This snippet at the end of a Reuters report about Mahmoud Abbas visiting the Vatican raised some eyebrows:
The Pope also talked about the difficulty Catholics were experiencing in Palestine amid media reports that Christians living there have suffered violence and intimidation at the hands of Islamist extremists.
For quite awhile, Western news services tended to ignore Islamic violence against PA Christians, even blame Israel for the phenomenon.
In related reading, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs released a report on the status of Christians in the Palestinian Authority. The report, the first on the PA’s commitments to freedom of worship since the Gaza disengagement, concludes that the PA’s Christian communities are “sacrificial pawns in the larger game of the Middle East peace program.” And as Robert Spencer summed up the situation for FrontPageMag recently:
Christians in the Middle East are in a virtually impossible position (which is why they are streaming out of the area). If the support the Islamic agenda, they are signing their own return to the second-class status of the dhimma, as mandated by the traditional Islamic law that jihadists are bent on restoring. If they support Israel, they risk being targeted by the jihadists, who surround them on all sides.
