AOC’s moral, religious, and historic Christmas confusion
Michael Rubin
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), New York’s millennial congresswoman, believes herself the barometer of progressive morality. But by reframing Jesus as akin to Palestinian terrorists fighting Israel, she instead cloaks herself in a mantle of ignorance and moral confusion.
Conflating political and religious fervor, AOC took to Instagram on Christmas Eve to opine, “In the story of Christmas, Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in the mass genocide of innocents. He was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power,” she wrote. “Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians, so much so that the Christian community in Bethlehem has canceled this year’s Christmas Eve celebrations.”
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“The entire story of Christmas and Christ himself is about standing with the poor and powerless, the marginalized and maligned, the refugees and immigrants, the outcast and misunderstood, without exception,” she added.
Where to begin?
Christians have little say about whether Bethlehem holds Christmas celebrations. In 1950, Christians made up approximately 86% of the population of Bethlehem and its surrounding villages. That share of the population stayed relatively steady until Israel handed the Palestinian Authority control over Bethlehem, and then the proportion of Christians plummeted. Today, barely 13% of Bethlehem’s residents are Christian. At issue was the Palestinian Authority’s deep discrimination against Christians. When Muslim families moved to Bethlehem and forcibly took over Christian property, for example, the Palestinian Authority did nothing to evict the Islamist squatters, even when judges sided with the Christians.
Palestinian terrorists in Bethlehem developed the tactics that Hamas later applied in Gaza. In 2002, for example, Palestinian terrorists seized the Church of the Nativity, barricading themselves in the holy site and stealing the priests’ and nuns’ food and water. They essentially sought to use the sensitive, civilian site as a shield to wage war. The Palestinian gunmen desecrated the church during the six-week siege. An Israeli sniper killed one, a most-wanted terrorist, after he began firing an automatic weapon from within the church. Terrorists then set fire to a neighboring building. The siege ended after six weeks with the evacuation of some terrorists to Gaza and the remainders to Europe.
Christians in Gaza fared even worse under Hamas. Just like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Hamas imposed its extremist interpretations on Christians. It forced women to veil, banned alcohol, and sought forcibly to convert children. While Islamist propagandists note that Islam, unlike Judaism, considers Jesus a prophet, they punish Christians who suggest Jesus to be the son of God who died for mankind’s sins. In 2006, 5,000 Christians lived in Gaza. Within a decade, that number declined by 80%.
Put aside her whitewashing of terror. AOC and her fellow travelers lack basic understanding of history. Jews were the indigenous population of the territory Romans renamed Palestine. Jesus was born a Jew, his last supper was a Passover Seder, and he died a Jew. Therefore, when progressive pundit Cenk Uygur posts, “If Jesus returned to the place of his birth, could he survive the night? Or would he be just another Palestinian casualty?” he is half right. Should Jesus reappear today in Bethlehem, he likely would not survive the night because, as a Jew, he would be subject to Palestinian lynching.
If AOC truly understood Christianity, she would realize that Jesus would not stand for the rape of girls and women, or the beheading and burning of children. Jesus preached love and compassion, not hostage-taking and terror. She would pray for the release of hostages and the end to terror, not peace under Hamas’s yoke. If AOC understood history, she would realize Israel is the nation of migrants and refugees. While Jews are indigenous and always lived in the territory, it was the slaughter of Jews in Europe and the mass expulsion of Jews in Arab lands that led to a population influx, and that many Palestinians migrated from Syria as Jews transformed the land.
Politics should never trump principle. Unfortunately, for AOC they do. Embrace of Hamas principles condemns Jews, Christians, and moderate Muslims to pay the price.
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Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.