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When I was in Israel recently I made the time to visit many Christian holy sites, which was a profoundly moving experience. I did not go to Bethelehem. Here's why. From Abraham H. Miller in FrontPage:
Since the Palestinian Authority’s takeover of Bethlehem in 1995, under the Oslo Accords with Israel, Bethlehem has been transformed from a Christian city into a Muslim city. Bethlehem’s remaining Christians now live in a condition of dhimmitude (a reference to the second-class citizenship Islam imposes on Christians) in the city of Jesus’ birth.The Palestinians brought with them a political system based on primitive tribal relations, where the power of one’s clan became a substitute for the law. As a consequence, Christians have suffered civil outrage and criminal violence without recourse to justice.
Christians have been refusing to live under these conditions and have been leaving Bethlehem in large numbers.
So who is to blame for the plight of Bethlehem’s Christians and for the birthplace of Jesus being emptied of Christians? Why, the Jews, of course! Who else?
That is the Orwellian message of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee (AADC) that held a candle lighting vigil on November 29, 2005 for Bethlehem’s Christians at San Francisco’s Union Square as the Christmas shopping season began.
Muslims in Bethlehem make the lives of Christians unbearable and force them to flee their ancestral homes while Muslims in America hold a vigil to blame the Jews.
To understand how the Christians became a minority and the victims of thuggery in the city of Jesus’ birth, it is important to see just what Arafat did to Bethlehem once he got his hands on it.
In 1995, Yasser Arafat gained control of Bethlehem and immediately expanded its municipal boundaries to include 30,000 Muslims living in neighboring refugee camps. Next, Muslim Bedouins living east of Bethlehem were incorporated into revised municipal boundaries. All this was still not enough for the PA to change the status of Bethlehem as a Christian city. But then Arafat created inducements for Muslims to leave Hebron and the area around it and move to Bethlehem.With Arafat’s government by clan, by gun, and by terror, a land Mafia developed that began expropriating land from Christians. In 2002, two Christian teenage sisters were found with their throats slit and their genitals mutilated. Muslims claimed the Amer sisters were prostitutes, as if that were justification for torture and murder. But Christians familiar with similar incidents claim the girls were murdered to cover up a gang rape.
Of course, none of this appears in the AADC’s call for the candlelight vigil that is also designed to showcase the AADC’s divestment campaign against Israel.
The plight of Bethlehem’s Christians under the PA’s thuggery has, however, drawn outrage from Christian organizations worldwide. The mainstream Protestant churches in America, however, have been too busy with their divestment campaigns to take the notice of the plight of Christians living under the Palestinian Authority’s tribalism.
Indeed, just this week, the Vatican, in a rare diplomatic move, called publicly on the Israelis to intervene in Bethlehem on behalf of its severely receding Christian population. Now totaling less than 12% of Bethlehem’s population, Christians, who have been the targets of continual PA violence, might leave entirely. The result will be that in the place where Jesus was born there will no longer be a Christian community.
In the West Bank town of Taibe marauding Muslims burned, looted and beat Christian residents in the name of a Muslim family’s “honor,” a family whose father had brutally beaten his daughter to death for wanting to marry a Christian. The violent Muslim mob burned a statue of the Virgin Mary and shouted, “Burn the Crusaders!” PA fire and security forces took their time arriving on the scene, appearing hours later. In the end, the mob was almost immediately released from jail. Meanwhile, the Christian fiancée of the murdered woman was arrested and beaten while incarcerated. The lesson—that of the mob being released while an innocent Christian languished in jail—was not lost on the Christian community of the West Bank!
Father Artemio Vitores, who supervises the holy places in Israel and the Palestinian Authority for the Vatican, recently and publicly, asked Israel’s President Moshe Katsav, “Help us keep Bethlehem.” This appeal represents a sharp and desperate change in Vatican politics. The Vatican has long feared offending the Palestinians far more than offending Israel.
