The willful failure of progressive Christians to see the Muslim world and the Palestinian leadership as motivated by a triumphalist Islamic ethos, which is intolerant towards the religious and political rights of Christians and Jews (dhimmis, or subjected people as seen by conquering Islam), and parenthetically ignores Palestinian terrorism and unwillingness to recognize or make peace with the Jewish State, reveals their deep seated prejudice, if not their latent anti-Semitism.

The Christians for Israel message of love and their biblical quest for peace in Jerusalem are uplifting. It constitutes an antithesis to the hostility displayed by the so-called progressive Christians and authors of the Kairos USA towards the Jewish State.  This enmity is not accidental.  Rather, it is borne out of the progressive Christians’ contempt for Jewish particularism, which is manifested in the State of Israel.

A nun sounded the alarm that the Syrian conflict was becoming sectarian when she said that a Christian man was beheaded by Syrian rebels in the northern town of Ras al-Ayn on the Turkish border, and his body was fed to dogs, a British newspaper reported Monday.

Sister Agnes-Mariam de la Croix speaking from her sanctuary in Lebanon said the newlywed taxi driver, Andrei Arbashe, was kidnapped after his brother was heard complaining that the rebels fighting against beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad were behaving like bandits, The Daily Mail reported.

The 38-year-old Arbashe, who was soon to be a father, was found headless by the side of the road, surrounded by hungry dogs, Sister Agnes-Miriam, who is mother superior of the Monastery of St James the Mutilated, added.

“His only crime was his brother criticized the rebels, accused them of acting like bandits, which is what they are.”

Mid-December, the newly formed Syrian National Coalition obtained wide recognition including from the United States and the European Union. France and British were one of the earliest countries from the Western world that recognized the coalition as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people in November.

But Western powers until now are hesitant on whether to supply the opposition fighters with weapons. Western support so far has been in terms of non-lethal military equipment.

Meanwhile, the 60-year-old nun condemned Britain and the West for supporting anti-Assad fighters in spite of growing evidence showing human rights violations committed by them. She listed murder, kidnapping, rape and robbery as rising crimes.

“The free and democratic world is supporting extremists,” Sister Agnes-Miriam said from her sanctuary in Lebanon. “They want to impose Sharia Law and create an Islamic state in Syria.”

In December, Washington blacklisted the opposition al-Nusra Front group, saying it was linked to al-Qaeda. U.S. officials fear that groups such as al-Nusra Front to hijack the 21-month Syrian uprising. The Syrian conflict killed more than 45,000 people.

Christians in Syria, who many of them still support Assad regime, were previously given concessions by the Syrian regime to appease them. The Christians, a minority , also skeptical over regime change in the country as they fear the rise of Islamists.

The truth about Christians in Bethlehem

-Jihadi leader Ahmad Al Baghdadi Al Hassani referred to Christians as polytheists and “friends of the Zionists.”

In a recent Egyptian TV address, the extremist leader stressed that Christians must choose “Islam or death,” while their women and daughters may legitimately be regarded as wives of Muslims.

Related articles:

• Analysis: Jihadists’ goal - Israel-Egypt war
• Salafist leader: First we take Damascus, then Tel Aviv

Al Hassani resides in Syriaand supports the armed opposition.

Video courtesy of jn1.tv

If you receive a Trocaire gift catalogue with a reply paid envelope. Please take the time to write a quick note and tell Trocaire you stand with Israel and this Christmas will be donating to the people of Sderot, it won’t cost you a penny and will get our message across. (Hat tip to Irish4Israel on Facebook).

This is not the place to survey every NGO group working against Israel. For a much more detailed analysis I recommend Anti-Israel NGOs keep on pumping out lies. Of the twenty-two (22) separate groups involved in the publication of TRADING AWAY PEACE How Europe helps sustain illegal Israeli settlements, apparently being distributed to EU politicians to pressure them into banning imports of goods from Jews – and only Jews – who work in Judea and Samaria at least fifteen (15) are directly associated with Christian groups. Some were unfamiliar so a made a list in the footnotes with the Christian connection, usually gleaned from their websites‡.

