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 In the media's Middle Eastern coverage it wouldn't be Christmas without the usual seasonal run of stories on how Bethlehem's Christians are suffering because of Israel. These stories will occasionally admit that the number of Christians dropped drastically under the Palestinian Authority, not under Israeli rule, but this doesn't stop them from running the usual smear campaign. The Wall Street Journal (via Debbie Schlussel) has an excellent rebuttal 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. This kind of "honest reporting" however is a rarity among the usual roll call of pieces attacking Israel, while giving Fatah and Hamas terrorists a pass. The majority of the stories blame Israel for "scaring away" tourists, not the terrorists, whose latest attack murdered a father of 7 yesterday. Israel has been accused of deliberately impoverishing Bethlehem by ensuring tourists visiting the town spend as little as possible. And they do face danger as soon as they enter the area, because they're entering territory effectively run by a terrorist organization with no independent judiciary or legal government, whose police force doubles as a terrorist militia. As visitors draw close to the city from nearby Jerusalem, they encounter Israel's separation wall, built in 2003 to protect against terrorist attacks, and checkpoints manned by soldiers. Possibly Adnan should be taking his complaint to the terrorists who run the area and continue to carry out terrorist attacks, thereby turning it into a war zone. Or perhaps the foreign diplomats and reporters who enable them. Israeli officials said they have done everything possible to encourage tourists to go to Bethlehem as a way of promoting peace. Rafa Ben-Hur, the deputy director-general of the Israeli tourism ministry, said: ''If we didn't encourage people to come to Bethlehem from Jerusalem, I don't think you would see the numbers you have now.'' The bottom line is that if the locals wanted to keep tourists there, they could. Anyone coming to Bethlehem has already spent a good deal of money to get there. They're open to staying around. The reasons they don't want are directly connected to Fatah. Naturally the Guardian is still running the usual Pro-Hamas propaganda pieces, one from Austen Ivereigh, the disgraced former press secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster, who was forced to resign after the Daily Mail revealed that Austen Ivereigh had an affair that caused his girlfriend to have an abortion. Austen Ivereigh's defense at the time was: "When I represent the Church's teaching on abortion, there was no hypocrisy on my part. To say that abortion is the taking of human life is not to condemn anyone who has had one." This kind of bizarre moral double standard however has not stopped Austen Ivereigh from condemning Israel and going from the press secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster, to being the press secretary to an Islamist terrorist group. Within spitting distance of the very spot Jesus Christ was born is one of the world's great monstrosities, "a symbol of everything wrong with the human heart" as the Archbishop of Canterbury described it when he saw it for himself. Naturally this quote does not go on Saudi Arabia's dehumanizing treatment of women, Hamas talking about bringing back crucifixion, or you know, bullying a woman into having an abortion... No it's about Israel's passive border defenses against Islamic terrorism. Walls don't just divide: they corrupt the soul, allowing myths to suppurate. One is that Christians are being "driven out" by Islamic extremism. What nonsense. They have coexisted peacefully with Muslims for centuries, and the Hamas government has done nothing to disenfranchise the Palestinian Christian population. Of course, peaceful co-existance. But one might be driven to ask why a former Christian region became a Muslim one? Was it the sudden enthusiasm for Christians to convert to Islam. And what shall we say of the peaceful co-existence represented by the Assyrian Holocaust and the Armenian genocide? Nonsense, indeed. Perhaps Austen Ivereigh should go ask the dead how well they co-existed with their murderers. Bethlehem is shuttered and depressed not because of Koran-wielding thugs but because the wall has smashed its economy... Jerusalem, Bethlehem's lifeline, a mere 20-minute drive away, is now barred to West Bank Arabs; unemployment in Bethlehem is above 50 percent. That strangulation, and that alone, is the reason why Christians make up just a third of the district's population. The wonder is that so many stay. Of course playing his part to the hilt, Austen Ivereigh completely ignores why the area under Palestinian control is cut off, because of Islamic terrorism. But let's say that Bethlehem's decline was caused purely by being cut off by the wall. Why then was Bethlehem's Christian population marginal even before the wall went up? Furthermore if the problem is the wall, then why has only the Christian population decline, while the Muslim population increased. This is an even tougher question because Christians have tended to run local businesses, while Muslims are more likely to travel to work on construction in Jerusalem. Clearly much as Austen Ivereigh would like to pretend otherwise, this is not about the wall. It's about Islam. But let's hear it from the son of a Hamas leader himself, who became a Christian. It takes a few seconds to digest this sight: The son of a Hamas MP who is also the most popular figure in that extremist Islamic organization, a young man who assisted his father for years in his political activities, has become a rank-and-file Christian. "I'm now called Joseph," he says at the outset. And there's the peaceful co-existance of Christians with Muslims in Iraq. Where they're co-existing so peacefully that Christmas has been canceled altogether. Now isn't that peaceful? Christians in the Iraqi city have opted not to celebrate Christmas this year, since Ashura, a major Shi'ite day of mourning, falls on the same day. So out of "respect" for the local Shi'ites, Chaldean Catholic Bishop Imad Al Banna asked all Christians in Basra not to engage in any public celebration of Christmas, and not even to entertain guests or show any joy in the day. ...clearly Israel's wall is to blame for this. Not Islam. And behind all the circuses, the phony posturing about Israeli checkpoints and the WALL (Horror of horrors, an actual wall) here is a reminder of why the wall is there. Why the checkpoints are there. Not apartheid or deliberate humiliation or some conspiracy... it's simple self-defense. And when that self-defense is relaxed, innocent people die. Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai left the community of Einav at 4:30 PM Thursday and drove toward his home in Shavei Shomron. Terrorists in a car that overtook him opened heavy fire at him. Ten bullets hit Meir in the head. He was mortally wounded and died a few minutes later. This is what happens when the checkpoints are removed. Terrorists use that as a chance to kill. And then the checkpoints go up again and the world cries tearfully for Israel to stop humiliating the poor oppressed Palestinians. And the checkpoints go down, and more people are murdered. Over and over again. And who killed Rabbi Meir Chai? Was it some small lone band of extremists condemned by moderate Muslims? Get real. He was killed by members of Fatah's security forces. The same police forces who provide "security" in Bethlehem. The announcement by the Al Aksa Martyrs organization that its men are the ones who killed Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai raises some difficult questions, when one bears in mind that the United States assists the Fatah organization through military training under the supervision of Gen. Keith Dayto This is what madness looks like. This is what appeasing terrorism looks like. And this is the least of the reasons why there is a wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Because Bill Clinton insisted that Israel import tens of thousands of terrorists and give them an autonomous state inside its borders. Because 3 Presidents have supported, armed and trained the terrorists of that terrorist state known as the Palestinian Authority. And 5 Israel Prime Ministers have done their part too, to enable the "moderate" terrorists over the "extremist" terrorists. That is why no one is safe in Israel anymore. That is why there are checkpoints and guards and walls. A fact that the usual mix of liberal Churches who wail over Bethlehem will never acknowledge or admit. Here meanwhile is how the avatar of the liberal press, the New York Times via the AP covered the story of the murder of Rabbi Chai. West Bank: Israeli Settler Killed That's it. Israeli settler. Not father, not human being. Just "settler". An Israeli man was shot to death in the West Bank on Thursday. A little-known militant group identifying itself as a faction of the Fatah movement of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, claimed responsibility for the attack, in an e-mail message to journalists. Israel Radio identified the victim as a 45-year-old resident of a nearby Israeli settlement. Christmas celebrations proceeded without incident in Bethlehem. Isn't it wonderful that they proceeded without incident. The murder of Rabbi Chai furthermore takes place in the context of Israel accepting a 10 month settlement building freeze on the area, as a "confidence building" measure for the Palestinian Authority, which not only did not return to the negotiating table, but exploited Israel's relaxation of checkpoints to commit murder. Will this stop the freeze? I rather doubt it. In other news, there's a suspicious fireworks incident abroad a plane traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit, one of America's largest Muslim areas. Of course there's no way to know the identity or whether this was intended to cause any harm, but it should be on our radar. A passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight Friday from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan, caused a brief disturbance at the end of the trip by igniting several firecrackers, according to a Delta Air Lines spokeswoman. The good news is that the passengers, even in 2009, still reacted immediately. Meanwhile Atlas comments on the story of the Taliban Christmas video. The timing of course is no accident at all. The Muslims Against Sharia blog has Alan Caruba's response to Jimmy Carter's non-apology apology. The news of the day before Christmas is that former President Jimmy Carter has apologized for anything he has said or done to offend America’s Jewish community and presumably around the world. I also have nothing but contempt for Foxman, who is mainly interested in getting his name in the paper at every opportunity. I have very little interest in Carter's apologies, like most Jews I want him to simply leave us alone. And that's clearly not something he has any interest in doing. His attempt to form a phony common ground through sanctimonious religious language is all too typical of the hypocritical piety of his presidency. And we've had enough of it. Debbie Schlussel is just as disdainful of Carter's apology. Carter's views don't necessarily reflect on his grandson, but neither is the association a comfortable one. The Baron at Gates of Vienna wonders if it isn't the economic downturn in Dubai that's getting to him. At Sheikyermani, India's Home minister tells us what we knew all along. Religion of peace, my ass. And then there's this issue. A couple of months ago I wrote about Michelle Malkin's site posting an anti-semitic Vdare article in the Buzzworthy section. I wrote it off as a possible accident, but it's happened again. And this time the content is much less ambiguous. I am a little baffled, because Malkin's position has generally been pro-Israel, which makes it odd that she would link to a hatefilled pro-terrorist rant from 9/11 Truther, Paul Craig Roberts. At the time I wrote her an email, without ever receiving a response. Maybe the Buzzworthy section is produced by some random feed selection. But the title would seem to indicate otherwise. And this is a problem that would not exist if Malkin was not associated with the Vdare site in the first place, a site that's tough on immigration, but otherwise slightly to the left of David Duke and far to the right of even Buchanan. This isn't a question of PC. This is allying yourself with the men in the peaked white caps whose views on Islamic terrorism are often virtually indistinguishable from the far left. At Tundra Tabloids there's an important essay on the paralyzing effect of so-called moderate Islamism If we look at the concept, it becomes apparent that Islamism - with it's many different names like radical Islam, political Islam, or militant Islam - is just a made-up concept created in the west for the purpose of supporting another, equally imaginary concept called moderate Islam - also known as true Islam or worldly Islam. At Israpundit, Bill Levinson asks, What if Obama's Policies Lead to a Nuclear Holocaust At Reflexiones, Ana has a Spanish language translation of my article on the Macabees and Chanukah The New Centrist remembers a real life hero, Bernard Goetz On this day twenty-five years ago, Bernhard Goetz pulled the trigger on four thugs who were about to rob him. For some, this made him an outlaw, a criminal, even a “racist”. For others, a hero. And that is a model for all of us. Finally, the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors has a campaign on behalf of UN Watchdogs targeted by the UN. There is a sample letter, and more information at CJHS's Facebook page and Twitter account. I urge you to take a closer look, because if the UN can silence UN watchdog groups and figures such as Anne Bayefsky, they will operate completely immune from accountability. On November 5th the Security Office of UN Secretary-General Ban  |
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