Is the Muslim My Neighbor?

William Norman Grigg
Aug. 23, 2010

As violence raged through Gaza, Esther Najjar feared that her family -- which included two young girls -- would be the next target of the mob that had just firebombed the local Catholic church.

Riled up through the expert ministrations of professional agitators, the mob of Palestinian Muslims assaulted several Christian houses of worship in protest of papal remarks taken as an affront to those who revere Mohammed. Esther, like many other members of Gaza's embattled Christian minority, was all but helpless. If not for the intervention of their neighbors, she and her daughters may well have been massacred.

"I was afraid," Esther later told a wire service reporter. "First they attacked the church, and then there was that protest against the pope.... Some of the protesters tried to come down this street, and we were terrified they'd attack the houses. But our Muslim neighbors stopped the protesters." (Emphasis added.)

Those who acted to defend the rights of Esther and her children didn't see them as adherents of an "infidel" religion -- one they might regard as the fighting faith of their political enemies. Instead, they saw those Christian Palestinians as neighbors threatened by criminal violence.

Incomprehensible as it may seem to those whose bearings on reality are defined by Fox News and GOP-aligned talk radio, the Hamas-dominated government of the Palestinian Authority didn't exploit the controversy to call for a pogrom against the Christian minority. In fact, Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Prime Minister at the time, did exactly the opposite, admonishing his fellow citizens to rally in defense of the besieged minority: "All Palestinian citizens must prevent all harm to all Christian churches on Palestinian land. Our Christian brothers are citizens of Palestine. They are Palestinians."

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