Kindling Evangelical Hostility Toward Israel - by Dexter Van Zile

...There are no images of hooked-nose Jews with long, serpentine hands trying to seduce white women from Europe on the walls of the piano bar, but there may as well be. The stuff on the walls is creepy, scary and edgy enough to give viewers something to pretend to think about as they wander around. The overall effect of the art on display at the Walled Off Hotel is to leave visitors with the feeling that Israel is a very bad, bad country and that visitors are part of the elect capable of seeing just how bad the country is. It seems to work on this crowd. CATC attendees, well-to-do Evangelicals from the United States and Europe, looked at the exhibits with admiring eyes, as if they were young, naïve children at a haunted house on Halloween, with the unseen Jew as the monster.

Dexter Van Zile..
Jewish Policy Center..
Fall '18..
Link: https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2018/10/09/fomenting-evangelical-hostility-toward-israel/

This past spring I attended the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference (CATC), a biennial event organized by Bethlehem Bible College, an outpost of Christian anti-Zionism located in Beit Jala. The conference gives Palestinian Christians in the West Bank an opportunity to demonstrate their value to the corrupt tyrants who control Palestinian society (and protect Christians from jihadist violence) by demonizing Israel to Evangelicals from North America and Europe. The message offered at these conferences, which have taken place every even-numbered year since 2010, is that Evangelical support for Israel hinders the ability of Christians in the Middle East to live in peace and share their faith in Muslim-majority countries in the region. Speakers also seek to elicit feelings of guilt from the Western Christians while downplaying the problem of Arab and Muslim supremacism and Jew-hatred. With this narrative, Westerners are encouraged to expiate their guilt over Western colonialism by embracing a narrative that portrays Jews and their homeland as an obstacle to all that is good in the Muslim and Arab Middle East.

A few hours before the first night session of the conference, organizers escorted twenty or so attendees from the Orient Hotel, the conference venue, to the nearby “Walled Off Hotel” where they were exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda produced by Bansky, a charlatan who has turned anti-Israel contempt into a consumable art form that privileged young Westerners can purchase to demonstrate their authenticity and solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world.

The walls of the hotel’s piano bar are covered with paintings and sculpture that portray Israel’s security barrier as something out of a horror movie. One painting, for example, showed a dozen children sitting in swings circulating around an Israeli-built guard tower. On another wall hung a particularly gruesome sculpture of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross with scythe-like blades extending from the horizontal bar of the cross and a stretch of rope (a noose?) hanging from beneath Christ’s feet.

Paying the Jizya in Bethlehem - by Dexter Van Zile

...Is staying in the land worth the damage Palestinian Christians do to their reputations — and their souls — by misinforming their co-religionists in the West about the nature of the Palestinian cause and by shilling for the thuggish, inept and corrupt Palestinian Authority? Is the Palestinian Christian presence in the land really worth the bad example they are setting for their fellow Christians in the West and the disgraceful legacy of dishonesty and submission they are passing on to their children? Is it worth it, really?

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, who also serves on 
the faculty at Bethlehem Bible College, 
translates a defamatory speech made by 
Hanna Amira, chairman of the PA’s Higher 
Presidential Committee for Christian Affairs, 
at the 2016 Christ at the Checkpoint Conference. 
(Photo: Dexter Van Zile)

Dexter Van Zile..
Times o Israel..
16 April '16..

Last month I spent four days attending the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference held in Beit Jala in the West Bank. It was the third time I attended the event, which has been held every even-numbered year since 2010. At the 2012 and 2014 conferences, I came home appalled by the lies and misinformation broadcast at the conference, which is organized by Bethlehem Bible College, a non-denominational school supported by Evangelicals from North America and Europe that is a hotbed of anti-Israel agitation in the West Bank.

At the 2012 and 2014 conferences, speakers blamed radical Islam’s violence against Christians in the Middle East on Christian support for Israel, as if Muslims had no moral agency of their own. Speakers condemned Jews for having rejected Jesus as the messiah, suggesting that this rejection rendered Jews unfit to run a sovereign state of their own. On a more practical level, speakers falsely reported that the security barrier completely surrounds Bethlehem, the city of Christ’s birth, in an attempt to portray the Jewish state as an obstacle to God’s purposes for peace in the Middle East.

I was stunned that the speakers defamed the Jewish people so brazenly and that the audience of 600 Evangelicals from North America and Europe listened so happily to it all.

Similar messaging was broadcast at the 2016 conference. I should be in a high dudgeon about what I heard, but instead I feel pity.

Spreading lies about the Jewish state, as unsavory and self-destructive as it is, is the price Palestinian Christians pay for staying in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It’s what they have to do.

Jews stay in the land through the force of arms and diplomacy. Palestinian Christians stay in the West Bank by shilling on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, one of the most corrupt and incompetent set of elites in the world.