A Couple from Debbie
I first found this
WSJ editorial at
Debbie Schlussel. Here it is in its entirety. And check out this
previous post by Debbie.I don't think I need to add any comment except to echo Debbie's query as to the absence of any protest by any of the self-styled "human rights" organizations and any reporting of this deplorable situation by the "speaking truth to power" MSM.
By DANIEL SCHWAMMENTHAL
Bethlehem
Meet Yussuf Khoury, a 23-year old Palestinian refugee living in the West Bank. Unlike those descendents of refugees born in United Nations camps, Mr. Khoury fled his birthplace just two years ago. And he wasn't running away from Israelis, but from his Palestinian brethren in Gaza.
Mr. Khoury's crime in that Hamas-ruled territory was to be a Christian, a transgression he compounded in the Islamists' eyes by writing love poems.
"Muslims tied to Hamas tried to take me twice," says Mr. Khoury, and he didn't want to find out what they'd do to him if they ever kidnapped him. He hasn't seen his family since Christmas 2007 and is afraid even to talk to them on the phone.
Speaking to a group of foreign journalists in the Bethlehem Bible College where he is studying theology, Mr. Khoury describes a life of fear in Gaza. "My sister is under a lot of pressure to wear a headscarf. People are turning more and more to Islamic fundamentalism and the situation for Christians is very difficult," he says.
In 2007, one year after the Hamas takeover, the owner of Gaza's only Christian bookstore was abducted and murdered. Christian shops and schools have been firebombed. Little wonder that most of Mr. Khoury's Christian friends have also left Gaza.
On the rare occasion that Western media cover the plight of Christians in the Palestinian territories, it is often to denounce Israel and its security barrier. Yet until Palestinian terrorist groups turned Bethlehem into a safe haven for suicide bombers, Bethlehemites were free to enter Israel, just as many Israelis routinely visited Bethlehem.
The other truth usually ignored by the Western press is that the barrier helped restore calm and security not just in Israel, but also in the West Bank including Bethlehem. The Church of the Nativity, which Palestinian gunmen stormed and defiled in 2002 to escape from Israeli security forces, is now filled again with tourists and pilgrims from around the world.
But even here in Jesus' birthplace, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Christians live on a knife's edge. Mr. Khoury tells me that Muslims often stand in front of the gate of the Bible College and read from the Quran to intimidate Christian students. Other Muslims like to roll out their prayer rugs right in Manger Square.
Asked about why Muslims would pray so close to one of Christianity's holiest sites, Pastor Alex Awad, dean of students at the Bible College, diplomatically advises me to pose this question to the Muslims themselves. Mindful of his community's precarious situation, he is at pains to stress that whatever problems Christians may have with their Muslim neighbors, it's not the PA's fault.
"Muslims and Christians live here in relative harmony," he tells reporters, only to add that Christians "feel the pressure of Islam . . . There is intimidation and fanaticism but these are little instances and there is no general persecution."
Samir Qumsieh, the founder of what he says is the holy land's only Christian TV station, also stresses that there is no "Christian suffering" and that the Christians' problems are not orchestrated by the PA. Yet his stories of land theft, beatings and intimidation make one wonder why, if the PA doesn't approve of such injustices, it is doing so little to stop it?
Christians have only recently begun to talk about how Muslim gangs simply come and take possession of Christian-owned land while the Palestinian security services, almost exclusively staffed by Muslims, stand by. Mr. Qumsieh's own home was firebombed three years ago. The perpetrators were never caught.
"We have never suffered as we are suffering now," Mr. Qumsieh confesses, violating his own introductory warning to the assorted foreign correspondents in his office not to use the word "suffering."
Always a minority religion among the predominantly Muslim Palestinians, Christians are, Mr. Qumsieh says, "melting away," even in Bethlehem. While they represented about 80% of the city's population 60 years ago, their numbers are now down to about 20%, a result not just of Muslims' higher birth rates but also widespread Christian emigration. "Our future as a Christian community here is gloomy," Mr. Qumsieh says.
Palestinian plight not attributable to Israel barely seems to register in the West's collective conscience. As Christians around the world remember Jesus' birth, perhaps we can think of Mr. Khoury and those Christians still suffering in Gaza and Bethlehem.
Mr. Schwammenthal is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
And then there's Jimmy Carter's apology. Who is he trying to kid? I first read of it at
Debbie's place. It's been showing up in other places though. Again, I echo what Debbie says. And I add: the guy's a liar, and I can't be placated by his phony apology. The worst line in the
whole phony thing full of bad lines and weasel words:
I likewise hope that violent attacks against all civilians will end, which will help set a better framework for commencing negotiations.
This reminds me of when CAIR and other jihadists-in-disguise condemn "all terrorist attacks against all people." Carter hasn't acknowledged the undeniable fact that Palestinians gleefully murder civilians of all stripes on purpose for terrorist and for propaganda purposes. When Israelis accidentally kill a Palestinian kid (which Hamas might be using as a human shield), they express genuine remorse. Carter expresses the same stupid, offensive, and just plain wrong moral equivalence.
It isn't an apology. It's an insult.