After Palestinian terrorists took over the Church of the Nativity in 2002, and brutalized the priests inside, the Vatican pressured Israel to give the terrorists safe passage and not to invade or destroy the church. Israel eventually complied. For its part, the Vatican refuses to speak of the brutality that occurred inside the church or even to re-consecrate it, for to do so would mean that the Vatican would have to acknowledge how the church was desecrated.
The Vatican is walking a tightrope in the unstable Middle East. The church’s primary concern is to preserve both the Holy Places and its role in administering them. With the outcome of the Palestinian-Israeli war still unknown and unpredictable and with Bethlehem already in the hands of the PA, the Vatican is faced with an unenviable set of difficult choices.
Now the Vatican is further confronted with the realities facing Christians who no longer live under Israeli protection but instead under Palestinian oppression. The Vatican’s direct request for Israeli assistance is a strong indicator of how threatened the Christians are and that the Vatican is well aware that the PA is the cause of and not the solution to the problem.
None of this of course will matter to the AADC’s propaganda machine that will asked people to “light a candle to protect Bethlehem’s Christians from Israeli oppression.” The AADC’s spin is that Christians flee Bethlehem because of Israel’s policies. Isn’t it strange that Christians flee while Muslims stay and grow dramatically in number, and Christian property ownership recedes as Muslim property ownership expands. Muslims oppress Christians over there while here Muslims hold vigils blaming the Jews for the oppression inflicted on Bethlehem’s Christians.
In San Francisco, of course, where President Bush is equated with Hitler and the American military is considered a terrorist organization, reality doesn’t matter. We have to give the AADC's organizers credit. They could not have found a more susceptible audience or a ritual more reminiscent of Hitler’s torchlight parades than by lighting candles against “Jewish oppression” in San Francisco’s Union Square full of Christmas shoppers.
Posted by Robert at December 16, 2005 10:27 AM
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Re: "The mainstream Protestant churches in America, however, have been too busy with their divestment campaigns to take the notice of the plight of Christians living under the Palestinian Authority’s tribalism."
It's more like the mainstream Protestant churches don't want to confront the issue because they will then have to show some backbone - which the present leadership lacks.
Posted by: johnb![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 16, 2005 11:01 AM
"the Vatican, in a rare diplomatic move, called publicly on the Israelis to intervene in Bethlehem on behalf of its severely receding Christian population..."
-- from the article above
It was idiotic for the world to put pressure on Israel to surrender Bethlehem in the first place. Had not everyone been too busy to study Islam, the fate of Bethlehem as a Christian city would have been entirely foreseeable. Now it is being islamized faster even than modern Turkey (Constantinople was 50% non-Muslim in 1914, and the rest of present-day Turkey had large numbers of Armenians, Greeks, and even Assyrians) -- today Turkey is 99.7% Muslim, than present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh, than present-day Sudan, than present-day Iran, than present-day -- well, whever Muslims rule, and slow, or fast, the non-Muslim population, fleeing or reacting to persecution, discrimination, and the daily humiliation and degradation and physical insecurity, leaves, moves away, or under pressure converts to Islam. It is an Iron Rule of Dar al-Islam. Why should anyone have thought Bethlehem would be different? And what about, in some unimaginable future, Jerusalem itself? Or Western Europe? Or North America?
The Israelis should, with the support of outside Christians, re-christianize Bethlehem. But first they must take it back, as they have every right to. They must undo the damage that was done when they yielded, mistakenly, to pressures, mistakenly applied, from organized Christian groups that confused the siren-songs if islamochristian "Palestinians" - Naim Ateek, Hilarion Cappucci, Hanan Ashrawi, the current smooth-tongued appeaser-of-Islam Victor Batarseh, described as the "Christian" mayor of Bethlehem but in fact a "Palestinian islamochristian" who denies, in the face of all the evidence, that Islam, that Muslims, have had anything to do with the troubles of Bethlehem's Christians. Forced to choose between protecting Islam and protecting Christianity, Victor Batarseh, like quite a few (but not all) "Palestinian" Christians, chooses -- Islam.
