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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

This is not the first time news has come about this station shutting down, but whatever. As I've noted in the past (previous: Bethlehem Christians fear neighbors, Only Christian TV station in Holy Land closes), the Samir Qumsieh (also spelled Samir Qumsiyeh) is the cousin of arch-anti-Israel activist, Mazin Qumsiyeh, who spends his time traveling the world trying to convince people that Israel ought to be removed in place of one big Palestinian Arab state. Yeah, I know, crazy: PA closes only Christian TV station

The owner of a private Christian TV station on Tuesday accused the Palestinian Authority of silencing the voice of the Christian minority in the Holy Land by forcing him to go off the air.

Samir Qumsieh, owner and director of Al-Mahed (Nativity) TV, which was founded in Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem, 14 years ago, said PA security officials who raided his station last week told him that the decision to close it down had been taken because he did not have a proper license.

"It's strange that they are closing us down now after we have been broadcasting for the past 14 years," Qumsieh said. "This is a breach of freedom of speech and an attempt to silence the media."...

...The Christian broadcaster was one of several private radio and TV stations that were closed last week under the pretext that they had been operating without a proper license from the PA's Ministry of Information and Ministry of Interior.

Most of the stations have been operating for over a decade.

The move drew a wave of protests by the owners and many journalists, who accused the PA government of seeking to silence the independent media in the Palestinian territories.

Some of the owners said they weren't able to renew their licenses because of the high fees requested by the PA authorities...

The other part of the article discusses the extent to which recent corruption scandals have taken hold in the consciousness of the PA residents, despite Abbas's attempts to silence the whistleblower. We're once again throwing our hopes behind an entity with no ability to deliver.

Update: The article has been updated and the title now reads: PA backtracks over Christian channel

The Palestinian Authority appears to have backtracked on its decision to close down 10 TV stations, including a private Christian channel.

The PA had taken the stations off the air, claiming they did not have proper licenses, but announced Wednesday that the networks would be given one month to sort out the issue.

Nevertheless, the owner of the Christian station said he would not reopen the channel until the PA apologizes...

18 Comments

May I cross-post?

I will never in a million years understand the rabid Jew hatred in the Christian community. Do we not know from our friends? You've done much on behalf of Christians. I hope that more of us would appreciate it.
I talked to a member of the United Methodists, and he said, and I kid you not, that his opposition to Israel's existence is that there should be no country based on religion.....seriously. I marvel at the man's sunny ignorance. Only countries should exist which are not based in religion. Like Iran, or the rest of the Muslim world?

@Solomon - Thanks

@Jewel.

I will never in a million years understand the rabid Jew hatred in the Christian community.

Neither will I.


So you dont think that Jews ever irritate and antagonize Christians, or treat them poorly? It's all just a big mystery to you, heh?

EV. Maybe we Jews irritate you guys.

You wipe us out.

Torture, murder, extortion, forced conversion, mass expulsion, segregation, extermination.

It isn't just Jews either who've been targeted. Native Americans were tortured and forced to convert. Muslims were also expelled from Spain, including people who'd converted to Christianity. The Spanish Inquisition focused most brutally though on Jews who'd already converted to Christianity, some several generations in the past. Christians of Jewish descent were tortured, murdered, burned in an attempt to discover crypto-Jews.

In 1492 the Sephardic Jews were expelled in one fell swoop with barely any notice, all their property was confiscated. You really should read about this. These were people who'd lived in the Iberian peninsula since before Roman times, since before Christianity was invented.

They mostly fled east to the Ottoman Empire where at least they weren't murdered en masse until WWII that is, when countless tens of thousands of Greek and Balkan Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. Some when to Flanders, to Holland, where most of their descendants were subsequently murdered by the Nazis and where in any case they were segregated for centuries.

Almost all the Greek Jews were killed and antisemitism there is just appalling and it's specifically linked to religious bigotry.

So unless you've been the target of this kind of attack you just have no room to talk.

In England the Jews were attacked, expelled for hundreds of years and frequently blamed for various catastrophes. On the way to the Crusades noble Christian knights slaughtered thousands of British Jews.

Throughout Europe Jews were prevented from owning land, holding respectable jobs, were always insecure and were damned in literature, portrayed as evil and blamed en masse for various blood libels including wars, famine, plagues and revolutions. Jews were forced into money-lending since other work was unavailable; then were frequently extorted by powerful nobles. We were forced into ghettos and the eastern Pale of Settlement where we were also not safe. Periodically Cossacks and Czarist troops and other find examples of Christian compassion would attack, rape, burn, murder and extort. That's why my grandparents fled Russia.

If they hadn't, they'd have been wiped out probably like so many millions. Certainly we haven't found any living family members outside the US, ie people who didn't run, died.

A priest who is investigating thinks the number of Jews murdered in the Ukraine for example is much higher even than previously estimated.

So please. There's no comparison with "irritating" you guys or even "mistreating" individual Christians on occasion, though I agree that this is wrong. Certainly none of us should mistreat another.

