Independent Appeal: 'What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?'

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured," she says.

Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. "It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on," she says. She was already nervous about the birth - her first, and twins - so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't understand."

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

"Now Mariam is at an age when she asks me where her brother is," Fadia says. "She wants to know what happened to him. But how do I explain it?" She looks down. "Sometimes at night I scream and scream." In the years since, she has been pregnant four times, but she keeps miscarrying. "I couldn't bear to make another baby. I was convinced the same thing would happen to me again," she explains. "When I see the soldiers I keep thinking - what did my baby do to Israel?"

more

[geardaddy]

1. What pigs...

to laugh at a bleeding pregnant woman! Unbelievable.

[breakaleg]

2. Completely disgraceful. I wonder did anything happen to those soldiers who refused to let her pass?

[UndertheOcean]

3. Probably nothing happened to those PIGS...

But as Pelsar said in a previous post , those morally bankrupt people are the ones that the IDF prefers to station in the West Bank

[pelsar]

10. shall we call that "a lie" or perhaps miss stating what i wrote...?

fascinating.....it would be more honest if you quoted what i wrote in full, rather than make it up....i've always wondered why people do that, usually i i dont get the chance to ask, but since you decided to...perhaps now is the chance to explain why you took my name, and made up something to attach to it?....

or is this one of those cases where the poster "disappears" in to cyberspace out of embarrassment?

[newyorican]

13. Hmmm....

Ok, the soldiers sent to the WB are not, "morally bankrupt people". They are your average Israeli conscript, representing a cross-section of society?

[pelsar]

16. infact they are....

the avg israeli "army company" though many have certain characteristics, will have a cross section of the society, and those in the westbank are exactly that.

as are the reservists who are sent.....(though they do represent the small minority of the society that are active in the combat reserves)

but you didnt write the post....nor would i have expected that of you.

[UndertheOcean]

14. You KNOW what post I'm talking about...

and I check DU only once or twice a day.

[pelsar]

17. yes i do know which post...

so since you have at least reacted...perhaps an explanation as to why you took my words and decided to change the meaning and then put my name to it?....

i didnt notice you "forgot" to answer that question.....I could go find the quote and repeat it.....but its pretty obvious to all (at least who are familiar with my writing) that its not just a different interpretation but a fantasy interpretation to fits ones own "agenda" as they say.

the only interesting question is why do it? Your belief is hardly based on my own experiences and viewpoint, you dont need my approval for anything.....I am, i would assume "nothing to you"....so why take my words which represent my knowledge and mangle them in such a obvious way?

or will this be the case of the "pretend the question was never asked".....

[UndertheOcean]

19. I was repeating what you said from memory , so it wasn't literal..

and that was my impression , that the less morals the soldiers manning checkpoints have , the safer is Israel.

Anyway I shouldn't have put your name on my impression of what you said ... and for that I'm sorry.

[pelsar]

23. apology accepted....

what i had said was that 18yr olds have a less developed sense of morality.....then a 38yr old with 3 kids and a mother in the hospital, he will see the the palestenians waiting in line for 6 hours in the sun very different "light" than an 18yr old who is more concerned with getting the approval from the sergeant, and not screwing up.

the same is true of the american soldiers in iraq....its an age thing. if you want to go even younger, its been shown that child soldiers (12-16yr olds) are the cruelest of all, having little understanding of what they are doing (research i had read a while back concerning the kids used in the wars in africa).

its not about "less moral" its about maturity, life experience, confidence, making moral choices under pressure (a very very very difficult thing to do, when lives are at stake) guessing at the unknown and trying to read the future (are you any good at that?)....

[oberliner]

4. This was just two months after the Passover Massacre

The author of the article identifies May 25th, 2002 as the date this incident took place.

Two months prior to that date, 30 Israeli civilians were killed and 140 were injured by a Palestinian suicide bomber who blew himself up in the dining room of a hotel where a large group of people were gathered celebrating Passover.

Hamas claimed responsibility for that attack.

Four days after the Passover attack, 15 Israelis were killed and 40 were injured when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at a restaurant in Haifa. Five of those killed were children.

Hamas claimed responsibility fo that attack as well.

Those attacks took place on March 27th and 31st, 2002 respectively.

The incident described in the article is tragic. 2002 was a terrible year for Israelis and Palestinians alike with countless needless deaths.

I don't see how printing this article which describes an event that took place over four years ago is going to do anything to help move Israelis and Palestinians in a direction towards peace.

One could reprint an article recounting the horrific details of either of the Palestinian terrorist attacks listed above and note that the organization that proudly claimed responsibility for those attacks now represents the democratically elected government of the Palestinian Authority.

That, too, would be less than helpful.

[Taxloss]

5. The Virgin Mary was Jewish.

Palestinian refugees my left foot. They were on their way from their permanent residence, Nazareth, to Joseph's birthplace, Bethlehem, hardly displaced. Later, in Egypt, they could be considered refugees.

