The Guardian of Biased Christmas Coverage
Harriet Sherwood
It just never gets old for some reporters — the annual Christmas-in-Bethlehem bias-fest centered on Israel’s alleged maltreatment of Christians. As CiF Watch’s Adam Levick recounts in a December 25 Algemeiner piece:
Yet, like a holiday ritual, [The Guardian’s] Harriet Sherwood, in the spirit of Phoebe Greenwood’s ugly Guardian piece last year (‘If Jesus were to come this year Bethlehem would be closed’, Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011) chose to advance, as if by rote, a predictable Christmas tale of Israeli oppression against Christians.
Sherwood’s piece, “Bethlehem Christians feel squeeze of settlements”, avoids entirely any context about the comparative treatment of Christians in the Middle East, and myopically obsesses on the putative threat to Christians posed by Israeli “settlements” in the Jerusalem region.
The litany of bogus claims about demography, population density, economic conditions and, of course, settlements obscures, as Levick notes, the actual source of danger for beleaguered Christians.
That the place in the Middle East where the population of Christians is growing just happens to be the sole country where Islamism is not a serious threat is essential to understanding the fate of Christianity in that part of the world – context about the contrasting religious freedom, tolerance and democratic values in the Middle East which Harriet Sherwood’s reports on the region do not provide.
It’s so much easier (and safer) to join the media chorus and blame Israel than to report the facts on radical Islam’s menace to non-Muslims.
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