Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
Trust me on this, the Baby Jesus was not wrapped in a keffiyeh
at birth, and not at any other time either. Even Arabs wore turbans—not keffiyehs—until
at least the early
18th century. And Jesus was not an Arab but a Jew.
Why, then, is there a nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square
featuring a wooden Baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh?
I thought someone had done this as a joke.
— Luana Fabri (@LuanaGoriss) December 10, 2024
It’s not a joke.
Pope Francis inaugurates nativity scene in Vatican showing ‘baby Jesus’ on a keffiyeh. pic.twitter.com/e1858jdOCB
One might put the anachronistic keffiyeh “swaddling” of the
Baby Jesus down to artistic license. But “Nativity of Bethlehem 2024” by Bethlehem
artists Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, has nothing to do with art. The
crèche is merely antisemitic propaganda dressed up fancy in olive wood, mother-of-pearl,
stone, ceramic, glass, felt, and fabric.
At the unveiling of this “artwork,” the pope said its
presence is meant to remind us of those who “suffer the tragedy of war in the
Holy Land." But we know who he means. The pope means that ARABS are
suffering, because, oh look! Here is Baby Jesus in a keffiyeh.
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This is, after all, the same pope who suggested a global
effort be made to determine whether Israel is guilty of committing genocide in
Gaza—the same pope who called Israel’s actions in Lebanon as going “beyond
morality.” The same Pope Francis who never
once mentioned Hamas by name.
This all calls to mind a boring dinner I attended last week during
which a fellow diner expounded at length in an annoying way as if only he were
knowledgeable enough to weigh in on that particular topic. I made my excuse, and
as I walked away, a word came to mind, pontificate. That’s what the
annoying fellow diner had been doing. Pontificating.
An interesting word, I thought, no doubt derived from the
word pontiff. The dictionary confirmed this for me, adding that the word
comes from the Latin pontifex, or high priest. I gasped a little when
I read that, though I’d long understood the significance of the ornate papal
garments. It still felt like a terrible affront—a “borrowing” of a core concept
in Judaism in service of an ideology proscribed by the Torah.
The artwork titled “Nativity of Bethlehem 2024” represents, in a similar vein, a form of appropriation—an appropriation of Jesus to support a false narrative that casts him not as a Jew, but as an Arab. The viewer is presented with a distorted perspective, hearing nothing about the actual crucifixions of Jews on October 7 or the ongoing plight of hostages. There’s no mention of how many lives in Gaza could have been spared had the hostages been released, nor is there a single word about Hamas. All of this is deliberately kept from public scrutiny, seemingly with the blessing of the pope.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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