One does not know how, but somehow Israel must be given a signal that it should, that it must, that it will suffer not only no repercussions but outright gratitude from the world's Christians, if it takes back control of Bethlehem -- a control it should never have relinquished in the first place.
Posted by: Hugh at December 16, 2005 11:37 AM
"One does not know how, but somehow Israel must be given a signal that it should, that it must, that it will suffer not only no repercussions but outright gratitude from the world's Christians, if it takes back control of Bethlehem -- a control it should never have relinquished in the first place."
Yes, and Israel should take back Joseph's Tomb, Rachael's Tomb and land in Hebron that belonged to Jew's in 1929 before the massacre there. It was taken back by Jews in recent years and rehabilitated but Ariel Sharon wants to strip it from them and give it to Arabs.
Those negotiating "land for peace" failed to read the fine print. It says, land for peace.*
*"Peace" of the grave...
at December 16, 2005 12:09 PM
... but somehow Israel must be given a signal that it should, that it must, that it will suffer not only no repercussions but outright gratitude from the world's Christians, if it takes back control of Bethlehem ...
After La Stampa's cartoon, portraying the Jews as "trying/wanting to kill the Christ Child a second time", during the standoff with Arafat's thugs in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem anything of the sort coming from Italy would be the height of "Chutzpah".
That Christians who have supported Arafat all along in the face of his massacres of their co-religionists in Lebanon in the 70s would now proclaim their desire to maintain Bethlehem a Christian city just reeks of hypocrisy and racism.
Posted by: Cynic at December 16, 2005 12:17 PM
yes, and let's give the PA sovereignty over East Jerusalem and all of the city's holy sites too.
As for the AADC’s incredible audacity in blaming Israel for the plight of the region's Christians, well, whadaya expect? A year or so ago, Hamas claimed a Palestinian teenager murdered by Palestinian terrorists when he tried to help his family clear a nest of rocket launchers off the family farm as a martyr to the cause.
What is truly nauseating isn't the AADC, but the beyond ignorant idiots who don't question the crap they are peddling aren't revolted by this outrage, because they have been blinded to the truth by the relentless Palestinian jihad propaganda machine.
Posted by: waterdragon52 at December 16, 2005 12:38 PM
The most ungrateful, and leacherous people in the entire middle east are the palestinians!
If you do not believe that statement ask yourself this simple question, "why is it no other country them??"
If the israelis give them one more square inch of land it will be a big and bloody mistake. What is happening in Bethlehem is no surprise and should not be a surprise. Why it was even allowed to happen is explained by the architect of most of it. Bill Clinton was the cause. He is and was the weakest and most gullible president America has ever known. He was completely and totally ignorant of world polititcs and islam. His policies clearly bear that out...from appeasment in North Korea, to blind eye politics in China to not appreciating the conflict in the balkans and Afganistan and then onward to his interference in the middle east with the so called road map.
GW Bush has done what should have have been done a long time ago...strap on some balls and kicked some ass!! Unfortunately, the balls he stapped on may be too big for him since im not sure what is happening now in the middle east was fullt expected...in any event there is still 2 1/2 years to go so lets see what happens.
Posted by: Shunkleash at December 16, 2005 1:38 PM
"The Israelis should, with the support of outside Christians, re-christianize Bethlehem. But first they must take it back, as they have every right to."
I don't think that half-hearted belated requests from the Vatican or the Protestant clergy constitute a clear signal. It must be clear and unequivocal. Some arabs will be displaced. Some may die. There can be no backtracking, no after-the-fact denials, no condemnations. I don't blame Israel for staying out of this, given the Church of the Nativity fiasco.