But nothing we have ever ever done to you (or to the Muslims for that matter) is even in the same universe with the above referenced mass persecution, segregation and near-destruction of the Jewish people throughout Christendom.

This includes even our spiritual demotion to damned status and the elevation of the Church to the "true Israel" and various other forms of bigoted "replacement covenant" theology.

So bah. And humbug.

PS: this is exactly like your poor little white male Europeans are being persecuted rap.

The power balance is so extremely in your favor and then you cry poor little me.

It's ridiculous and unseemly.

Jew says: "Those evil Christians. They should sit down and shut up, they have no room to talk."

QED

Oh bull.

I'm not talking about talking EV. You're implying that we "irritate" Christians and therefore we deserve to have been serially abused for almost 2000 years.

No Sophia, Im not talking about 2000 years, where the Jews were hostile to Christians from the beginning by the way. They threw Jesus to the wolves.

Whatever happened 2000 years ago is beside the point. The ADL attacks Christian symbols in public spaces, today. Jews are the farthest Left group in the US today and for the last 50 years, the Marxist Left that virulently assaults Christianity and the Church.

And its a mystery why any Christian would harbour ill feelings towards Jews, apparently. Inconeivable!

And your response is peddling historical guilt, which in your mind precludes any Christian from voicing and acting on his perceived reality, and excuses any Jewish transgression or hostility towards Christians.

And you no doubt put white/black, light skinned/dark skinned, male/female, and so on and so forth in the same style double standard.

EVil, your fellow "white christian euros", leftist Non-Jews, are single handedly destroying europe.

Yet you blame Jews. LOL!

EVil, all the wars that ravaged europe, Asia, Africa have the bloody handprints of your fellow savages, yet you blames JOOOOZ.

Too bad for you too that the Israelis are NOT the unarmed Jews of WW2 EVil nazi filth overrun europe - soon to become eurarabia, thanks to your fellow pagan/druid/satanist/progressive "white christian euros".

The JEWS threw Jesus to the wolves huh.

EV get a grip. Pontius Pilate crucified so many Jews it caused open rebellion and the Romans recalled him and he was executed.

Moreover, we as a group were not and are not guilty of transgressions against Jesus, real or imaginary, even though the Church held until recently that contemporary Jews are guilty of killing Christ and Protestant denomizations still believe in replacement covenant and the Church STILL believes it is the "true Israel."

For anybody to hold us guilty of this in the first place is flat out medieval.

Now - your perceptions - how you feel today, that's something else.

But to hold an entire people collectively guilty for something that may or may not even have happened, and if it did happen, let's say Jesus was among the hundreds of thousands of crucified Jews, how the hell can you hold blame this on the Jews and not the Romans?

We were not going around crucifying people. We were not an imperial power. We were under the Roman boot and getting killed in vast numbers and were finally crushed altogether and dispersed.

So WTF.

Nobody is holding YOU personally responsible for the Nazis or the Spanish Inquisition, EV but when you sound like that or try to make some moral equivalence between being "irritated" and genocide you're going to get an earful.

Now if you personally, as EV the human, feel aggrieved by something that has happened to you as a person, feel free to share. If you as a person feel threatened by modern times, well you have company and plenty of it.

That's something altogether different. And there's not a person here who hasn't suffered in some way so - that's what friends are for. To talk to and make things seem less lonely.

Lord knows the world is difficult and it can be brutal and sometimes, like when a dear friend or husband or parent is desperately ill, or you have that sinking feeling or the sense that we just don't have any control over anything, things are even worse than usual.

But please don't confuse us with the Roman Empire. That is just so unfair and it amazes me that anybody could believe that in the first place. Jesus of all people would be rolling in his grave to hear such a thing.

Well that all went well. Another step forward for the Jewish / Christian relationship.

Im not hung up on things that happened 2000 years ago.

Nor 50 years ago, I dont hate the Germans and the Japs....nor villify them continuously on a daily basis.

However the Western Left daily villifies me and mine, for the last 50 years, accelerating as they gain power and influence, and make policy to punish me for historical sins that I never took part in.

Yeah, Im pissed off.

Not that I want to argue about stuff that happened 2000 years ago....but...

Here is a nice roundup of how the Jewish authority persecuted the early Christians from wikipedia.

Maybe the Jews should have treated the early Christians better and their Messiah. Just a thought. Not that Jews deserved later persution because of it, but then again Euro Christians dont deserve to be punished for historical greivances either, but that doesnt stop the Western Left and the vast majority of American Jewry who reside within that Left.

EVil, it wasn't the Jews who threw the early Christians to the lions, it was YOUR people EVil, your fellow klanish, racist, primitives.

YOUR people EVil, your pagan euros who had Christians burned at the stake, torn to shreds by wild animals in the Coliseum.

YOUR people EVil who kowtow to islamofascists, people like george galloway, jenny tonge, jimmy carter.

Bitter EVil, your life must really suck. Black people no longer have to sit in the back of the bus.

Oops...here is the link to the wiki entry..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians

Your hatred and villification of me and mine is duly noted Eddie.

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