O, Muslim Town of Bethlehem - Palestinian Muslims Oppressing Palestinian Christians

by Lee Green 

Christmas is almost upon us, and typically around this time of year, there are a plethora of articles about the dwindling Christian population in Bethlehem.  However, instead of focusing on the harassment and violence by extremist Palestinian Muslims against Palestinian Christians - the real cause of the decline of Christians living in Bethlehem (and throughout the Palestinian Authority areas), too many journalists wrongly accuse Israel of being the primary reason for Christian flight from the area.
 
It is rarely noted in these distorted reports that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is increasing, not declining.  As the following articles, essay and report note in detail, Christians in the Palestinian Authority areas feel discriminated against, harassed, oppressed and under physical threat by Palestinian Muslims - not Israel.
 
+ Melanie Phillips's Diary 
Peace on earth, but hatred towards Israel
Posted By Melanie On December 18, 2006
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1421 
(I have also included the text of this below)
 
+ O, Muslim Town of Bethlehem, by Elizabeth Day,
from the Daily Mail (UK), December 16, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/yl6ej7
 
+  As noted in a detailed report published by the JCPA, "The Beleaguered Christians of the Palestinian-Controlled Areas", by David Raab, January 1-15, 2003, http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp490.htm, harassment and violence against Palestinian Christians at the hands of Palestinian Muslims, is common.  At times, it is even committed by those who are supposed to protect them -  Palestinian policeman and Palestinian Preventive Security Service officers
 
+ CAMERA Report: NY Times Omits Major Reason Christians Are Leaving Bethlehem (Dec 24, 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/azyef
 
+ CAMERA Report: AP Reports on Arson Attacks by Palestinian Muslims Against Palestinian Christians (September 6, 2005)
http://tinyurl.com/ylzkcs

Melanie Phillips's Diary 
Peace on earth, but hatred towards Israel
Posted By Melanie On December 18, 2006
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1421
 
Christmas is almost upon us, the time of goodwill to all men, and the occasion for the latest vicious attack upon the Jews by the Church of England. In the Catholic weekly The Tablet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was reported as saying: 'People are leaving Bethlehem in large numbers. It is now very difficult to get in and out of and we thought we could go there, and do what we can to encourage that very beleaguered community, and remind others that it matters that there are Christians in the middle of that conflict.'
 
That solidarity with the people of Bethlehem causes Dr Williams to challenge the Israeli Government. He is careful in his choice of words, but he asks, in these days leading up to Christmas: 'I would like to know how much it matters to the Israeli Government to have Christian communities in the Holy Land. Are they an embarrassment or are they part of a solution? That's a question.' Is that so? Well here's another question. Does Dr Williams realise
that he is giving voice to a Big Lie about the Jews of Israel, or is he just astoundingly and unforgivably ignorant?
The assumption behind his question is that the very real beleaguerment of the dwindling number of Christians in Bethlehem is caused by Israel. This is a diabolical falsehood.
 
The overwhelming reason why the Christians of Bethlehem have fled is because they have been forced out not by Jews but by Muslims. A story in today's Mail on Sunday (which reports 'deep concern' by Dr Williams and the leader of Britain's Catholic [church], Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor), provides a very different picture indeed of the cause of the Bethlehem Christians' suffering: "Life for Palestinian Christians such as 50-year-old Joseph has become increasingly difficult in Bethlehem - and many of them are leaving. The town's Christian population has dwindled from more than 85 per cent in 1948 to 12 per cent of its 60,000 inhabitants in 2006. There are reports
of religious persecution, in the form of murders, beatings and land grabs. Meanwhile, the breakdown in security is putting off tourists, leading to economic hardship for Christians, who own most of the town's hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops. 
 
"The sense of a creeping Islamic fundamentalism is all around in Bethlehem. George Rabie, a 22-year-old taxi driver from the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala, is proud of his Christianity, even though it puts him in daily danger. Two months ago, he was beaten up by a gang of Muslims who were visiting Bethlehem from nearby Hebron and who had spotted the crucifix hanging on his windscreen. 'Every day, I experience discrimination,' he says. 'It is a type of racism. We are a minority so we are an easier target. Many extremists from the villages are coming into Bethlehem.'