It’s intriguing and ironical that in some cases you really have to look to find any Christian context, such as mention of God or Jesus, on their website. In others there is a disclaimer that their work has nothing to do with spreading Christianity or in any way is aimed at benefitting Christians in the areas they work. Are they scared what someone, less tolerant of diversity, might say?

DAHSHOUR, Egypt — When the angry mob was rampaging through town, storming her home and those of other Christians, the 70-year-old woman hid in her cow pen, pushing a rock against the door. There she cowered for hours, at one point passing out from tear gas being fired by police that seeped in.

When Sameeha Wehba emerged just before dawn, she found she was the only Christian left in this small Egyptian village just south of Cairo.

Dahshour’s entire Christian community — as many as 100 families some estimate — fled to nearby towns in the violence earlier this week. The flock’s priest, cloaked in a white sheet to hide him, was taken out in a police van. At least 16 homes and properties of Christians were pillaged and some torched and a church damaged.

The violence was ultimately rooted in a dispute over a badly ironed shirt that escalated into a fight in which a Christian burned a Muslim to death, in turn sparking the rampage by angry Muslims.

“It was a devil’s moment,” Wehba said Thursday at the home of her Muslim neighbors, who have taken her in. “Whoever caused this was the devil’s son.”

The unprecedented exodus underscores how sectarian divisions that festered under decades of Hosni Mubarak’s rule are taking a turn to the worse, complicated by the problems of post-revolution Egypt, a country where 10 percent of the population are Christian.

• The historian James Parkes wrote: “During the first century after the Arab conquest [670-740 CE], the caliph and governors of Syria and the Holy Land ruled entirely over Christian and Jewish subjects. Apart from the Bedouin in the earliest days, the only Arabs west of the Jordan were the garrisons.”[3]
• In year 985 the Arab writer Muqaddasi complained: “the mosque is empty of worshipers… The Jews constitute the majority of Jerusalem’s population” (The entire city of Jerusalem had only one mosque?). [4]

Of course, the media’s obfuscation of jihadi goals serves a purpose: it leaves the way open for the politically correct, MSM-approved motivations for Muslim violence: “political oppression,” “poverty,” “frustration,” and so on. From here, one can see why politicians such as former U.S. president Bill Clinton cite “poverty” as “what’s fueling all this stuff” (a reference to Boko Haram’s slaughter of Christians).

In short, while the MSM may report the most frugal facts concerning Christian persecution, they utilize their entire arsenal of semantic games, catch phrases, and convenient omissions that uphold the traditional narrative—that Muslim violence is anything but a byproduct of the Islamic indoctrination of intolerance.

Syrian President Basher Assad isn’t the only target of Syrian rebels as Syria’s Orthodox Christian Church reports “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Christians” by al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militant groups in the embattled Syrian city of Homs.

The report from the Vatican news agency Fides says Brigade Faruq, which has links with elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Islamist mercenaries from Libya, has expelled 90 percent of Christians living in Homs, nearly 50,000 people.

Reportedly, the armed Islamists went door to door in the Christian neighborhoods of Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan informing the homeowners that if they did not leave immediately they would be shot. Then pictures of their corpses would be taken and sent to al-Jazeera, along with the message that the Syrian government had killed them.

As such, the men, women and children — denied by the Islamists from taking any of their belongings — were forced to flee to mountain villages 30 miles outside of Homs, their homes occupied by the militants who claimed the owners’ possessions as “war-booty from the Christians.”

According to reports by Barnabas Aid, a relief agency assisting Syrian Christians, the forced Christian exodus from Homs has been ongoing since the beginning of February when armed Islamists murdered more than 200 Christians, “including entire families with young children.”

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, half the Christian community has fled. Christmas decorations and public displays of crucifixes are forbidden. In a December 2010 broadcast, Hamas officials exhorted Muslims to slaughter their Christian neighbors. Rami Ayad, owner of Gaza’s only Christian bookstore, was murdered, his store reduced to ash. This is the same Hamas with which the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank recently signed a unity pact.

