of which included an effort to apprehend those Palestinians involved in such attacks. Some of those pursued, themselves not Christians, chose to take refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The almost worldwide condemnation which Israel received then, when it sought to extricate those concerned, is parallel to the easy condemnation of the security fence, which now affects Bethlehem and many other areas with significant Arab populations.
My experience during many visits to Israel is that most Israeli Jews, as well as Israeli Arabs and Christians, dislike the fence. It is ugly, expensive and bad for Israel’s battered image. But they dislike even more being blown up as they travel on buses or eat in restaurants. The sad fact is that the fence has saved lives.
And another from Professor Shaun Gregory of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford:
The Archbishop of Canterbury is right to draw attention to the suffering of Christians in the Middle East but wrong to lay the blame for this at the feet of Western foreign policy.
The genocide, displacment and repression of Christians across the Muslim world is one of the great untold stories of the past 150 years. Were it more widely known it would explode the myth of Islamic tolerance of other faiths.
The Archbishop falls into precisely the intellectual trap which has long obscured the reality of Christian persecution under Islam: an unwillingness to risk offending Muslim leaderships reinforced by orientalist guilt for the West’s troubled past with the Islamic world.
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