Israeli Persecution forces Christians to Emigrate

Khalid Amayreh

Israeli ambassador to the United State Michael Oren recently tried to bully CBS to kill a story exposing Israeli persecution, harassment and mistreatment of Palestinian Christians, forcing many of them to emigrate.

Oren, a Jewish supremacist, reportedly described the '60 Minutes' broadcast of 12+ minute story on Israel's mistreatment of Palestinian Christians as "a strategic threat" to Israel. He didn't explain how a short documentary would be a threat to a nuclear power that is armed to the teeth and which also happens to tightly control the government and Congress of the only superpower on the planet, namely the United States.

The story was prepared by veteran CBS reporter, Bob Simon who is expert on the Arab Israeli conflict. It began with a segment about the disappearance of Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land, with emphasis on a family whose Bethlehem home, once on the busiest street in town, is now surrounded on three sides by Israeli military walls.

Eventually, the story gained special attention as Oren approached CBS before the story was even completed and demanded that the network not air the story because it would do such a "hatchet job" on Israel.

I watched the story and honestly it never raised my eyebrows. I knew too well and all along that Israel had been persecuting and tormenting Christians since time immemorial, even before Oren and Simon were born.

Israel is not only a harsh and insidious occupier and persecutor, but is also a deceitful, pernicious liar. It knowingly and deliberately torments its victims, and then tries to turn the black into white and the big lie into a "truth" glorified by millions.

Long history of anti-Christianity

Does anyone still remember the fate of the depopulated Christian villages of Iqrit and Bir'im in the Galilee, which Israeli forces expelled their Christian inhabitants in 1948? Four 64 years, the banished inhabitants who had been dispersed all over the region and beyond pleaded to successive Israeli governments to allow them to return to their ancestral homes and land, but to no avail.

Israeli courts ruled on several occasions in favor of the villagers, but the Zionist establishment stubbornly refused to heed the rulings as Zionist leaders argued that carrying out the rulings would open up a Pandora's box for Israel, an allusion to millions of Palestinians uprooted from their homes and villages when Israel was created in 1948.

But the special hatred (and contempt) of Christians by Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, goes deep in history and certainly precedes modern Zionism by numerous centuries.

According to Yisrael Shahak, author of Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred toward Christianity, combined with ignorance about it. He argues that Jewish hatred of Christianity, though partly aggravated by Christian persecution of Jews, was mainly religious and theological in nature.

According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority.

Shahak, who died at the age of 68 in 2001, clarified that all classical Jewish sources which mentioned Jesus' execution were quite happy to take responsibility for it. Jesus is also accused in the Talmud of witchcraft, a charge the punishment for which is death.

"The very name Jesus was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists. The Gospels are equally detested, and they are not allowed to be quoted, let alone taught, even in modern Israeli Jewish schools."

Christianity is classified as a pagan, idolatrous religion by most if not all Orthodox rabbis. Israel firsters will not intimate this fact to their naïve but hysterical Christian Zionist evangelical allies.

Nor will they tell them that whenever an orthodox Jew mentions the name Jesus, he or she must recite the following curse: "May his name is damned, and memory erased." Would people like Pat Robertson and John Hagee, who pretend to be the spiritual guardians of Christianity, or even the Holy See, approach their Jewish friends and plead to them to see to it that this vulgar literature is expurgated from the Talmud or at least not taught in hundreds of Yishivot or Talmudic schools throughout Israel. Or perhaps these Zionist or Zionized "Christian" leaders are too pusillanimous to raise such "divisive issues."

Chesronot Shas

Some of the most vulgar anti-Christian passages in the Talmud are called "Chesronot Shas," literally the "Omissions of Shas." The omissions were originally omitted from the Talmud in the middle ages for fear of upsetting Christians, especially in Europe.

However, when Israel was created in 1948, Chesronot Shas were reincorporated into the Talmud. The Hebrew translation of the originally Aramaic passages can now be purchased in any large bookstore in Israel.

Rabbis try hard to avoid as much as possible any public discussion of Chesronot Shas, also spelled Hesronot Shas, for fear of drawing stringent Christian reactions. However, it has been established that the omissions use the most vulgar and abusive epithets to describe Jesus and his mother, such as calling him "the son of a prostitute and a Roman soldier, who learned witchcraft in Egypt and who beguiled Jews to worship him as an idol." Jesus, who is called Balaam the son of Beor the soothsayer, is also boiling in a huge cauldron in hell, full of excrement and human semen.

Hence, one can safely claim that Jewish and Judaic hostility to Christianity is inherent and intrinsic and transcends all Christian pogroms, including the holocaust.

Hitler of Bethlehem

A few years ago, I was discussing religion with a prominent rabbi in the southern West Bank. I was dumbfounded when the otherwise bland rabbi referred to Jesus as "Hitler of Bethlehem." I had to terminate the conversation because as a Muslim, I was not supposed to tolerate any bad mouthing about Jesus and other prophets of God, including also Noah, Abraham, Moses, Muhammed, and others.

But I discovered that even 2000 years later, many Jews are not willing to forgive Jesus and still relating rather gleefully And vengefully to his "execution." (to be honest, we Muslims don't believe in the crucifixion story altogether) .

A few years ago, settler youngsters near Hebron chased a number of totally innocuous Christian Peace activists, hurling stones at them and telling them "we killed your God, you Nazis"!!

Some of the rabbis tried to restraint the youngsters, telling them that what they were saying would find its way to TV Screens in Christian countries such as the United States and would seriously damage Israel's image.

But the insolent youngsters, who routinely assaulted unprotected Palestinian civilians, wouldn't give a damn about hasbara and PR because "Jews control these nations anyway!!"

There is no doubt that Jewish hostility, dormant or otherwise, to Christianity is being deliberately kept secret as much as possible by much of the media in the West. This per se constitutes a conspiracy. After all, why of all themes and subject, Talmudic perceptions of Christianity and Christians remain more or less a taboo in western scholarship?

Indeed, the CBS story, a merely 12-minutes of understated facts, represents an exceptional anomaly in the western media treatment of the systematic Israeli persecution of Palestinian Christians. It is also clear, that the more religious and nationalist Israel becomes, the more aggressive and hostile toward Christians it will be.

Many Christians around the world may not be in the mood to listen to this "strange warning." However, the drought of Christians from the Holy Land, which many fear will reach a terminal stage in the foreseeable future, should awaken concerned Christians and others from their self-imposed dormancy.

I am saying this because, without the Christians of Palestine, an original part of Palestine would be missing. And Palestine wouldn't be the same without its Christian component.