Ostensible Palestinian Democracy Persecutes Bethlehem Church

By Published On: April 16, 2012

Khoury.photo1.jpgKhoury.Beth2.pic.jpg

Pastor Khoury at desk and shown at Bethlehem’s First Baptist
Church with congregants and Christian American supporter

The Palestinian Authority runs a virtual one-party administration over West Bank Arabs, unimpeded by an independent supreme court or a free news media, restricts civil liberties and gives only lip service to freedom of worship. For example, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem reports:

The Palestinian Authority is refusing to renew the official registration papers of the First Baptist Church of Bethlehem, apparently due to its reluctance to join other Palestinian institutions in unfairly criticizing Israel. …
Such renewals are normally routine, and no official reasons were given for the denial. If [the decision is] left to stand, the result could mean the church cannot register births, marriages and deaths of its congregants. This could prove problematic as the PA requires that residents indicate affiliation with a certain religion on identification papers and other civil documents.

Pastor Naim Khoury, a relative rarity among Palestinian Arabs as a churchman who voices no hostility toward Jews and Israel, has witnessed violent attacks
upon his Bethlehem church.

Israeli news media, for example, the Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, have reported on the persecution of the Bethlehem Baptist Church but the silence of Western mainstream media on the matter is pervasive.

We expose the anti-Israel lies so you don't have to. But we can't do it without your help. Join the fight -- Donate now
CAMERA logo
Tell the World – Share Now!

More from SNAPSHOTS

  • Media Confounds, Calling Israel’s Voting Arab Citizens ‘Palestinian’

    September 24, 2019

    Arab woman voting in Jaffa, 2013 (Photo by Noam Moskovich/The Israel Project (Flickr) The impressive turnout on the part of Arab citizens of Israel in last week's elections -- making the Joint List of Arab [...]

  • Mahmoud Abbas’ Diatribe Threatening Israel Included Bogus Canaanite Claim

    September 10, 2019

    Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent anti-Israel diatribe that aired on PA TV was monitored and translated by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Excerpt: "I say to [Israel]: Every stone you have built on our land [...]

  • A Skewed NY Times Story on BDS, Then a Skewed Letters Section

    August 7, 2019

    After the New York Times published a skewed story about the anti-Israel BDS campaign, we detailed how the newspaper's reporters "put their fingers on the scales in support of BDS." One of the many examples [...]

  • CNN Calls House’s Unifying Anti-BDS Vote ‘Divisive’

    July 24, 2019

    Yesterday, in an overwhelming vote of bipartisan support, the House of Representatives voted 398 to 17 to adopt a resolution opposing the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) campaign. Yet, CNN's headline casts the unifying vote [...]

  • NY Times Cites Poll, Hides Palestinian Support for Violence

    July 9, 2019

    The New York Times has struggled to accurately describe polls this year. In January, editor Jonathan Weisman misrepresented Pew polling data to describe a nonexistent surge in Israeli support for the United States under President [...]

  • Not a Scoop: 448 Days Later, NY Times Reports Slur by Palestinian Leader

    June 10, 2019

    In January 2016, on the day Israel buried a pregnant woman stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel publicly criticized what he viewed as a double standard in Israelis law [...]

  • CNN’s Zakaria Indulges Palestinian Propagandist Hanan Ashrawi

    June 9, 2019

    Fareed Zakaria’s weekly Cable News Network (CNN) program (grandiosely named “Global Public Square”) June 9 broadcast included a discussion of the current U.S. Middle East peace plan with guests Hanan Ashrawi (Palestinian Authority official) and [...]

  • After Broadcasting Holocaust Denial, AJ+ Feigns Innocence

    May 31, 2019

    After Al Jazeera created and posted a video questioning "the truth of the Holocaust," officials at the Qatari media giant took a page from the New York Times' book, blaming employees who were working "without [...]

  • In Robert Bernstein Obit, AFP Inappropriately References His Judaism

    May 29, 2019

    Robert Bernstein (Courtesy the New Press) In its obituary yesterday for American publisher Robert Bernstein, Agence France Presse inserted an inappropriate reference to the Human Rights Watch founder who later turned on the organization due [...]

  • Rashida Tlaib Says Palestinians “Provided” Jewish Haven

    May 14, 2019

    As is often the case in politics, much of the back and forth over Rashida Tlaib's latest inflammatory comments — this time about the Palestinians and the Holocaust — seemed to be about partisan point-scoring [...]