By Martin Roth, BosNewsLife Senior Columnist
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL (BosNewsLife Columns)– It’s disturbing to learn of a growing number of Islamist threats against Christians in the Biblical holy city of Jerusalem.
The latest such incident, as reported by BosNewsLife, comes in the form of leaflets that were distributed there last week, purporting to be issued by “Islamic State, Jerusalem Emirate.”
The leaflets state that Islamic State knows where most Christians in Jerusalem live, and warn that they have until Eid al-Fitr – the festival marking the end of Ramadan on July 19th – to leave the city or be killed.
Last November I interviewed Karen Dunham, pastor of the Living Bread International Church in Jerusalem, and she told me that Muslim neighbors had attacked her church, although this appeared to be partly a dispute over property rights, as well as over religion.
She claimed police were slow to make arrests, “because the attackers are Arab Israelis, and we are foreigners and Christians.”
The police, Dunham added, “did not want to cause trouble within the Arab community, so they really did not do much to help us. If we were of the Islamic or Jewish faith we would have had much more support.”
MORE ATTACKS
In May this year a group of Muslims launched an attack on Jerusalem’s Christian quarter. Nashat Filmon, general director of the Palestinian branch of The Bible Society, was quoted as linking this to Islamic State.
Also in May an imam at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem posted online a video calling for Muslims to be constantly at war with the “polytheist enemy,” meaning Christians and Jews.
It is not just Islamists. Jewish extremists also engaged in anti-Christian activity. For example, they are believed to be behind an arson attack in June on the Church of the Multiplication, near the Sea of Galilee, where the Bible says Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 people with bread and fish.
But it is the Islamist threat that is the major concern, with a growing number of anti-Christian incidents in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, and rising support for Islamic State among some Israeli Muslims.
FREE WORSHIP
Yet in general, Christians remain free to worship in Israel. Christianity there is thriving and growing. Nowhere else in the Middle East is this true. No wonder Islamic State is issuing its threats.
We have seen what the organization has done in the areas under its control, aggressively wiping out any Christian presence.
Despite these horrors, there are many calls – even from Christians – for Jerusalem to be placed under Palestinian control or, at best, under some kind of international administration. How long, then, would Christians be free to worship? How long might churches and monasteries even remain standing?
These latest disturbing incidents are surely grounds for insisting that Jerusalem remains governed, and protected, by Israel.
(Martin Roth (www.authormartinroth.com) BosNewsLife’s Senior Columnist, is an Australian journalist and a former Tokyo-based foreign correspondent. He is the author of “Journey Out Of Nothing: My Buddhist Path to Christianity” and of the Brother Half Angel series of thrillers, which focus on the persecuted church. BosNewsLife Columns distributes opinionated columns and commentaries providing a fresh perspective on issues in the news. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BosNewsLife News Agency or its parent company.)
