-century philosopher of liberalism, comes down to us through his great works on human understanding, politics and education, through the American Declaration of Independence, and through the American and French revolutions
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1052-2026548,00.html
so in other words Provoslavni, the PFLP was a far left Marxist group.
well, thats ok - you can deal with communists - besides Pol Pot they are a rational bunch of folks. they understand M.A.D. - thats all fine with them.
now, the iranian president with his armageddon stuff- different thing altogether. thats religion into the mix.
Israel should never have agreed to give up Bethlehem. It should have been clear to them that the Muslims would, whatever cynical political use they made of local Arab or Arabic-speaking Christians, those useful "islamochristians" as they have been dubbed, in the end they would apply pressure inexorably on Christians everywhere. And why not? That is what being true to Islam means. Nowhere have Christians not suffered from pressure at the hands of their Muslim neighbors or masters, not even in Lebanon, where only the influence of powerful outside forces (France) and the unusual size and stability and self-assurance of the leading Christian group, the Maronites (who were well aware that while they used Arabic, that did not make them "Arabs" as everyone kept trying to make them believe they were, but rather "Lebanese" as so many of them understand that term -- i.e. descendants of the original, the Maronite Christian inhabitants of Lebanon who predated the arrival of Islam and Arabs.
Christians world-wide should demand that there be a place for both Middle Eastern Christians, and Christians from elsewhere, in Bethlehem and elsewhere in Judea and Samaria, as those places were called by Jesus and by Western Christendom for two thousand years, until the Jordanian Arabs decided to rename the area under their control as "the West Bank." And those Christians -- for example, the Christians now leaving Iraq -- should be established in places from which, necessarily, Muslim Arabs will be expelled. Only thus can Christianity retain its hold in the Holy Land, in conjunction with the benign and protective Israel. The bet that was made, that appeasement of the Arabs and Muslims would work, failed; the years of dutiful islamochristians working to support the Muslim agenda has blown up in the faces of the Arab Christians, and not only the Arab Christians.
Start with Bethlehem. Arab-speaking Christians everywhere should demand the re-Christianization and de-Islamization of Bethlehem. They should be supported in this by other Christians. And let us see how the remaining "islamochristians" still busily spouting their anti-israel propaganda -- such as Naim Ateek, Michel Sabbag, and Hanan Ashrawi -- react to this request. Will they come down on the side of Christianity, or will they in tbe end show, even here, that they are really indifferent to Christian interests and wish only to promote the Muslim agenda?
A question that deserves to be put to them.
DP111 – the Times Online article you link to is completely and utterly confusing to me. There are 3 sections which seem to make perfect sense:
“Locke did not believe that governments could always tolerate “opinions contrary to human society, such as manifestly undermine the foundations of society”. It is not clear what Locke had specifically in mind, but terrorism would surely be covered. In the 20th century both Nazism and Leninism were “opinions contrary to human society” in this sense — they were simply intolerable.”
Wouldn’t Sharia law as well as Islamic blasphemy and apostasy laws be considered “intolerable”, according to this formulation?
“Seventeenth-century Islam was included in the criticism. “It is ridiculous for anyone to profess himself to be a Mohametan (sic) only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, while at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor.”
No argument there…
“Locke would not have wished to be read as though he were infallible, since he believed in reason, not authority. But his doctrine of general toleration is the more persuasive because he recognises that some things are not tolerable. These are views that are too destructive for society; one only has to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf to recognise the possibility of that. “
And the Koran?…
“toleration must be the norm, but even toleration has its limits. Locke would not have believed in insulting publications….(and from the subtitle: “Even Locke, our greatest prophet of liberty, would never have defended those offensive cartoons”)
How does that follow from everything preceding it in the article? It completely overlooks that Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons in the first place to highlight that free speech was already implicitly under assault due to the de facto imposition of Muslim blasphemy laws in Denmark, which made cartoonists afraid for their lives. Is this author implying that Locke would have endorsed the imposition of Islamic blasphemy laws in our western democracies? Yes indeed toleration has its limits. Why should westerners TOLERATE the de facto imposition of Islamic law upon its non-Muslim citizens?
