Jesus probably would be born in a concrete shack instead of a stable and manger, but this house, even though built on the land of a Palestinian proprietor, would be illegal because of the great difficulty in getting Israeli permits to build on one's own land. Jesus would still be an outcast.Because of blockades of food, medicine and other humanitarian aid, Jesus would probably not have access to a doctor, just as in Roman times. He also would have trouble getting enough food, but Mary and Joseph would go hungry for him, according to a recent UN report. And unlike in other parts of the world, the cause of this food crisis is not the global rise in food prices, but the "military and administrative measures imposed by the Israeli occupation."
This occupation began in 1967 and is the longest-running military occupation in the world. If Jesus was born today, he would be one of more than three million Palestinian refugees. Four percent of American media reports use the word "occupation" in describing Palestine, although zero percent use the more precise description of "apartheid."
According to Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu: "I experienced a deja-vu when I saw a security checkpoint which Palestinians had to negotiate most of their lives, that I was reminded so painfully of the same checkpoints in apartheid South Africa, when arrogant white policemen treated almost all blacks like dirt ... please, please hear the call, the noble call of your scriptures, of our scriptures, to be with the God of the Exodus."
Iraqis live in the Fertile Crescent of civilization, most along the biblical Tigris and Euphrates, which some point to as a logical setting for the Garden of Eden. The most conservative scriptural estimate is that Adam and Eve begat five children. During the 1990s, Iraq was subject to sanctions designed to be so brutal that the population would rise up to overthrow Saddam. That didn't happen, but UNICEF said about half a million Iraqi children under the age of five died from starvation and lack of access to basic medical supplies because of the sanctions. Denis Halliday, the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Baghdad, resigned in 1998 and called the sanctions "genocide." Assuming Adam and Eve's five children represented the approximately three million Iraqi children in their age group, the odds are greater than 90 percent that the sanctions would have killed at least one of their children. You can do a Google search to find out how much publicity Halliday has received, despite the significance of knowing that America committed genocide in Iraq in the 1990s.
America stepped up its destruction of Iraq in 2003. The most extensive study, by the Johns Hopkins School for Public Health, put the total for the first three years of the five-and-a-half -year war at more than 650,000 civilians dead. A massive study by Opinion Research Business finds that more than one million additional civilians have died as a result of the war through January 2008. The media meets its profound obligations by virtually never reporting the civilian casualty numbers. The Iraq War has created more than two million refugees, so out of a population of 27 million the odds are greater than 99 percent that at least one person in a family of seven innocent people would either be killed or become a refugee because of the invasion. Of course, the family size would probably have been diminished before the invasion because one of the children would have starved to death. The U.S. has met its moral responsibility by taking in about 5,000 refugees, which is less than the number who show up at the Syrian border every three days.
So America has taken the place of Egypt and Rome as the subjugator of the Promised Land. Moses said we are forbidden to kill people and Jesus said we are proscribed from all evil, especially violence. If Moses and Jesus said we shall not kill, then how can Jews and Christians permit it?
The territories with the three largest refugee populations in the world are Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. If we can remember how we felt on 9/11, during that hideous crime, maybe we can have the strength to empathize when we see pictures of Palestinians and Iraqis running from our bombs.
You might be interested in...- Anti-war vet comes to campus
- Lecturer addresses Israeli-Palestinian dispute
- Politics Roundtable 1: Mark Warner and Vacillation
