Christians are being spat on and attacked in Israel while American pastors call for Gaza to be turned into a parking lot. Allison Weir of If Americans Knew traveled independently to the West Bank and Gaza and discovered that the American media’s portrayal of the conflict is significantly at odds with what the rest of the world reports. After 20 years of research, she explains why Christians support a state that persecutes their own people, and how propaganda has replaced journalism on the most important foreign policy issue of our time.
Why Christians Support a State That Spits on Them
Most American Christians who visit Israel go on tours conducted by the Israeli government, where they are shown carefully curated sites and shielded from the reality of the occupation. The US media, both liberal and conservative, is unreliable on this issue — mainly through omission and exaggeration. The beheaded babies story was completely false and retracted, but most Americans never learned it was withdrawn. This propaganda is not new: every war produces its own atrocity stories, and Israel’s multi-billion dollar PR machine has been perfecting this for decades.
Most Americans don’t know that neither liberal nor conservative media is reliable on Israel-Palestine. There is mainly omission and exaggeration, and Israel has a great deal of propaganda that the media often transcribes as though it’s news.
What Christians Do Not Know About Their Own History
- Christians are regularly spat on, attacked, and vandalized in Israel — documented incidents show clergy being spat at five times in five minutes
- An American pastor called for Gaza to be made a parking lot and described Islam as a “satanic death cult” — this does not represent Jesus’s teachings of peace
- Muslims revere Jesus as one of the mightiest messengers of God, honor his mother Mary with an entire chapter in the Quran, and have never disrespected either
- Allison Weir, a Christian journalist, found the situation on the ground to be the complete reverse of what American media reports
Extremists Do Not Represent Entire Faiths
As Allison Weir wisely notes, that bloodthirsty pastor does not represent all Christians, just as extremists in any faith do not define the whole. The tragedy is that American Christians are being manipulated by a decades-long propaganda campaign into supporting policies that contradict everything Jesus taught about peace, mercy, and loving your neighbor. The truth is available for anyone willing to look beyond the curated narratives — and the Quran itself is a good place to start, with its deep reverence for Jesus and Mary.
There are extremists everywhere. That pastor doesn’t represent all pastors. But the propaganda campaign that manipulates millions of Christians into supporting violence against innocent people — that is what we must expose.