"Jeriez Moussa Amaro, a 27-year-old aluminium craftsman from Beit Jala is another with first-hand experience of the appalling violence that Christians face. Five years ago, his two sisters, Rada, 24, and Dunya, 18, were shot dead by Muslim gunmen in their own home. Their crime was to be young, attractive Christian women who wore Western clothes and no veil. Rada had been sleeping with a Muslim man in the months before her death. A terrorist organisation, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, issued a statement claiming responsibility, which said: 'We wanted to clean the Palestinian house of prostitutes.'
 
"Jeriez says: 'A Christian man is weak compared to a Muslim man. They have bigger, more powerful families and they know people high up in the Palestinian authority.' The fear of attack has prompted many Christian families to emigrate, including Mr Canawati's sister, her husband and their three children who now live in New Jersey in America. 'I want to leave but nobody will buy my business,' Mr Canawati says. 'I feel trapped. We are isolated.' "

The story goes on to say that that isolation is exacerbated by Israel's security barrier. But the only reason that was erected was as a desperate last resort to prevent the Palestinians from murdering large numbers of Israelis by human bomb attacks. As the story makes clear, however, the principal reason for the Christians' flight is Muslim violence. Indeed, if it were Israel's behaviour it would hardly be only Christians who were fleeing. 

There is no shortage of correct, factual information about this. A report by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs provides an informed riposte to the Christian lies: *The Christian population of the areas under the control of the
Palestinian Authority (PA) has sharply declined in recent decades, as tens of thousands have abandoned their holy sites and ancestral properties to live abroad. Those who remain comprise a beleaguered and dwindling minority. In sharp contrast, Israel's Christian community has prospered and grown by at least 270 percent since the founding of the state.

*While Israel understands that the construction of the security barrier inconveniences some of the Christian communities living in its vicinity, Israel has shown sensitivity to Christian interests in planning the route of the barrier.

*The plight of Christian Arabs remaining in the PA is, in part, attributable to the adoption of Muslim religious law in the PA Constitution. Israel, by contrast, safeguards the religious freedom and holy places of its Christian (and Muslim) citizens. Indeed, in recent years Israel has been responsible for restoring many of the churches and monasteries under its jurisdiction.

*The growing strength of Islamic fundamentalism within the Palestinian national movement poses problems for Christians, who fear they will be deemed opponents of Islam and thereby risk becoming targets for Muslim extremists. This is exacerbated by the fact that Hamas holds substantial power and seeks to impose its radical Islamist identity on the entire population within the PA-controlled territories.

Some senior Christian clerics claim that the dramatic rise in Christian emigration from PA-controlled territories is a result of the Israeli 'occupation.' However, in-depth research demonstrates that the precipitous decline in the Christian population is primarily a result of social, economic, and religious discrimination and persecution within
Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza.
 
In a July 3, 2006, article, 'Who Harms Holy Land Christians?,' syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, a long-time critic of Israel, paraphrased a letter from Michael H. Sellers, an Anglican priest in Jerusalem, to U.S. Congressmen Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY), who were circulating a draft resolution blaming the Christian
decline on the discriminatory practices of the Palestinian Authority. Sellers insisted that 'the real problem [behind the Christian Arab exodus] is the Israeli occupation - especially its new security wall.' Yet two-thirds of the Christian Arabs had already departed between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, prior to the (Israeli) 'occupation' and decades before construction began on the security barrier to protect Israel's population from waves of deadly suicide bombers.

During the same period, hundreds of thousands of Christians were leaving other Muslim-ruled countries in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Every one of the more than twenty Muslim states in the Middle East has a declining Christian population. In fact, Israel is the only state in the region in which the Christian Arab population has grown in real terms - from approximately 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 130,000 in 2005.

*From Christian Arabs under the thumb of the PA, I have heard testimony of forced marriages of Christian women to Muslim men, death threats against Christians for distributing the Bible to willing Muslims, and Christian women intimidated into wearing traditional ultra-modest Islamic clothing. Churches have been firebombed (most recently in Nablus, Tubas, and Gaza after the Pope made his controversial remarks) and/or shot up repeatedly. And this is the tip of the iceberg.

