It just wouldn’t be the holiday season without some media outlet running the same tired old anti-Israel story with a Christmas theme complete with a Palestinian Santa Claus. This year it’s Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman (cross-posted in the Huffington Post UK) who wins the prize for the least original piece of Christmas bias.
In the Washington Post, David Bernstein comments on Hasan’s article:
Well, since Joseph and Mary were Judeans, i.e., Jews, from Nazareth, they wouldn’t need to be afraid of Israeli roadblocks needed to combat Palestinian terrorism, but of being murdered by terrorists from Hamas or Fatah.
Seriously, this sort of historical revisionism, treating ancient Jewish Judeans as if they were Palestinian Arabs, and then analogizing modern Israel to the oppressors of Jesus and his family, a common trope in the UK, would be laughable if it were not so pernicious. Pernicious not simply because it’s a ridiculous distortion of history, and not simply because it’s often accompanied by a large dose of anti-Semitism, with Palestinians playing the role of Jesus and the Israelis being the foreign oppressors crucifying him. But pernicious because it goes to the true heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict–the failure of the Arab side to recognize that the “Zionists” are not the “European settler-colonialists” of Third Worldist imagination, but a people with a three thousand year plus tie to the Land of Israel, whose religion was born there, who ruled two separate kingdoms there, who have prayed toward Jerusalem for two thousand years in their ancient Hebrew language, and so on.
Hasan relies on a 2006 poll taken in Bethlehem that purports to show that it is Israel and not the role of Islamic extremism that has prompted an exodus of Christians from the Holy Land. According to Hasan:
“Divide and rule” is the name of the (Israeli) game; trying to turn Palestinian Christians against Palestinian Muslims by blaming the latter for the persecution and emigration of the former
In the eight years that have passed since that poll was published, HonestReporting has highlighted numerous examples of Muslim persecution of Christians and the reality of life under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. There are too many examples to list here but it is well worth revisiting a lecture given by the courageous Christy Anastas, a young Palestinian Christian formerly of Bethlehem, who spoke out on this very topic earlier this year and in response to a similarly unholy attack on Israel by CBS 60 Minutes.
[sc:graybox ]Let HonestReporting know if your local media outlet runs similarly biased stories of Christians in the Holy Land through our Red Alert page.
