By Lela Gilbert

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/24/silence-is-deafening-as-attacks-on-christians-continue-to-grow/

The sights, sounds and scents of Jerusalem are kaleidoscopic and ever changing. When I first arrived in Israel in 2006, I realized that it would take a lifetime to see and appreciate the endless array of cityscapes, holy sites, museums, gardens, archeological digs and – most wonderful of all – the colorful people that surrounded me.

I suppose that’s why I wasn’t all that impressed at the sight of some ugly, spray-painted graffiti a friend pointed out to me in Bethlehem. “It’s Arabic,” she explained. “And it means, ‘First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.’”

“And that means…what?”

“It’s a jihadi slogan. It means, more accurately, ‘On Saturday we kill the Jews; on Sunday we kill the Christians.’”

That was outrageous. But like a lot of new things, it was soon eclipsed by other discoveries. In fact, I forgot about it altogether till I attended IDC’s Herzliya Conference in 2009 – an annual policy and strategy gathering. That year, I wandered into a panel discussion about something I’d never heard of –  “The Forgotten Refugees.”

 

 

I was bewildered watching panelists and participants, who were speaking with great emotion about Jews – often themselves and their families – who fled Muslim lands between 1948 and 1970. What were they talking about?

Short version: after seeing their friends and loved ones imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed, 850,000 Jews left behind their homes and millennia of history with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Many are now in Israel.

But it wasn’t until I actually began to research the story of those “Forgotten Refugees” that I began to understand the slogan: “On Saturday we kill the Jews.” Why? Because with virtually no Jews left to persecute in those Muslim countries, “On Sunday we kill the Christians.”

A few examples:

In 1948 there were about 135,000 Jews in Iraq. Today less than 10 Jews remain.

Since 2003, more than half of Iraq’s Christian population of 800,000 has fled. One horrific church bombing October 31, 2010, killing 58, made the news. But there was much more. As international human rights lawyer Nina Shea testified in a Congressional hearing:

“…In August 2004…five churches were bombed in Baghdad and Mosul.  On a single day in July 2009, seven churches were bombed in Baghdad…The Archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped and killed in early 2008.  A bus convoy of Christian students were violently assaulted. Christians…have been raped, tortured, kidnapped, beheaded, and evicted from their homes…”   

In 1948, there were some 100,000 Jews in Egypt. Today there are less than 50.
Since late 2010, Egypt’s Coptic Christian community – 8,000,000 strong – has been under assault – tens of thousands have fled.

In recent months, the Christians have been blamed for the demise of the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime.

In the span of just three days, between August 14 and 16, 38 Churches were destroyed; 23 were vandalized. Fifty-eight Coptic homes were burned and looted. Eighty-five Copt-owned shops, 16 pharmacies and 3 hotels were demolished. Six Christians were killed; seven Copts were kidnapped.

In 1948, there were around 30,000 Jews in Syria. Today less than a dozen remain.

Now hundreds of thousands of Syrian Christians have fled; others are bleeding and dying, often targeted by Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels who demand that they convert to Islam or die.

And elsewhere? Just this past Saturday, a massacre in a Nairobi mall took the lives of 68 people. Their al-Shabab killers ordered all Muslims to safely leave the scene; they shot the rest.

On Sunday, more than 80 Pakistani Christians were killed in a church bombing.

Jewish friends, neighbors and colleagues are shocked but not entirely surprised by such stories. They are rather puzzled, however, by what appears to be a lack of anxiety, action or advocacy on the part of Western Christians.

“Yes, it’s horrific,” we seem to be saying, “But what can we do?”

If we Sunday people are indeed concerned about the survival of our ancient communities in the Middle East, we may want to heed the advice of the Saturday people:

Pray as if everything depends on God. And act as if everything depends on you.

 

Lela Gilbert is author of “Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner” and co-author, with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, of “Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.” She is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Instituteand lives in Jerusalem. For more, visit her website:www.lelagilbert.com.

By Julie Stahl and Scott Ross
CBN News Jerusalem Bureau
Friday, July 26, 2013
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http://www.cbn.com/tv/2566061630001

JERUSALEM, Israel — Persecution of Jews and persecution of Christians: Is there a link between the two? Journalist Lela Gilbert says yes.

Gilbert has written extensively about the global assault on Christians around the world. She recently spoke with CBN’s Scott Ross about her latest book, Saturday People, Sunday People.

