A reader kindly points me in the direction of a blog written by Denis MacEoin which aims to portray Israel in a fair (and therefore favourable) light.

Not least in this powerful letter he has sent to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, which offers the worthy prelate some food for thought after the Archbishop offered some prayers for 50 families facing ‘expropriation’of their land by the Israeli authorities:

Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.

Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.

Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly…

… In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.

It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states…

I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:

Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.

There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.

Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis’ fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.