Posted by: Infidel33 at December 16, 2005 2:19 PM
GW Bush has done what should have have been done a long time ago...strap on some balls and kicked some ass!! Unfortunately, the balls he stapped on may be too big for him since im not sure what is happening now in the middle east was fullt expected...in any event there is still 2 1/2 years to go so lets see what happens. Posted by: Shunkleash
Bush strapped on some balls? LOL, you have to be kidding. Where, when, was I napping. Oh you mean he made some noises, like seperating Islam from Islamoterrorism..
He's celebrating he elections in Iraq, that have been won by the surrogates of Iran, he pressured Mubarak to include the Muslim Brotherhood in their elections and offered an olive branch to Hizbollah and Hamas.. you mean those kind of balls?
Israel doesn't have 2 1/2 more years, not at the rate it is going. Islamic Jihad (Fatah) launches a "martyrdom" operation, or some rockets, and then cries foul and victim when Israel persecutes and our lovely President sits there deaf, dumb and silent.. not breathing a word of criticism, much less serious castigation of the Palestinian Authority or Islam, except to throw some more money at them.
Terrorism is a lucrative business.
BTW, The Arab word for Unity is Maehfil, from whence the Sicilians got the word Mafia.. and guess where they got the idea of protection money? Jizyah.
Posted by: Nariz at December 16, 2005 4:01 PM
This process is heating up but not irreversable. Both the PA and the Israelis are culpable for the destruction of Christianity since niether care about Christians. I just read this over the phone to a Bethlehem Christian now living in the US. She told me that many Christians lost their property and left during the Israeli occupation and now the Israeli government has turned these Christian properties over to the PA or in some cases directly to Islamic groups (like the mosque for Manger Square). Most Christians now recall with longing the rule of the Hashemites and the late King Hussein who, although a Muslim, was perceived as protective of the Christian Palestinians.
The Israeli failure to protect the Christians of Bethlehem and Ramallah is a crime for which she will answer to God and history.
Posted by: Provoslavni at December 16, 2005 8:28 PM
"I just read this over the phone to a Bethlehem Christian now living in the US. She told me that many Christians lost their property and left during the Israeli occupation and now the Israeli government has turned these Christian properties over to the PA or in some cases directly to Islamic groups (like the mosque for Manger Square). Most Christians now recall with longing the rule of the Hashemites and the late King Hussein who, although a Muslim, was perceived as protective of the Christian Palestinians.
The Israeli failure to protect the Christians of Bethlehem and Ramallah is a crime for which she will answer to God and history."
-- from a posting above
I would be disinclined to believe any Arab Christian -- what is she? Greek Orthodox? Melkite? very unlikely to be a Maronite -- about the putative sins of the Israelis, to whose rule the Christians have been fleeing (the card permitting Christians to live in Jerusalem undr Israeli protection and rule is the most sought-after item among Christians on the West Bank). This "Bethlehem Christian" strikes me as a classic, not exactly islamochristian, but the kijnd of "Palestinian" Arab who, unable to let go of the years of anti-Israel propaganda, will find some bizarre way to blame Israel for the mistreatment, by Muslim Arabs of Christian Arabs. It's nonsense.
As for the little story about King Huseein, that too is nonsense. Have you forgotten, or not known, that it was the Jordanians who immediately forced the British archeologist Kathleen Kenyon to leave the terittories they controlled pre-1967, because on her digs she (who was hardly a friend of Israel) kept finding remains of churhces, and these were something that the Muslims of Jordan did not want uncovered or revealed -- they stomach, purely for the tourist dollars, the handful of claims they make to Biblical sites. But as for signs of Christain setttlement long after that period -- that they do not like.
Curiously, at Camp Victory in Tikrit, one of the Arabic-language classes was taught by a Christian Arab from Jordan. As the poor soldiers were carefully not told anything about Islam during their training (at Fort Jackson, or Fort Bragg, or Fort Hood, or Parris island, or anywhere at all), they had to pick up what they could by being in Iraq. In that Arabic class, that Jordanian Christain let fly and the truth about Islam was smuggled into every lesson.