The California author arrived in Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon for a three-month visit. Today, she spends much of her time in Jerusalem. She shared with Ross about radical Islamic plans to first rid the Middle East of Jews and then of Christians.

But first, she said she has noticed that persecution by Islamists is not the only challenge for Christians in Jerusalem.

Disunity Among Christians

Ross: There are many Christian sects, denominations, etc, in this Land, how are they doing with one another?

Gilbert: Not too well. They’re not doing much better than the ones in America.

Ross: It was Nehemiah that said, look we’re divided on the wall one from another and how are they going to do battle if they don’t have one mind and one strategy, one approach to everything? One! Jesus prayed it.

Gilbert: You know you’ve got Christians arguing about prophecy, I mean, evangelicals arguing about all kinds of things, much less the old churches who have ancient rifts within themselves – that go back to the fourth century. So it’s not surprising but what we know is that we all look pretty much the same through a jihadi rifle site. And maybe we need to remember that.

Ross: Are you hopeful?

Gilbert: I’m hopeful because of my faith in the Lord and in His way of working things out. Politically, I can’t understand what’s going to happen…my hope is in Him…He’s worked in my life in so many miraculous ways that I have to believe He’s going to work amongst His people and bring them together and protect them.

Her New Book

Ross: And now out of all this, a book. I was fascinated by the title define that significance.

Gilbert: It’s graffiti from radical Islamists that appears throughout the Middle East. In the best terms it says, “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday.” But there’s a flag, a photo of a flag in the book that says, “On Saturday we kill the Jews, on Sunday we kill the Christians.” And that’s where I got the title.

Gilbert said even though many of the world’s Muslims are not violent, their voice is drowned out by radical elements.

 

Buy the Book:
ShopCBN: Saturday People, Sunday People

Event, July 19:

Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner

http://www.heritage.org/events/2013/07/saturday-people

Long fascinated by the land of Israel, Lela Gilbert arrived there on a personal pilgrimage in August 2006 – in the midst of a raging war. In Saturday People, Sunday People, she offers a unique portrait of Israel as seen through the eyes of a Christian who came for a visit and has stayed on for more than six years. While most people see Israel as an abstraction centering on international conflicts of epic proportions, Gilbert reflects on the vibrant country that she found – a story of the real Israel and of real Israelis.
Gilbert weaves together not only a memoir of her experiences, but also a rich account of past and present events that continue to shape the lives of Israelis and the world beyond their borders. Included is a story that has all but vanished into history: the persecution and pogroms that drove more than 850,000 Jews from Muslim lands between 1948 and 1970 – the “Forgotten Refugees.” Their experience is now repeating itself among Christian communities in the same region – a cruel pattern that embodies the Islamist slogan calling for the elimination of “first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”

Lela Gilbert is a free-lance writer and editor and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Included among her previous books are: Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (co-authored, Thomas Nelson, 2013), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion (co-authored, Oxford University Press, 2008), and Baroness Cox: Eyewitness to a Broken World (Lion-Hudson, 2007). She is a contributor to numerous news publications including the Jerusalem Post, The Weekly Standard, Jewish World Review, and National Review Online (NRO).

Link to original story.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/saturday-people-sunday-people-ruth-king.html

June 1, 2013

An underreported tragedy of the Middle East is the persecution and exodus of Christian communities that have lived there for centuries, some for millennia, well before the advent of Islam.  The irony is that today Israel is the only country where the Christian population is growing. The sorry exception is in the Arab controlled regions of Judea and Samaria.

Lela Gilbert, in her inspiring book Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes ofa Christian Sojourner, describes her life in a country she came to visit but now makes her home.

Although Gilbert grew up in a family supportive of Israel, for her the defining moment was Israel’s triumph in the 1967 War–whose 46th anniversary will be celebrated on June 5th this year.        She watched with concern as, in the following decades,  Israel’s enemies increased in number, with Muslims joined by fellow travellers throughout the world, including the leadership of the mainline churches who shrugged off the fiercest faith driven diatribes against Jews, Christians and other “infidels.”

Alarmed by these trends, in 2006 Gilbert decided to visit the land that fascinated her as a writer and as a practicing Christian. To her family’s surprise and to Israel’s great benefit, Gilbert would be no ordinary tourist. She rented a flat in Jerusalem and began her sojourn. She currently divides her time between Jerusalem and California.