Presumably this is the punchline which justifies the conclusion:
“Modern liberals may be shocked at John Locke’s final exception to the rule of toleration. “Lastly,” he writes, “those are not to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”
What on earth does that have to do with the publication of the cartoons? How does the publication of the cartoons of Mohammed “deny the being of a God”?
I definitely must be missing something here because there seems to be a huge disconnect between the body of the article and its conclusion. Someone is definitely gonna have to explain this one to me…
Hugh,
I believe Ashrawi is the only "Christian" that was re-elected and that she won only with a bare plurality. Then again, this former girlfriend of Peter Jennings was a creation of the Western news media anyway. Maybe now, everyone will see how irrelevant she really is.
I don't know if it's is true or not, but I heard from a Christian Palestinian from Tel Aviv, that the mayor of Tulkarem has quietly approached Israeli authorities about annexing his city into Israel. Right now, Tulkarem is probably the only West Bank town that still has a Christian majority. This may just be part of the Arabic rumour-mill but it would make sense.
Ashrawi was one of so many of Peter Jennings's girlfriends; she was hardly trhe most attractive on his little list though he was not discrinating; he even enjoyed cuckolding an older colleague dying of cancer. As for that Tulkarm story, it sounds apocryphal because no Christian mayor would dare to do such a thing; it would be a death sentence. The PFLP was the movement, indeed, for Christians to display their devotion to the "Palestinian" cause; Habash, a Christian, was its head; it was the act of dhimmis, of course, behaving in the same desperate-for-Muslim-acceptance-and-approval manner that was displayed by Michel Aflaq, that Damascene Christian, when he co-founded the political movement of Ba'athism, a fascistic ideology of "Arabism" that would help make a political space for Christians, and in both Syria and Iraq where the ruling Muslims (in Iraq) or quasi-Muslims (the Alawites in Syria) found it useful for their own purposes as minorities (the Sunnis being far outnumbered by the Shi'a in Iraq and the Alawites being only 12% of the Syrian population).
The Christians of the Middle East, for their pains, have gotten, and will get, nothing from the Muslims. Only where they have taken a stand, and been sufficiently powerful themselves, as in Lebaon, or protected from abroad (right now the Copts in Egypt have attracted, at long last, the interest of the outside world), or both, do they stand a chance of being left unpersecuted. Pretending there is nothing menacing about Islam, or as in the case of so many "Palestinian" Christians who thought they could survive by internalizing the Muslim view and promoting the campaign against Israel, has proven to be a disaster. Some of these Arab Christians, when they finally leave the Muslim lands, whether for Belize or West Africa, for Montreal or Hoboken (not that many Arab "Palestinians" -- if any -- should be allowed into our societies at this point, given the views that many of them appear incapable of shaking off) actually have begun to reconsider their past coping strategy, their irrational but deep anti-Israel beliefs, and to figure out that the real menace to them always came from Islam. Or at least that is what some of them now say. Be wary, of course, for the amount of lying that goes on to cover tracks, in order to satisfy new neighbors in America or elsewhere, is considerable, and obviously now that it does not pay to express sympathy for the PLO or Hamas or the Arab Jihad against Israel (particularly in Alabama, near those Peenemunde boys you kept defending against my relentless assault) some of those expressing a change of heart and view may mean it, and others may not meant it at all. After all, their entire lives in the Middle East, as Christians, have required them to lie and lie in order to get along with dangerous Muslim neighbors; old habits of such accommodation die hard, if they die at all. Only when the slave is squeezed out of them, and they can begin to learn the pleasures of being straightforward, will you be able to tell who really thinks what.
But one thing is clear. Hanan Ashrawi, Naim Ateek, Michel Sabbag, are not defenders but traitors to Christianity. They deserve a special contempt from all Arabic-speaking Christians. If a modern model is sought, Charles Malik, the Lebanese statesman, would do. And so would the Bishop of Beirut, Moubarac, who in 1947, welcoming the nascent state of Israel, saw clearly that the long-term fates of the Maronites and other Christians in the Middle East were indissolubly wedded to the fate of the Jews and the Jewish state. His views continue to make sense. Those of the unpleasant-in-every-respect Ashrawi do not.
