Ayoon Wa Azan (Israel’s Mistreatment of Christians)

Not a day goes by without me receiving information on the world’s aversion to Israel, its extremist policies and its fascist government and Nazi-like practices against the Palestinians. But the importance of this information lies in the fact that I do not seek it in the first place. This means that it would be many times more in volume if I otherwise did. Instead, I get this information from the Western newspapers which I read every day, and from the material published by the think tanks that I follow, as well as universities and churches, especially in the U.S. – and which require their followers to boycott and divest from Israel. Anti-Israeli sentiment is increasing year after year. A reputable public opinion survey in Europe had shown on the eve of the occupation of Iraq that Europeans consider Israel (and George W. Bush’s America) the biggest threat to world peace. Barack Obama’s America has managed to repair some of its reputation, while Israel’s remains in the gutter. A few days ago, I read a survey by the BBC that polled 25 thousand people in 22 countries. The results showed that Israel, North Korea and Iran are at the bottom of the list, with the respondents who saw Israel in a negative live numbering twice as many who saw it positively. Here, I would like to remind the readers that the supporters of Israel control major media outlets all around the world, unlike North Korea and Iran. And yet, the entire international media does not seem to be able to improve the image of the state of crime, racism and occupation. As such, the television show 60 Minutes on the U.S. network CBS recently carried a report on Israel’s mistreatment and persecution of Palestinian Christians, which reached such an extent that a majority of Christians has since emigrated, with their percentage in Palestine declining from five percent before the occupation and under the British Mandate of Palestine, to 2 percent today. The facts that the most important political program on U.S. television carried shocked that segment, or flock, of Evangelical Christians in the ‘Bible belt’ in the southern United Sates, where Israel enjoys a high level of support because of biblical myths. The program showed the other or real image of Israel. When the extremist Israeli ambassador Michael Oren tried to defend Israel, he only managed to further infuriate Christian Americans as he claimed that their churches are ‘known for their anti-Semitism’. In London, Hard Talk, a program broadcasted by the BBC, hosted the Jewish-American scholar Norman Finkelstein, the author of the Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein said that the Jewish-American love affair with Israel is now over, because the new young generation now knows more about what’s going on in Israel, and about the conditions of the Palestinians. Surveys also show that young Jewish Americans are not concerned by Israel, which they don’t perceive as a cause for them anymore. Incidentally, the known Holocaust merchant Simon Wiesenthal wants to build a museum of tolerance on a land in Jerusalem that also comprises a Muslim cemetery. I have with me an article written by Professor Rashid Khalidi, which conclusively proves the history of the cemetery. At present, there are sixty families with relatives buried there calling for it to be protected from destruction. The Khalidi family, just like the Nusseibeh family and countless other Palestinian families, along with the Christian Arab Ghassanids who ruled Jerusalem and whose realm extended to the Golan, can trace their presence in Palestine to both pre-Islamic and post-Islamic times. In other words, they are not mongrels like Avigdor Lieberman or the Russian immigrants like those who pretended to be Jewish to escape the ‘paradise’ of communism in their country. Does the reader want to hear more about what I found, without even asking for it? Well, I was surprised to find that the Mail on Sunday, one of the most prolific Sunday papers which sells millions of copies, published a two-page report entitled “1,600 on hunger strike and the world doesn’t even bat an eyelid”. The Mail on Sunday is a right-wing paper, and I do not recall it has ever expressed support for the Palestinians with such unambiguity before. The suffering of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike was also covered by a similar report in the liberal paper The Independent. So perhaps it was the stance taken by a right-wing newspaper and others regarding the hunger strike that forced Israel to urgently resolve the issue. But perhaps the clearest condemnation of Israel was the one that recently came from Peter Beinart, a Zionist who usually defends Israel. However, the man is a liberal, and his book ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ has infuriated extremists in both Israel and the United States, who then went on to launch sharp attacks against him, because he exposed the extremism from an insider’s angle, as he said that Israel has become an armed camp dedicated to repressing the Palestinians. Personally, I believe that Beinart’s book is as important as professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy – which was the beginning of the end of the lie called Israel. I will stop here, even though I have many times over the information I noted down today, which I hope that the reader will remember gathers up for me without my request.