Labels: Christians, Christmas, Debbie Schlussel, islam, Israel, Jimmy Carter, terrorism, Wall Street Journal
Religious Freedom
We just got done lighting the Chanukah candles at my house. Tonight is the fifth night of Chanukah. Today is also Christmas, so I'd like to wish Christians everywhere a Merry Christmas. Earlier today, we indulged in our yearly Christmas tradition. We went to a movie and then got some Chinese food from our local carry out. The food was good, the movie was awful. We went to see the Spirit. In spite of the cleavage provided by Eva Mendez and Scarlett Johansson, my whole family agreed that this was a painfully bad movie. A guy sitting at the end of our row fell asleep during this piece of junk. While he was still out the price of his ticket, at least he made better use of his time than we did. My daughter woke him before we left. She felt bad leaving him like that.
My wife's family is Catholic, so we also have a Christmas Eve tradition of going to her sister's house for dinner. So last night we had a nice dinner and a good time. Afterward, we came home and lit the Chanukah candles for the fourth night.
Does any of this really matter?
It does and here's why, from a
couple of
articles I linked to today at Little Green Footballs:
Iraq's Christians, a scant minority in this overwhelmingly Muslim country, quietly celebrated Christmas on Thursday with a present from the government, which declared it an official holiday for the first time.
But security worries overshadowed the day for many, particularly in the north where thousands of Christians have fled to escape religious attacks.
Overall security in Iraq has improved markedly in the past year, but a fatal car bombing in Baghdad on Christmas morning was a gruesome reminder that serious problems remain.
and
Rushing to Christmas mass, Iraqis in their Sunday best hurried into Baghdad's Sacred Heart church, pausing just long enough so a uniformed security guard could pat them down for suicide vests or dangerous weapons.
The juxtaposition of faith and fear is one that resonates across Iraq, where as violence drops people are cautiously venturing out from homes bunkered by blast walls and sand bags and taking up activities abandoned during years of bloodshed.
Christians, who with Yazidis, Shabaks and others make up Iraq's fragile minorities, marked perhaps their safest Christmas since 2003 on Thursday, but many still talk of a precarious future in a nation at risk of backsliding into civil war.
Iraqi Christians, believed to number around 750,000, have been targeted like others in Iraq's 28-million, mainly Muslim population by the horrific violence since the 2003 invasion. Their plight often gains heightened attention in the West.
Reliable figures are hard to find on how many Christians are among the millions who have fled the country, but some Christian leaders warn of a threat to the existence for their community.
A series of high-profile attacks against Christians in the northern city of Mosul this fall prompted the flight of thousands of families and fuelled a fear of being singled out.
"Christians have no political ambitions and they don't have militias to defend themselves. They are peaceful people," Thaier al-Sheikh, the pastor of the Sacred Heart church, said as he sipped tea in his rectory.
"Christians have been here longer than Muslims, 600 years longer. We are the roots of Iraq," he said.
"We want to live in this country; we don't want anything else. But we want to live peacefully ... Unfortunately, today we have the impression that Christians have no future in Iraq," he said, standing before he donned his gold-trimmed clerical robes.
No mention is made as to whether there are
any Jews
left in Iraq to celebrate Chanukah.
And then there is the rest of the Islamic world. There are a very few Jews left in some Islamic nations, but are they allowed to openly celebrate the Jewish holidays? I'm guessing that they aren't. At one time perhaps, the authorities were more forgiving in allowing Jews and Christians to practice their religions, but with the current jihadist climate that has taken hold of the Muslim world, I bet things are tough.
There has also been articles about attacks on
Jews in Europe - by whom? Oh yeah, Muslims - uh - I mean - youths. We don't know who these youths are, or why they attack Jews, or burn cars, or riot, or . . . you get the idea. If I were a European Jew, would I shut the drapes before lighting my Chanukah candles? Would we have the decorations in the window that we have, that we've always had, year after year? We live across the street from a church, but we've never feared anyone at the church. We were even friends with the previous pastor. Would I be able to say the same thing if I live across from a mosque? In London or Berlin?
I value the freedom I and my children have to practice Judaism in the open, without fear. I have that freedom because my grandparents were willing and able to move to this strange foreign country from Russia and Poland way back in beginning of the 20th century. A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews take this freedom for granted. It's something that we've always had, and so they think, something we will always have. Religious persecution is for other countries. I think they are asleep at the wheel. There are people in this country who do want to
take that freedom from us. A lot of people don't want to face that fact and put on great demonstrations about reaching out to others in order to "know the other." They won't admit that "the other" wants to murder them and their children.
Some people don't want to consider the situation where we could, right here in the United States, be persecuted for our religious beliefs. But there are
people in California being
persecuted and blacklisted for their political beliefs. They foolishly thought they had the right contribute to the campaign to pass
Proposition 8 in California. Not only have
churches been vandalized, but some people have been harassed and forced from their jobs for this allegedly protected
political speech. What's worse is that nobody, outside of a few conservative bloggers, have risen to their defense. Where are the newspapers who pretend to be guardians of our freedom? Where is the ACLU on this? Don't they claim to protect civil liberties? And where will the ACLU and all of the other "human rights" groups be when these brownshirt tactics begin to be used against religious minorities? They won't be on our side, that's for sure.
Labels: Chanukah, Christmas, Iraq, islam, Proposition 8, religion
CHALLAH AKBAR
