Sunday, April 16, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
The title is "Jerusalem Christians say attacks on the rise."
Walking in the footsteps of Jesus, huge crowds of Christian pilgrims have this month thronged Jerusalem's ancient streets where the Easter story unfolded."It's very emotional, I already cried a little," says Marina, who is visiting from Belgrade and joined the Orthodox Good Friday procession carrying a wooden cross. "It's something you have to feel to be here."Local Christians also stand out as they join the devotions, with Palestinian and Armenian scout groups leading religious processions.But in recent months, Christians living in the occupied East of the city say they have seen increased harassment and violence.
The first crime of omission is the biggest.
Palestinian Christians belong to the most extreme doctrinal antisemitic churches in the world. The Greek Melkite Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, which make up the majority of Jerusalem's Christians, still hold on to the classic Christian supersessionist philosophy that regards Judaism itself as an aberration. The most vicious doctrinal antisemitism in pre-Zionist Palestine came from local Christians, not Muslims, and in fact their antisemitism shaped modern Muslim Jew-hatred.
The church leaders in Jerusalem have been the most extreme anti-Zionists and antisemites, and have been deathly afraid of saying anything negative about the Muslims who have indeed been oppressing them for centuries. They have enthusiastically taken on the role of dhimmi and defended that second-class status assigned to them by the larger Muslim world.
When they say they are oppressed by Jews, one must be skeptical at the very least.
The main Christian interviewed by the BBC, Bishop William Shomali of the Latin Patriarchate, was quoted in a Vatican magazine in 2012 as saying, “The Talmud, the holy book studied by the ultra-orthodox, more highly venerated than the Bible itself, invites religious hatred, speaks badly of Jesus, and even worse of Mary and, in general, of Christians. In Israeli schools love for the other is not taught but rather the destruction of the other.”
This is pure antisemitism - with a dollop of anti-Zionism on the side.
The BBC then lists some recent examples of Jewish vandalism or disrespect towards Christian sites in Jerusalem. Some of them are legitimate - and the Israeli police arrested the perpetrators. One came from an American. There is no indication that things really are worse than in previous years outside of what the Jerusalem Arab Christians are claiming, and furthermore no proof outside of speculation that this alleged increase is a result of the current Israeli government making extremist Jews bolder.
The Talmud quote above was a response to anti-Christian graffiti in 2012, so there have always been extremist Jews who have attacked church property. They were outliers then and they are outliers now. Any blanket blame of all Jews or all Israel for the actions of a minority who act in opposition to Israeli policy is just another form of antisemitism - of generalizing the actions of a few to the larger population.
But the BBC's antisemitism is not only from quoting antisemites without context, which is bad enough. The reporter shows her own bias here:
The holy city of Jerusalem lies at the heart of the Christian faith. However, the number of Christians living here has dropped from a quarter of the population a century ago to under 2%. Many have emigrated, escaping the painful daily realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and seeking better opportunities elsewhere.
The clear implication is that Israeli policies are driving an exodus of Christians, and the article goes on to say that "Many Christians feel that the growing hostility towards them is meant to push them out."
However, if one looks at the demographic history of Jerusalem, one sees that the only major exodus of Christians came under Jordanian rule - from 19% of Jerusalem residents in 1944 to only 4% in 1967, with far more than half of the Christians of Jerusalem fleeing during those years.
The reason that the percentage has gone down from 4% to 2% today is not because of Israel forcing Christians out but because Israel expanded Jerusalem to include more Jews and more Muslims. In absolute terms, the Christian population has slowly grown in Jerusalem, and the only times it has ever gone down in history have been under Muslim rule. Indeed, Israel's Christians are overwhelmingly satisfied with living in Israel.
That paragraph shows that the BBC is not interested in the truth, but in anti-Israel and indeed antisemitic propaganda.
If the BBC had included any of the context mentioned here, it wouldn't have an article. So it airbrushes Muslim abuse of Christians and Palestinian Christian antisemitism out of the picture, leaving only an ugly lie that blame Jews as a nation for persecuting Christians.
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