What is amazing about this book is the way Lela Gilbert resonates to Israel’s dangers, its security concerns, its diversity,  its army, its vitality and its destiny, feeling them as her own. In her words: “….I came with the conviction that an assault upon Jews is an implicit assault upon Christians, since it strikes at the root of the same ancient tree.”       She experiences the hypocrisy, the lies and libels of the world’s  “enlightened” elite; she feels horror at the unspeakable jihadist terrorists who murdered the Fogel family including women and babies in their beds.  She absorbs “the heavy weight of sadness pressed against the whole country.” She also has witnessed the fear of Christians in PA-ruled Bethlehem,  similar to the fear of Christians throughout the Muslim world–in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Lela Gilbert also experiences the holiness of Israel, the eternal miracle of the Sabbath in Jerusalem,  the joys of Passover and Sukkot, the renewal and commitment of Tisha B’av and the optimism that pulses through Israel with the belief that the best is still to come.

With the Bible as her GPS, Gilbert has visited every corner of Israel and spoken to Israelis–and Arabs–from every background. She has visited the “settlements” of Judea and Samaria–from the handsome villas of the towns to the hilltop “outposts” where she  went to ancient wine cellars as well as new vineyards on the windswept hills.  In Gilbert’s words: “For a number of reasons, the passage in the bible referring to the Israelites coming into the land and claiming their land has held important personal meaning for me.”

Ruthie Blum, the American born Israeli journalist and our mutual friend, has described Lela Gilbert thus: “Lela is what I call ‘one of us.’ She gets it about America, and she gets it about Israel. She is a rare breed who, upon her arrival in Israel, immediately grasped that the issues in both countries are very similar. It is not only that, as a pro-Israel Christian, she has a belief in the justice of the Jewish homeland. It’s more complicated than that. She actually understands the threat to democracy and free cultures that radical Islam poses. Aside from that, she managed to become socially enmeshed in Jerusalem society in a way that even many Jews who immigrate here have difficulty doing. She’s a real treasure.”

Gilbert writes that during her first days in Israel she visited a shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. The owner was curious about her as a writer and as a Christian who would come during the war in Lebanon. He gave her a gift–a silver Star of David–with the words: “It is my way of saying thank you for being with us.”

I can only add “Thank you Lela Gilbert, for this book.”

http://balfourpost.com/a-scandal-no-religious-freedom-on-jerusalems-temple-mount/

To the dismay of Israel’s religious community, Jews were once again banned from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount last Thursday (May 16). And, sadly, no one in Israel was the least bit surprised.

Because of the sanctity of the temple that reigned there centuries ago, the Temple Mount is the most sacred site in Judaism. Christians also hold great reverence for the area, thanks to myriad New Testament references relating to the life and ministry of Jesus in and around the temple.

Nonetheless, both Jews and Christians are frequently barred from visiting the Temple Mount Plaza. And both groups are always forbidden to read their scriptures, carry holy items, sing or pray there for fear of offending Muslim sensitivities.

On Wednesday, May 15, Jews celebrated Shavuot – one of three pilgrimage holidays on the religious calendar during which Jews historically traveled to the temple; they still gather from all around the world in Jerusalem.

This year, a visit was planned for a group of Jewish school children to mark the holiday at the Temple Mount. Muslim groups were incensed by the plan; they warned of violence if the children appeared.

Indeed, in recent weeks, there has been increasing anger in the Muslim world focusing on the Temple Mount’s Al-Aqsa Mosque: a flurry of rumors reported Jewish desecration of Al-Aqsa, including “storming” of the mosque, plotting to destroy it, or otherwise doing it harm. This is nothing new – such libels have long served as a trigger for protests, stone-throwing, rioting and, occasionally, massacres.

In recent years, Muslim groups have also reacted explosively to what they describe as the “Judaization” of the Temple Mount – as if Judaism having something to do with the Temple Mount were an late 20th Century innovation. In fact, several prominent Arab leaders have denied that a Jewish Temple ever existed there, introducing a real innovation – “Temple Denial” –  to the discussion. The Muslim Brotherhood’s most prominent cleric, Yusuf Qaradawi, stated during a recent visit to Gaza, “Palestine was never Jewish…Palestine is Arab and Muslim and will remain Arab and Muslim, and Islam will prevail.”