I hope that some of those Arabic-speaking (not always Arab) Christians will take up the cause of Bethlehem's re-christianization and simultaneous de-islamization, and possible retaking by Israel. And the same might be appropriate for the rest of the West Bank -- empty it of Muslims, fill their places with Christians from the Middle East, and outside the Middle East, the latter possibly coming for a limited stay, a kind of service to the church, staking a claim to the Holy Land, necessarily under Israeli protection.
Hello. Hamas has always been feared, it's not anything new. They didn't need "elected" to do what they do best where they have always been involved anyways!
I'm not going to say anything linking my family to anything, whether you living here understand what's going on or not my family could be next to be demolished for a family your churches here want to support when moving back from Europe.
My family keeps a low profile by not mentioning our Christian faith it's a rule of thumb to live by if you want to remain 'settled'.
We have more to fear at the hands of our leaders and neighbors etc and just because you live in Israel, it means nothing if you're a Christian.
My grandmother used to boast about certain tv teachers but it has been good for her to see the truth like this she knows now what true Christian living is.
Unless you are doing it just for show and prestige and keeping your friends who are secular or ortho-sephardic etc.
We are not welcomed.
I have lost two close friends-families who were moved out of settled areas into broader PA areas after their homes were confiscated "as not existing" by the ruling bodies legislation.
It doesn't matter if you are a Jew or Arab if you are a Christian you have very little rights in the end if they want you out of the way.
I have not heard from them since. They were kicked out of their homes and new homes have been erected for several wealthy families from Europe who are not Christian but ortho-sephardic etc.
I got to see a few famous tv teachers who came to visit the new owners and had their pictures taken with them. That's a common sight though everywhere from time to time.
I'm surprised no one is interested in this topic on here? Hamas? What about your tv teachers who tithe from their donations to support the wealthy european orthos/sephards coming to pick whatever they want and they get it.
Why isn't this an issue? Christians here supporting Christians back home being uprooted and totally destroyed and being kicked from this place to that place.
The only ones to understand are other Christians no matter what enthnic-Arab homes they are from!
I'm here studying in the states again after my family moved back to Israel in the early 90's.
Christians who are living in Israel have had to worry since the crackdowns really started to effect us in the early part of 2000.
The church we went to was destroyed just wrecked in one day. There was nothing anyone did because it was a church a place for Christians to meet and there are no laws protecting that!
Unless it's historical then that's worth a lot of money and tourism.
I never noticed it until then I mean I never paid attention before that. It meant nothing to me.
Things started to really get tough when more and more of the rich wealthy european orthos started moving in all over and the tv teachers from here in the states started coming and hosting more and more moves.
Since maybe 1994 or so it really started like crazy it seemed to me. I thought we were like minded as Christians but we are not. You have no idea what you are doing to our families who live there or the Christians who have lived there since my grandparents grandparents were children.
Someone should start up something concerning that.
Hamas? Come on we have always had to deal with them.
The real problem is the tv teachers who are hosting more and more returns of the ortho who confiscate our homes because we are of another faith.
To the leaders and ruling bodies our Messiah to them is a fraud and we are hated!
I can't even go to church here in the states it seems it is so out of touch and when I try to explain they refuse to listen.
Christians are doomed if we stay there!
""Recently a couple of articles I have written in defense of Israel, and calling upon Christians to support it, have elicited what appeared to be substantive refutations of the idea that Israel is, as I termed it, the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East, and that it grants freedom of religion to its citizens.""
The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."
The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives?
A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.
Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.
This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.
On the world stage, should we really apologize for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Breughel, Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin? Penicillin and computers? The Olympic Games and Football? Human rights and parliamentary democracy? The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. No, the west needs no lectures on the superior virtue of societies who keep their women in subjection, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes.
