Israel Matzav

Paying the jizya to stay in Bethlehem

Dexter van Zile attended the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference in Beit Jala, next to Bethlehem this past week. He questions whether Christian submission to Islam is a worthwhile price to pay for staying in this land.

At the 2012 and 2014 conferences, speakers blamed radical Islam’s violence against Christians in the Middle East on Christian support for Israel, as if Muslims had no moral agency of their own. Speakers condemned Jews for having rejected Jesus as the messiah, suggesting that this rejection rendered Jews unfit to run a sovereign state of their own.

On a more practical level, speakers falsely reported that the security barrier completely surrounds Bethlehem, the city of Christ’s birth, in an attempt to portray the Jewish state as an obstacle to God’s purposes for peace in the Middle East.

I was stunned that the speakers defamed the Jewish people so brazenly and that the audience of 600 Evangelicals from North America and Europe listened so happily to it all.

Similar messaging was broadcast at the 2016 conference. I should be in a high dudgeon about what I heard, but instead I feel pity.

Spreading lies about the Jewish state, as unsavory and self-destructive as it is, is the price Palestinian Christians pay for staying in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It’s what they have to do.

Jews stay in the land through the force of arms and diplomacy. Palestinian Christians stay in the West Bank by shilling on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, one of the most corrupt and incompetent set of elites in the world.

Palestinian Christians have to pretend that their fellow Palestinians are ready for statehood, jihadism in the Middle East is not the fault of Muslim radicals but the West, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all Israel’s fault and that Palestinian leaders can be trusted to make peace with the Jewish state even though they can’t be trusted with the money thrown at them by Western governments.

Repeating these messages is the tax, or jizya Palestinian Christians must pay to maintain peaceful relations, precarious as they are, with their Muslim neighbors in the West Bank.

In previous epochs, Christians paid protection money to Muslim rulers to ensure their safety, but today they pay the jizya by telling lies to their fellow Christians in the West.

Read the whole thing.

The West laps this stuff up as if it's the truth. Why? Historical anti-Semitism undoubtedly plays a role....

Labels: Bethlehem, Christians in Israel, Islamic terrorism, Palestinian Christians

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:32 PM