[IndianaGreen]

6. G-d would choose the Palestinians as the people for his "Son"

Traditionally G-d has always sided with the powerless and the persecuted, which certainly Israel is not today, and Nazareth is a Palestinian town.

But for the accident of the date, Jesus could have been known as Jesus of Palestine.

While we are in this biblical-nonsense, if it hadn't been for a gay man (Jonathan) that saved the man he loved (David) from being killed by his father (Saul), Jesus (or his followers) could not have claimed that he was the "son of David."

BTW, why did Mary stay in that wretched place for months after Jesus was born? It took the three Iraqi wise men months to travel to Bethlehem. Surely the kid was already out of his diapers by then.

Lenin said that religion was a private matter, and a private matter it must remain. The Bible, or any other holy book(s) should never be used as the basis for public policy.

[Behind the Aegis]

7. Doesn't change the fact that Mary was a Jew.

Your assertions are nothing but nonsense.

[IndianaGreen]

8. It wouldn't be Miriam if the choice had been made today

Lighten up, would you!

You know as well as I do that the prophecy the Christians use refers to "a young maiden." Maiden does not mean virgin! It merely means an unmarried woman.

[UndertheOcean]

15. Do we even know for sure that Mary or Joseph or Jesus existed at all ?

n/t

[Behind the Aegis]

18. No. But if they did, it is more than likely they were Jews.

[UndertheOcean]

20. They were probably much closer to current day Samaritans than what is considered today as "Jewish"

n/t

[IndianaGreen]

21. Not if they were living today. They would be Palestinians.

And Jesus would be rotting in an Israeli jail, or he would be in Guanatanamo for opposing American imperialism in the Middle East.

[Behind the Aegis]

22. You don't know that. It is nothing more than an assertion...

...and as usual, an anti-Israeli assertion.

[Igel]

11. Abraham wasn't powerless and persecuted.

He was fairly well off, it seems, but he was faithful, and that counts more than being disadvantaged. The rich can enter the kingdom of heaven (people seldom finish the quote because it undermines their thesis); Jesus, in the Gospel accounts, makes no difference between the rich, the oppressor, and the poor in money: It's being poor in spirit, just and righteous, merciful and humble (etc., etc.) that counts. People confuse the two. You can be poor and sinful or reasonably well-off and virtuous. The poor have an edge, since historically they had an easier time being humble; perhaps that's still true, overall, but it strikes me as less true than it used to be. The Pharisees had another problem: as teachers, they imposed more requirements than the Law did and failed to keep even all that they taught, so they got hit with both the usual preaching plus an added dose of anti-hypocrisy preaching.

Neither was Israel necessarily weak and oppressed when God sided with it, in the OT account. Just righteous or repentant, rare occurrences ... humility was a prerequisite, so there's that old correlation between weak/oppressed and humble again. Of course, in the NT Jesus sided with the Jews and the 'lost sheep of the house of Israel', not quite persecuted, and not alway rich, but certainly occupied.

I wonder how many Palestinians trace their lineage to an Israelitish David.

There's one variant that the magi started out early and got there very soon after birth; Joseph and clan probably would have been planning on staying in Jerusalem for at least 8-9 days, Sukkoth isn't a short thing, and they may have shown up for the first of Tishri; Mary probably would have stayed back while Joseph looked for better digs or went to present himself with his family for the required offering, if that was still done at the time. (The other popular realistic variant is that Christ was born in the spring, and they were there for Passover, which still had the mandatory offering and a week bracketed with sabbaths.)

BTW, kids don't get out of diapers after a few months. If you leave them out of diapers in their first year they tend to pee and crap on the carpet.

[Igel]

9. A young, unmarried pregnant Jewish girl in the company

of a man that wasn't her husband, going to a Bethlehem where even Christians feel a bit under duress? Without any sort of protection in search of shelter?

Indeed, what would happen to the Virgin Mary?

[Scurrilous]

12. 'Bethlehem wall' shock for Williams

<snip>

"Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was visibly shocked yesterday as he encountered the 30ft high security wall built by Israel around Bethlehem when he led a pilgrimage of British Church leaders to the birthplace of Christ.

The party had to request special permission from the Israeli authorities to be allowed to walk the section of the ancient pilgrimage route between Jerusalem and Bethlehem now cut by the screen of grey concrete.

Erected by Israel as protection from suicide bombers, the wall around Bethlehem has come to symbolise the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict that continues to divide the Holy Land after decades of bloodshed.

Dr Williams, wearing a simple black vestment with a purple sash, accompanied by Greek Orthodox bishops in cowls and turbaned members of the Ethiopian Coptic church, walked in silence past heavily armed Israeli border guards and underneath a watchtower with bullet-proof glass.

The pilgrimage was designed as a gesture of solidarity with the declining Christian community of Bethlehem, a community that blames the wall for turning their home into an economically backward ghetto."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/22/wmid22.xml