Under the Palestinian Authority, whose constitution gives Islamic law primacy over all other sources of law, Christian Arabs have found their land expropriated by Muslim thieves and thugs with ties to the PA's land registration office. Christians have been forced to pay bribes to win the freedom of family members jailed on trumped-up charges. And Arabs - Christians and Muslims alike - have been selling or abandoning homes and businesses to escape the chaos of the PA and move to Israel, Europe, South America, North America, or wherever they can get a visa.

Not a peep of any of this from the Archbishop of Canterbury, or indeed any other prominent Christian leader. Instead the Church blames Israel for the flight from Bethlehem, part of the systematic campaign of libelous propaganda against the Jewish state and the sanitization of Arab murderous hatred that is circulated and believed as holy writ among so many Christians in Britain and elsewhere.

Recently, a cleric of the Church of England sent me - as an apparently pointed rebuke - a truly wicked book,
Bethelehem Besieged, by one Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian pastor in Bethlehem. With a jacket garlanded by encomia from Hanan Ashrawi, George McGovern, James Zogby, Desmond Tutu and others, this book presents a picture of Bethlehem's Christians suffering under a yoke imposed by the cruel and belligerent Israelis. Page after page is devoted to claims about the 'apartheid-like wall'; unwarranted 'invasions' of Bethlehem by overwhelming Israeli military might; the siege of the Church of the Holy Nativity when Israeli troops 'clearly had instructions to go in and destroy' (doubtless that's why there was a stand-off for days while the Israelis tried to persuade the Arab gunmen inside, who were trashing the church, to surrender) - a scandalous misrepresentation with more than a whiff of old-style theological prejudice, when the author compares his family locked inside the parsonage for safety to 'the first disciples after the crucifixion of Jesus'; the 'devastating impact' of the closures and the curfews under the Second Intifada; and so on and dishonestly, virulently, sickeningly, on.

No mention whatsoever of the never-ending violence and mass murder of Israelis perpetrated by the Palestinians; no acknowledgement whatever of the fact that Israel's military actions in the town were occasioned solely as acts of self-defense against Palestinian aggression; no mention at all of the truly unwarranted aggression towards and
persecution of the Bethlehem Christians by Palestinian Muslims. Instead, the Israeli victims of Arab aggression are blamed by this Arab Christian as a source of unredeemed evil - a nationalistic scapegoating of the Jewish state that mirrors the theological scapegoating of the Jewish religion in the Gospels and the calumnies of the early church fathers.

This vile travesty merely mirrors the kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli filth that pours out of places like the Sabeel Centre and other sources of Palestinian Christian writing, along with NGOs like Christian Aid. As Canon Andrew White has more than once observed, not only does this all smell of replacement theology or supercessionism, the
ancient Christian calumny against the Jews, but it has become once again standard fare within the Church of England and many other churches.

The results of all this incitement to hatred are on display in a
gruesome opinion poll in The Tablet:
Do you believe the security wall is needed to protect the population of
the Holy Land from suicide bombers?
Yes: 18.6% No: 79.4%

Those agreeing that the Churches should support international efforts to arrive at a two-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians: 80.4%
- campaign for the dismantling of the security wall: 77.6%
- support Palestinian calls for an independent homeland within the
borders that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war: 75.2%
- call for the removal of Jewish West Bank settlements: 75%
- disinvest from companies whose products are used by the Israeli
Government in the occupied territories: 68.5%
- call on the Palestinians to recognise Israel and renounce violence:
57.3%
- accept that Israel is engaged in a struggle for its survival and support its efforts to root out its enemies: 21.2%

Read that last figure again. Almost 80 per cent of British Christians polled do not accept that Israel is fighting enemies who are pledged to destroy it. Almost 80 per cent of British Christians are ignorant of the truth, have swallowed a diabolical lie and as a result have turned Jewish victims into global villains. Where, alas, have we heard this before?

I'm sorry if this pains the many decent Christians who uphold truth and fight evil and therefore support Israel in its existential struggle to survive the attempt to exterminate it; but it has to be said that, at a time when Iran is openly threatening to destroy Israel, the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust.

The time has arrived for decent Christians around the world to raise their voices as loudly as they can against this terrible, primitive anti-Jewish stain that once again besmirches their religion.

Originally Published on 12/20/2006 for CAMERA