The media celebrated the ordination of Palestinian Sally Azar, one of only five Protestant women pastors in the Middle East, refusing to mention the Palestinians’ horrific treatment of Christians
At the beginning of the week, both the Associated Press and the BBC ran laudatory stories praising the ordination of Palestinian pastor Sally Azar.
The AP touted Azar as “the first Palestinian female pastor in the Holy Land,” covering her ordination “before a packed crowd inside the church in Jerusalem’s Old City.”
The BBC published similarly positive coverage, quoting an excited Azar as she took up her new mantle.
According to a report prepared by journalist Baruch Yedid, an expert in Arab sector affairs who writes for the TPS news outlet, “Church officials have documented two murders and five kidnappings [in Gaza] because the victims were Christian.”
The report continued, “In 2020, a major survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research revealed that 25% of Palestinian Christians as a whole had witnessed violence on religious grounds and a large majority said that they felt unwelcome among Muslims.”
Among the other troubling statistics cited in the TPS report were: 25% of Gaza Christians “reported religious discrimination in job interviews,” 30% were “subjected to expressions of hatred on religious grounds,” and 70% said that Muslims told them “Christians’ judgment is to burn in hell.”
And the numbers don’t lie: the Christian population in Gaza at the end of 2022 was only 1,000, down from 3,500 at the beginning of the 2000s. During the same time period, Gaza’s general population doubled.
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