Qaradawi isn’t alone in his convictions. Yasser Arafat, during the Camp David accords in 2000, denied that any Jewish Temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount. Former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross described the incident in an interview with Brit Hume,

…at Camp David [in the summer of 2000] we did not put a comprehensive set of ideas on the table. We put ideas on the table that would have affected the borders and would have affected Jerusalem. Arafat could not accept any of that. In fact, during the 15 days there, he never himself raised a single idea. His negotiators did, to be fair to them, but he didn’t. The only new idea he raised at Camp David was that the Temple didn’t exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus… This is the core of the Jewish faith…he was denying the core of the Jewish faith there. [Emphasis added]

In 1996, the Muslim Waqf (custodians of the site) began a huge and highly controversial reconstruction project, digging out and enlarging the al-Marwani Mosque, which lies underground, beneath the al-Aqsa. As the digging progressed, by night the Waqf clandestinely removed 400 truckloads of artifact-rich earth and dumped it in landfills.

In the years that followed, those truckloads of earth were discovered, traced, reclaimed, and continue to be sifted through by Israeli archeologist Gabriel Barkay and a team of experts and volunteers. “At least it enables us to look at the soil,” Barkay explains, “although everything comes from a very disturbed context. But we know it comes from the Temple Mount. And we have tens of thousands of finds.”

One very significant find – one that refutes Temple Denial – is that of a bulla, a lump of clay bearing a seal impression, which is about 2,600 years old and dates from the First Temple Period. It bears the name of an official, Gadaliyahu son of Immer. The Immer family is recorded in the Bible, in the 20th chapter of the book of Jeremiah, verse 1.

Meanwhile, Jewish activists have increased their protests, growing increasingly belligerent about being forbidden to worship on the Temple Mount. And at last they have been heard.

On May 8, The Times of Israel reported, “the Knesset’s Interior Committee, headed by Likud MK Miri Regev, debated the long-standing unofficial ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount….At the meeting Elhanan Glatt, the director general of the Religious Affairs Ministry, said that his ministry was examining the possibility of revising the informal ban on Jewish prayer at the site.”

Unsurprisingly, these moves have exacerbated rumors, rage and resentment in the Muslim world. False tales about alleged Jewish assaults on Al-Aqsa appear nearly every day in the Arab media. Faced with further intimidation, will Israel’s lawmakers find the courage to change the rules?

In the eyes of many, forbiddance of non-Muslim prayer on the Temple Mount is a scandal. This is true not only for people of faith, but also for those who find what is termed an “informal” ban on Jewish and Christian prayer – a ban quite “formally” enforced by uniformed police officers – to be outrageous. Israel has always prided itself in carefully protecting the holy sites of Jews, Christians and Muslims.

How is it that the Jewish State has somehow allowed a Saudi Arabiaesque forbiddance of religious freedom on Judaism’s holiest site?

*
Lela Gilbert is a journalist and author of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner (Encounter, 2012) and co-author of Persecuted: the Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson, 2013). She is an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and lives in Jerusalem

The Cultural Intifada and Temple Denial – on The Glazov Gang
April 12, 2013 By Frontpagemag.com

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Lela Gilbert, author of Saturday People, Sunday People, actor Dwight Schultz (DwightSchultzFansite.tv) and Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.

The Gang members gathered to discuss The Cultural Intifada and Temple Denial. The dialogue occurred in Part I and focused on Islamists’ gambit to de-Judaize the Jewish state. The discussion was part of the Gang’s reflection on Lela Gilbert’s book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. Ms. Gilbert shared what brought her to Israel, the Israelis’ warm reception of her, and why, as Dr. Gabriel Barkay imparted to her, “Temple Denial is more dangerous and serious than Holocaust Denial.”

Part II dealt mostly with Saturday People, Sunday People, focusing on the dire lessons of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the trauma that Israeli citizens, including children, have suffered from Palestinian terror, Jimmy Carter’s Jew-Hate, and the world’s blind spot: the forgotten exodus of 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.

The segment ended on a reflection on Margaret Thatcher and the powerful way in which she shaped her era.

To watch both parts of the two-part series, see below:

Part I:

Part II:

Link to original post
You can make sure that Jamie Glazov Productions continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by clicking here and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of The Glazov Gang, click here.

Two Books and an Agenda

by Shoshana Bryen

http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/4066/saturday-people-sunday-people

The Western temptation to view the Middle East and North Africa as part of the “Muslim World,” of which the “Arab World” is a subset, makes politics simpler but does a disservice to what has historically been a multi-cultural, religious, and ethnic region. It also provides cover for the systematic assault on minority communities by the dominant Arab and Muslim cultures. If the West doesn’t know minorities are there, it won’t notice when they disappear. And they are disappearing.