The story of the lady from Bethlehem is absurd on its face: the Israelis have scrupulously guarded, and made available for easy access, all Christain sites under their control. The very opposite is true, all over the Dar al-islam. That she could utter such nonsense is one thing. That, after all we know about the psychology of coping with the status of being a dhimmi, and the endless anti-Israeli propaganda to which all "Palestinians" including the Christian ones are constantnly subjected to, one would think that her testimony would be taken not with a grain, but a pillar of salt.
Posted by: Hugh at December 16, 2005 10:29 PM
"This process is heating up but not irreversable. Both the PA and the Israelis are culpable for the destruction of Christianity since neither care about Christians..."
You are right, but I would add the EU (one of the main supporters of the PA) which has paradoxically become one of the most anti-Christian entities on earth since Europe lost its own faith sometime in the 1960s.
Posted by: rocky at December 16, 2005 11:15 PM
Perhaps some figures regarding the Number of fleeing Palestinian Christian who have moved to Israel would shed some light on the claims of "persecution" by the Isralis.
Are those Figures available?
at December 17, 2005 12:22 AM
Hugh,
Let's face it, the P.A. is a corrupt criminal reservation but the Israeli government is culpable for turning over power to this bunch of thugs. Just like in Iraq where the US is completely ignoring the rights of Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, the Israelis have acted like the Christians of Palestine do not exist as a separate and unique people. Instead, they just lump them all together as Arabs which is a falsehood the corrupt Muslim PA shares to its own political and financial advantage.
Of course, Hussein ibn Talal was a Muslim and his regime deserved criticism, but compared to most Muslim leaders, he was much more moderate. We can't ever be Manichaean when dealing with the world. Islam is an oppressive, evil ideology but not every Muslim person is evil.
Yes, it is true the Israelis (Labor and Likud) have done their best to protect the archaeological, historical, and religious sites and their policies in this regard should be applauded by the world. The exceptions include expanding the mosque of Omar which violates the integrity of Manger Square and the vicious murder of the New Hieromartyr Saint Philoumenos and the desecration of the ancient church at Jacob's Well by radical Zionists in November 1979, although on this one the government was culpable only after the fact.
Now my mea culpa. Maybe I am failing to make clear my central point: Israeli policy has failed to win over the Christians when they should be natural allies. I DO NOT make these criticisms out of animosity toward Israel...just the opposite! An Israel that does right by the Christian Palestinians gains an ally and makes itself more secure. Both Christians and Jews face the same Islamic threat. Therefore, it is essential that we not abuse each other. An honest debate about what divides us is the first step toward alliance.
As for my friend, she is Roman Catholic but attends my Melkite parish with her Melkite cousins who are Israeli citizens. I, myself, have cousins who are Israeli Jews. Therefore, a mutually beneficial alliance between Christians and Israelis is dear to my heart. However, it will not come to pass unless we honestly face the injustices that divide us.
at December 17, 2005 1:34 AM
Rocky,
You are absolutely right about the EU, not to mention the UN and NATO who united to destroy Christian Kosovo and deliver it to the Muslim terrorist KLA.
Posted by: Provoslavni at December 17, 2005 1:37 AM
Pardon me for being so cynical but shouldn't Christians have been "helping" Israel/Israelis retain/reclaim Jewish holy sites during the last few decades?
Much as it stresses me to have been aware of situation with Bethlehem for much longer than the media or these Johnny-com-lately-Christian mouthpieces, Israel is not the be-all to all; she has been condemned far too many times when giving warnings, when making suggestions, when trying to pass laws, when trying to stave off the inevitable she saw but others are blind to.
The sainted Vatican and any other Christian groups should have thought about their need for Israel's help and assisted her in the past instead of sitting on the fence or falling off on the side of arafart & co .. aiding, abetting and supporting terrorists.
Vatican! Give us back our children you took during WWII. They/their whereabouts are far more important than some rock and stone city. Then , maybe we can talk.
Posted by: bj at December 17, 2005 10:21 AM
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