Little wonder, then, that the West Bank is also hemorrhaging Christians. Once 15% of the population, they now make up less than 2%. Some have attributed the flight to Israeli policies that allegedly deny Christians economic opportunities, stunt demographic growth, and impede access to the holy sites of Jerusalem. In fact, most West Bank Christians live in cities such as Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, which are under Palestinian Authority control. All those cities have experienced marked economic growth and sharp population increase—among Muslims.

In the United States, the two groups that most ardently support Israel are Jews and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Jewish support is easy to explain, but why should certain Christians, most of them politically quite conservative, be so devoted to Israel? There is a second puzzle: despite their support for a Jewish state, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many Jews. And a third: a large fraction of African-Americans are hostile to Israel and critical of Jews, yet Jewish voters regard blacks as their natural allies.

The evidence about evangelical attitudes is clear. In 2006, a Pew survey found that evangelical Christians were more favorable toward Israel than the average American was—and much more sympathetic than either mainline Protestants or secularists. In another survey, evangelical Christians proved much likelier than Catholics, Protestants, or secular types to back Israeli control of Jerusalem, endorse Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and take Israel’s side in a Middle Eastern dispute. (Among every religious group, those who are most traditional are most supportive of Israel. The most orthodox Catholics and Protestants, for instance, support Israel more than their modernist colleagues do.)

Evangelical Christians have a high opinion not just of the Jewish state but of Jews as people. That Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn’t seem to bother evangelicals, despite their own conservative politics. Yet Jews don’t return the favor: in one Pew survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much smaller fraction—about 16 percent—of the American public has similarly antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.

WASHINGTON — Think North American campus activism for Israel and chances are you won’t think of a Hispanic Catholic organizing pro-Israel events.

Or, of an African American Catholic at a historically black college telling not just her fellow students, but also a Jewish youth group, why she supports Israel.

Yet, Stanley Gonzalez-Martinez and Alexis Crews are among thousands of non-Jewish students at North American colleges and universities who wear their love for Israel on their sleeves.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, says Stephen Kuperberg, the Israel on Campus Coalition’s executive director. “Non-Jewish students vastly outnumber the number of Jewish activists motivated to support Israel,” he says.

“On campus, just as it is in the rest of the United States, if the only support Israel has comes from Jews, we would be in very bad shape.”

Answer…

When the subject is “Palestine,” and the Arabs and their assorted mouthpieces and rah rah squads are doing the counting.

After the centuries old Ottoman Turkish Empire was dismantled after World War I, many different long suppressed peoples had visions of freedom, self determination, and independence in the new age of nationalism emerging in the region. Diplomats like America’s President Woodrow Wilson, Great Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes, and others encouraged this with their “Fourteen Points” and statements such as “Arabia for the Arabians, Judea for the Jews, Armenia for the Armenians, Kurdistan for the Kurds,” etc. and so forth.

There was just one problem with this, however-and we are living with the tragic consequences of it to this very day…

From the mid-7th until the mid-13th centuries of the Common Era, much of the region had been conquered by Arabs who had burst out of the Arabian Peninsula, waging murderous jihad in all directions in the name of both Arabism and the Dar ul-Islam. Countless millions of native, non-Arab peoples were slaughtered, enslaved, forcibly Arabized, converted, and/or subjugated in other ways in the process-going onto this very day. That’s how Arabs got to the native, non-Semitic Copts’ Egypt, Aryan Iran, Amazigh (“Berber”) North Africa, native Semitic-but non-Arab-Lebanon, Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan, black African Sudan (and beyond), Judea/Syria Palestina-the Roman/Byzantine-conquered land of the Jews, the Indian sub-continent, etc. and so forth…Keep in mind that these are the same dudes complaining about an allegedly expansionist Israel.

_

_

_

The problem we face today stems from the fact that Arabs now demand that a fictitious 3rd party also be entered into this apportionment…the “Palestinians.” Before I make any further comments on this, I’ll let one of those “Palestinians” himself do the talking. Please listen carefully to PLO executive committee member Zuheir Mohsen, on March 31, 1977, in the Dutch newspaper Trouw…

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism…

NOT JUST