Iraq, for example, is both Arab and Muslim—but there are non-Arab Kurds, Assyrians and Turkmen, and smaller groups of Azeris, Georgians, Armenians, Roma, Chechens, Circassians, Mhallami, and Persians. There are non-Muslim Christians, Mandeans, Yazidis, Yarsan, Shabak, Zoroastrians, and Bahais. The Jewish community dated from before the Common Era. But in 2011, Wikileaks published the names of what were reported to be the last seven, in hiding while they planned to leave. Iran is considered Persian, but nearly 40% of the Iranian population consists of Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Lurs, Baloch and Turkmen, Kazakhs and Qashqai. The percentage of ethnic Persians is actually rising slightly as others leave.

The percentage of non-Muslim people is declining precipitously—as many as half of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have left the country since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam. The Persian Jewish community, dating from the time of the Bible, continues to shrink from 100-150,000 in 1948 to 80,000 in 1979, to 8,756 today according to a 2012 census.

The lack of official and unofficial tolerance for “the other” is part of the reason the “Arab Spring” soured so quickly. Western ignorance or complacency remains a contributing factor.

Lela Gilbert, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a free-lance writer, brings the systematic decimation of Christian communities in the Middle East to the attention of the West in her new book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. It is actually two books and an agenda.

The first book is about Gilbert’s much-longer-than-planned visit to Jerusalem and her exploration of Israel. The second is about the decimation of Arab Christian communities, the follow-on to the expulsion of Jewish communities in the 20th Century. This explains her choice of the title, borrowed from radical Muslims who have long used the phrase, “First the Saturday people; then the Sunday people.” Gilbert examines both tragedies with great respect. The agenda is to use the Jewish history in Arab lands as a cautionary tale to sound the alarm about the increasingly monolithic Muslim Middle East, and to create a Christian-Jewish alliance to face Muslim violence against minorities.

The First Book

Gilbert came to Israel during the 2006 Lebanon war and learned that much of what she thought she knew about Israel wasn’t so. She stayed longer than planned, visiting Christian and Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem and in the North, visiting Sderot under Hamas rocket fire, Bethlehem and a “settlement.” She met and interviewed Israelis of all stripes. Her blunt and outspoken belief in the political rightness and essential humanity of Israel is refreshing and her wide-eyed astonishment with the media’s unfairness is almost shocking. A cynic might say it is rose-colored glasses—after all, Jerusalem does that to people—but it will come as a relief to those who have been talking about media and political bias for years. It is refreshing to have someone look at Israel with new eyes and see what many others have seen and write about it with such elegance. She captures sights, smells, and insights about the Jewish calendar, Jewish holidays, and her Jewish and Arab neighbors with appreciation and respect.

Aware of the persecution of European Jews, Gilbert discovers the Jewish refugees from Arab countries by accident: “So why hadn’t I heard about this ‘forgotten exodus’ before? I’d been in Israel for a few years by then. I’d read half a dozen lengthy histories of Israel or histories of the Jewish people, yet they had barely mentioned such a monstrous event. Why had nearly a million refugees fallen off the radar screen?”

She turns her attention to them and their progeny in a series of vignettes about Sephardic Jews, contrasting the relative obscurity of their stories with the exposure of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. “Hardly a day passes when the subject of the millions of Palestinians refugees seeking a ‘right of return’ to their lost properties—or compensation for them—isn’t discussed in relation to Middle East peace negotiations… the story of their losses and their controversial politicization is a familiar subject… Meanwhile, a different refugee story… is far less familiar.”

One Iraqi-born Israeli explains why: “I’ll tell you something about Iraqi Jews—in fact probably about Jews in general. We never look back. We always look forward. I’m not going to go back and claim a house, which used to be mine 40 or 50 years ago. I really couldn’t care less. I live for the future. The European Jews were the same way after the Holocaust. If you look back, you never go forward.”

The stories of Muslim persecution of Jews in Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria segue seamlessly into tales of Muslim persecution of Christians in the same places.

The Second Book

The stories in the second book are ugly. Described in detail is the almost unreported 2010 massacre in the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad, in which 57 people including two priests and many children were killed during Mass. There is the 2012 incident in Mosul in which, “motorcycle-riding killers struck a Catholic priest’s family, breaking into the residence through a back entrance. They murdered Fr. Mazin Eshoo’s father and his two brothers, and raped his mother and his sister.” She describes the 2011 rampage in Cairo’s Maspero District in which at least 27 Copts were killed, and the harassment of converts in Morocco. The quiet decimation of the Bethlehem Christian community through intimidation by the PA government, Hamas, and assorted Muslim gangs gets a chapter of its own.

