Leftists generally know nothing about Jesus Christ and care even less, but around this time of year, they find it useful to invoke him, particularly as a prop to support their latest pet causes and buttress their propaganda. And so we have now been treated to the spectacle of that most thoughtful and learned of our elected representatives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Would You Like A Lime With That?), informing us that Jesus was from a family of “Jewish Palestinians.”
It simply won’t do, you see, for leftists to acknowledge Jesus as what he really was, a Jew, for if they did, their sharply rising antisemitism would render him useless as a stick with which to beat Christians and patriots. If Jew-haters say Jesus was a Jew, they can hardly turn around and try to invoke his moral authority to justify their perspectives and proclivities. And so Jesus must become a Palestinian, one of the left’s favorite victim classes, and one leftists have loved with a special ardor ever since the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
In line with this, New York Jewish Week reported Wednesday that AOC’s Christmas message drew “parallels between Jesus’ persecutors and present-day Israel.” The erudite Bronx theologian informed the witless millennials who hang on her every word that Jesus was born in “modern-day Palestine” at a time when the ruling government perpetrated “a massacre of innocents.” If you think this peculiar retelling of the Christmas story is wholly and solely designed to get you to hate Israel and support the Palestinian jihad against the Jewish state, that’s only because you’re right.
AOC pressed her point more explicitly, adding that Jesus “was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power. Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians.” This lurid fantasy has nothing to do with what Israel is actually doing in Gaza, and of course AOC made no mention of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, but this is the sort of thing that’s fashionable on the left these days, and if AOC is anything, she is certainly attuned to what is fashionable.
New York Jewish Week added that “the text in the story post was superimposed over an image of a baby doll in a pile of concrete rubble, a variation of the traditional nativity scene that became a motif for pro-Palestinian activists ahead of Christmas. Christian leaders in Bethlehem, traditionally seen as the birthplace of Jesus, called off Christmas celebrations this year to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.” They not only did that, but they put the baby Jesus in a pile of rubble themselves, in solidarity with the suffering Gazans. The conscience of her generation added piously: “When we justify the bombing of children, Jesus is under the rubble.”
No one is actually justifying the bombing of children, and no bombing would be taking place at all had not Hamas decided to go ahead with its plan to massacre a large number of Israeli civilians, but the “Jesus was a Palestinian” theme was too useful to be hindered by such prosaic things as facts. Nor is AOC the first or only one to resort to it. A Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Edward Beck, said on CNN the day after Christmas that Jesus was a “Palestinian Jew.” And back in April 2019, AOC’s partner in victimhood propaganda, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu), retweeted a tweet from a prominent Muslim cleric, Omar Suleiman, claiming that a Palestinian Christian had asked this of the Christian right in America: “Don’t they know we’re Christian too? Do they even consider us human? Don’t they know Jesus was a Palestinian?”
Related: In Bethlehem, ‘Tis the Season to Hate Israel
Saying that Jesus was a Palestinian betrays an ignorance of history. As "The Palestinian Delusion" explains, in the year 134AD, the Romans expelled the Jews from their homeland of Judea (“land of the Jews”) after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine. That was 100 years after Jesus, who lived in Judea. When he was crucified, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had the charge placed on a sign over his head: “King of the Jews,” that is, a supposed insurrectionist. Pilate did not write “King of the Palestinians.”
The Romans had plucked the name “Palestine” from the Bible; it was the name of the Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines. But never did the term “Palestinian” refer to anything but a region — not to a people or an ethnicity. In the 1960s, however, the KGB and Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s nephew Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom — the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The idea of a “Palestinian people” is one of the most successful propaganda fictions in human history. AOC and her allies are trying to extend the success of that propaganda by incorporating Jesus into their fictional scenario. It is all the more important, in the face of this, for patriots to be aware and informed of genuine history, and equipped to do battle against the propaganda deluge.
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