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Gaza ‘Advocates’ Invading Churches Is Insane. The Indifference of Western Christians Is Sinful

By John Zmirak Published on December 26, 2024

Let’s say it’s September 20, 2001. If you were outraged by the jihad attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and wanted to stage a protest, would you invade a gathering of New York City firefighters — let’s say a funeral for one of the first responders who’d died in the towers’ rubble?

What should we think about a group of 9/11 “victims’ advocates” who did something like that? What would their choice of target for their protest tell us about them?

It would tell us that they weren’t really sincere. That they had some other agenda, completely unrelated to the fates of the 9/11 victims, whose corpses they were picking up and cynically using as cudgels. Maybe such protestors would prove to be radical anarchists who hated the Fire Department because it was an arm of “oppressive” government. Perhaps they’d turn out to be led by foreign agents, eager to engender chaos.

The one thing we wouldn’t conclude is that they were sincere citizens outraged by the deaths of the New Yorkers whom firefighters had tried to save.

And we must draw similar, cynical conclusions about the so-called “Gaza advocates” who invaded a Catholic church service in Armagh, Ireland on December 22.

What’s the Hidden Agenda, Hatred of the West?

The last place any sincere advocate of civilians, especially Christians, in Gaza ought to be staging disruptive protests is inside a Catholic church. The Christians in Gaza have mostly been abandoned in the midst of Israel’s understandable but too-indiscriminate reaction to the monstrous October 7, 2023 attacks on civilians by Hamas. Mind you, I don’t hold Israel to unfair double standards. I was a loud and lonely critic of the U.S. war in Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 600,000 civilians, in cities we bombed and besieged in a country which hadn’t attacked us and didn’t have any actual “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened us. At least Israel really was attacked by terrorists from Gaza, and is now punishing the perpetrators.

The Muslim world doesn’t care much about “infidels” in a land jihadists claim as their own. The global Left is aligned with Hamas itself and chants along with the terrorists, “From the river to the sea.” Too few American Christians give the same care to Christian victims of combat as they (rightly) did to the Israeli victims of terror.

That’s weird when you think about it, and you have to ponder why. Aren’t all Christians everywhere our brethren, linked to us by ties deeper than any other imaginable since we expect to meet up in Heaven?

As citizens, we want U.S. aid to Israel conditioned on its treatment of local Christians.

But I’m proud to say that leading Catholics are trying to defend fellow Christians (many non-Catholic) in the smoking rubble of Gaza. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem overcame intense Israeli government resistance to pay visits to Gaza, bringing food and supplies.

Emptying Gaza Out

Frequent Stream contributor Jason Jones is leading efforts to bring relief to Gaza and highlight the civilian victims of an ugly, protracted war. He has been willing to alienate almost everyone in the process: uncritical zealots who give Israel a blank check to secure its objectives “by any means necessary”; antisemitic bigots who blame “the Jews” for defending themselves; and anyone else who gets in his way as he defends the vulnerable from violence — the mission of his Vulnerable People Project. This week, Jones delivered coal to Muslims in Afghanistan, provided security guards to synagogues in Nigeria, and exposed poorly trained conscripts in the Israeli Defense Force who cynically disregard Christians.

He also is sharply critical of Israel’s casual disregard for the safety of harmless, apolitical Christians in Gaza — descendants of the first Jews to accept the Christian Gospel after 33 A.D. As he writes at Chronicles magazine:

Given the current unchecked aggression of Israel’s controversial and unpopular Netanyahu government, and the near-total silence of Christians in the wider world as their coreligionists face extinction in the place of Christ’s birth, I really believe this Christmas will be the last one Christians celebrate in the Holy Land for the foreseeable future.

Stepping back from my own sense of brotherhood with Christians of every color, I can see where the Israelis are coming from. Founded after a ghastly genocide in Europe at the hands of nominal Christians, subjected to decades of foreign invasion and grinding, incessant terrorism, rebuffed at every turn when it tried to negotiate peace, still surrounded by dogged enemies and grudging, reluctant “friends,” Israel would benefit from having buffer zones, blank spaces, around its bleeding borders. That means moving people out to save lives in the long run. It worked in the former Yugoslavia, where my Croatian cousins had to be removed from Serbian land (and vice versa) after 1996, with U.S. government approval. It might be the most humane solution in the Holy Land as well.

We Must Make the Israeli Government Care

But there is no reason to expel the tiny remnant of Christians from the region. They pose no threat, throw no stones, plant no bombs. They just hunker down around the churches and graves of their ancestors and ask to be left alone. There’s no real reason for Israel to expel them. But there’s also no reason for Israel to take special pains to spare them. Why add in the headache of singling out Christian churches and institutions for protection in the midst of a brutal war?

There is no reason and will be none, unless we Christians provide one. There are countless places in the world where Christians are being singled out for persecution, mostly by Muslim governments. And in most of those countries, we American Christians have very little leverage. The jihadists running Sudan don’t count on support from American churchgoers, or much from the U.S. government. Neither do the jihadists who just conquered Damascus. Any pressure put on such regimes would have to come from the incoming Trump administration, which we should be lobbying Trump to apply.

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But Israel is a special case. It receives extensive military aid from the U.S. government. The loudest advocates for Israel in the face of international hate are zealous American Christians. It’s doubtful that Israel would prosper if those supports were to diminish. So we as Christian citizens must make it clear to our government that we want aid to Israel conditioned on its treatment of local Christians. It wouldn’t cost Israeli lives to spare the Christians of Gaza. It wouldn’t endanger the country. It would just add a few operational headaches to local commanders, demanding they discipline their troops and choose targets more carefully.

I wish that our own military had not been so indiscriminate in our war in Iraq. Our heavy-handedness and total disregard for the safety of local Christians did America no favors in the long run. I don’t think Israel’s callousness toward Christians is in that country’s long-term interests either.

Let’s pray, speak out, and help promote a decent outcome in the Holy Land, remembering first and foremost “the least among our brothers.”

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.