How can we expect immigrants to integrate into western society when they are at the same time being taught that the west is decadent, a den of iniquity, the source of all evil, racist, imperialist and to be despised? Why should they, in the words of the African-American writer James Baldwin, want to integrate into a sinking ship? Why do they all want to immigrate to the west and not Saudi Arabia? They should be taught about the centuries of struggle that resulted in the freedoms that they and everyone else for that matter, cherish, enjoy, and avail themselves of; of the individuals and groups who fought for these freedoms and who are despised and forgotten today; the freedoms that the much of the rest of world envies, admires and tries to emulate." When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square (in 1989) , they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty."
Freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it or it will die from totalitarian attacks. It is also much needed in the Islamic world. By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values.
Born in 1946 in India and raised in Pakistan, Ibn Warraq was educated in Koran schools in Pakistan and later in England. He currently lives in the United States and writes under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, a pen name traditionally used by dissidents in Islam. He is the author of the best- seller "Why I am Not a Muslim" and the editor of "The Origins of the Koran" and "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad."
I read somewhare recently (on this site?) that 30 per-cent of Palestinians were Christian. In this article it says 3 per-cent. Can someone confirm this please.
"I read somewhare recently (on this site?) that 30 per-cent of Palestinians were Christian. In this article it says 3 per-cent."
-- from a posting above
The confusion comes from this: the percentage of local Arabs, in the territories won by Israel when it refused to lose the Six-Day War, in Gaza, Judea and Samaria (orm if one prefers to use both the Biblical term "Gaza" alongside not the other Biblical toponyms, but rather the post-1948 placename deliberately invented by the Jordanians, "West Bank") that is those local Arabs who after 1967 appropriated the word "Palesistinian" for their own uses, the percentage was nearly 25%. But it has now plummetted not to, but to below 3%, in the lands under "Palestinian Authority" control, because it is there that the inexorable Muslim pressure is felt. The number of Arab Christians has gone way down, which explains that slightly too large "30%" figure becoming that slightly too large "3%." What is reasonable to say is that the Arab Christians under "Palestinian" control now are one-tenth the proportion of the population that they were under Israeli control. That tells you all you need to know.
Where did those Christians go? Some have moved to Jerusalem, and tried desperately to come under Israeli authority, or even to obtain Israeli citizenship. Others have moved further away -- to Belize and Panama and Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, to a few places in West Africa, to Australia, to Canada, to countires in Western Europe, even to the United States. It must be painful for them to have to come to grips with the fact that in many of the countries they go to, because of their ethnic identification, language, and even cuisine, they are keenly aware of the growth, and real feelings, of the local Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, whose own mental makeup is precisely that of those who forced these Arab Christians from the Middle East in the first place.
Thanks, Hugh, for the above response. it shines a bit of light on the problem.
Hugh,
It's true about Jennings life as a "player" in Beirut but Ashrawi was the one girlfriend who was used for her connections to become a media star.
Now to quibble with you...
1. The Peenemunde boys are all dead and they never got into any kind of politics while in Alabama. They were under the same kind of restrictions as active duty military officers at Redstone.
2. I hope this was a typo (since typos are something I'm guilty of in every post)since you had it correct in the 8:59 post but if not, please don't write "re-christianization" but always "re-Christianization". You don't work for the E.C.in Brussells :-)
Bethlehem at the moment is irretrievably lost, accept it in order to have more energy available helping Israelis and Israel defend Jerusalem.
That was one of the great points of Winstin Churchill, he understood when a battle was won, and when it was lost, which helped him to see the bigger picture.
He said "The battle for France is over, the Battle for Britain has begun".
Today he would tell you the Battle of Bethlehem is over, the Battle of Jerusalem has begun.
Also Christians in the Arab World (Apart from the Maronites) consider Israel to be doomed, so just why would they be in a hurry to form a nation next to Israel that would rely on Israel to protect it when they believe Israel will inevitably be destroyed?
I support the Christians, and Israel as much as anyone here, but I don't believe in forgotting about the precarious conditions that Israel, and the regions Christians are in right now (A constant state of siege), the situation calls for realistic, not idealistic solutions.
I only wish that the Greek Orthodox Church would catch up with Greece and learn how to bot be Dhimmi.