As she did with Jewish refugees, Gilbert provides historical background and then lets individual stories speak for themselves, either through persecuted individuals or through surviving family members. It was not necessary to juxtapose their tribulations against the horrific massacre of the Fogel parents and three of their six children 2011 in Itamar, but that is the segue to the third, and most uncomfortable, part of the book.

The Agenda

The last chapter, “Natural Allies in a Dangerous World,” postulates that Jews and Christians, as minorities, have to stand together to defend Israel and defend the remaining Christian communities of the Middle East. It is hard to argue against the proposition.

Gilbert has a sharp tongue for Muslim radicals and the politics of the Catholic Church. But she slides a little too lightly over the history of Christian-Jewish relations.

“Muslim hatred of Jews,” she writes, “is linked to hatred of Christians.” Radical Islamists, “demonstrate that, in their view, human life is of less value than the Islamic religion itself. Human beings—and their God-given breath of life—are found wanting in comparison to the sanctity of Islam’s holy book, the Quran. And the revered reputation of its prophet Mohammed. And calls to jihad—holy war—from radical leaders against non-Muslims.”

She calls out the Catholic Church’s political bias against Israel: “The Vatican’s Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops… chose to focus on the ‘Israeli occupation’ of Palestinian territories rather than naming the actual perpetrators of ongoing violence against Christians; radical Islamic terrorists,” adding, “The Vatican’s focus on Israel, rather than on radical Islam, as the root cause of abuses against Christians, is both disingenuous and destructive.”

But she engages in a bit of disingenuousness herself when she discovers that Bethlehem’s Christians have anti-Jewish attitudes no different from those of radical Muslims, and place blame on Israel no differently than does the Catholic Church. She lets them duck: “As the leaders of the Arab Christian churches place the blame for the dangers facing Arab Christians squarely on the shoulders of Israel, they never hint that the radical religious jihadis or ‘Islamic Mafia’…are extorting, threatening, falsely accusing and sometimes murdering Christian Arabs.”

Gilbert appears not to consider that the Catholic Church may blame Israel precisely because it fears that Islamic violence against local Christians might be exacerbated by taking Israel’s side. Nor does she consider that Arab Christians may really share Arab Muslim anti-Jewish attitudes. It can’t go all one way for the Catholic Church and all the other way for the Arab Christians.

Selective Lessons from History

Of Christian persecution of Jews she writes, “It has been true that Jews and Christians have hotly disputed religious disparities… A number of our differences cannot and should not be compromised for the sake of mutual understanding, and we will continue to agree to disagree.” What she posits as mutual antagonism historically led to Jewish—not Christian—persecution. The Spanish Inquisition, for example.

“[I]t cannot be overlooked that the bloodshed suffered by Jews at the hands of so-called Christians over many centuries is a matter of historical record.” So, even where Gilbert acknowledges who was on which end of the persecution, she won’t call the bad guys Christians; they are only “so-called.” That dodge—her apparent belief that “real” Christians wouldn’t kill Jews for theological reasons, but “real” Muslims would—is actually the reason that “bitter mistrust continues to this day.”

It would have been better to say outright that the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy and many practitioners treated Jews and Muslims precisely the way the Muslim ecclesiastical hierarchy and many practitioners treat Jews and Christians today—as people minimally in need of conversion and maximally doomed to die.

If that sounds churlish, it is only because Gilbert doesn’t then acknowledge the great efforts by various strong Church leaders over time who worked prodigiously to come to terms with and overcome the history of Christian persecution of Jews. Christians did not always appreciate them, but it is on the foundation of their work that Gilbert’s appreciation of Israel and the Jewish people stands.

A Natural Alliance

Saturday People, Sunday People is elegantly written, historically important, and politically relevant. Gilbert is correct that there is an immediate and deadly problem for Christian communities of the Middle East and that most of the world is ignorant of or unmoved by their plight.

Jews should be calling for the protection of minorities in the Middle East. Not because Jews were victims first, but because it is morally right, and because the growing intolerance of modern Muslims majorities will make it harder, if not impossible, for Arab and Muslim countries to find political openness and consensual government in the 21st century. The natural alliance is among people, individuals or groups of any religion or no religion, who understand that exclusionary and reactionary governments bode ill for their majorities and minorities alike.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center.

 

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Killed-Because-they-were-Copts-That-s-Enough-of-a-Crime