The Guardian is waking up to the fact that Gaza is ruled by an Islamic theocracy that doesn’t allow the dhimmis within its midst to celebrate their religion.
There hasn’t been a Christmas tree in Gaza City’s main square since Hamas pushed the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in 2007 and Christmas is no longer a public holiday.
Imad Jelda is an Orthodox Christian who runs a youth training centre in Gaza City. With unemployment hovering at 23%, he has seen young Christian men leave to study and work abroad in their droves. “People here do not celebrate Christmas anymore because they are nervous,” Jelda said. “The youth in particular have a fear inside themselves.”
Let’s compare that to Israel’s Christians, shall we?
In Israel, a higher profile for Christmas
The founders of Neve Shaanan, a neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv, planned their streets in the shape of a seven-branched candelabra – a symbol of their Jewish faith. Ninety years later, the streets are full of Christmas decorations, reflecting a flowering of Christianity in Israel’s economic and cultural capital.
What! Christians in a Jewish city! Why, that’s intolerable! What are the Israelis doing?
On the Saturday before Christmas, the center of festivities was the city’s central bus station, a hulking seven-story maze of concrete. A plastic green fir spewed fake snow from its top in a shop near the main entrance.
Christmas carols blasted from storefronts full of rice and noodles. Giggly young Filipino women took photographs with a Santa Claus figure to send to their friends and parents.
Allowing the celebrations to go on, apparently. But wait. As this is an AP story, there must be something negative being done or said.
For some, the holiday punctuates the divide between parents and children.
Nancy Domingo, who arrived in Israel 14 years ago from the Philippines, said her eldest daughter did not plan on eating traditional Filipino Christmas food. The seven-year-old, like the other children of migrant workers here, has grown up steeped in Israeli Jewish culture. The girl speaks Hebrew, learns about Jewish holidays in school and is familiar with Jewish dietary laws, such as the ban on pork.
“If I cook pork she won’t eat it because in school they tell her pork is not clean,” Domingo said. “She doesn’t know Christmas, only Hanukkah.”
No! Shocking! The child is voluntarily refusing to eat pork! But wait, the AP did find an Israeli who griped about all the Christmas stuff going on in his city.
Not all Israelis are pleased to see the rising profile of Christmas, which to some symbolizes religious assimilation and to others a religion with a history of hostility to Jews. Moshe Avisar, 67, on his way back to Jerusalem, said the decorations in the bus station bothered him.
“I go to the Central Bus Station and I don’t feel like I’m in Israel, even though it’s my country,” he said. Of the decorations, he said, “I don’t want to see this in the Jewish state. Then all the Jewish people get carried away with it and start celebrating too.”
Ouch! Someone call the UN Human Rights Committee. Because of course, if there is any statement to be made about the suppression of Christians in the Middle East, it will be made about Israel–not about Gaza, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia–where celebrating your faith and your holidays can get you jailed or killed. In Israel, well, an old Jewish man is going to complain about you.
As for the rest of the media, well, the AP had a four-paragraph story about the Roman Catholic patriarch’s concern for the Middle East’s Christians. (Yes, four paragraphs.) And this is the last one, that gets cut for the three-paragraph “World Briefs” section of your paper:
Since the overthrow of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Muslim extremists have torched churches and attacked Copts in the worst violence against the Christian community there in decades. Twal’s territory does not include Egypt.
As always, it’s Israeli Double Standard Time. Negative stories about Christians in Israel? Yeah, we got those. Negative stories about the discrimination against Christians throughout the Middle East?
[crickets]