By Stan Goodenough
A rabidly antisemitic "Christian" charity organization in England is selling specially modified nativity scenes in the run-up to Christmas this year.
Amos Trust is also spewing a whole lot of slander in a special "Bethlehem Christmas Pack" available from its website.
According to a report by CNS News, the nativity model being sold by the Amos Trust is of Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth, with a wall running through the town.
Made by Arabs in Bethlehem, it is meant to depict the security fence Israel has been erecting in order to safeguard its citizens from Palestinian terrorists infiltrating from what the world calls the "West Bank."
Amos Trust says that the wall in its nativity scene will ensure that "the wise men won't get to the stable."
Demand for this model is high, it crows. The first batch is already sold out.
The anti-Israel inference is clear, and echoes similar sentiments echoed at Christmas time in past years.
Israel's enemies in the west - among whom the British rank near the top - often accuse Israel of destroying the "spirit of Christmas."
"If Mary and Joseph tried to enter Bethlehem today Israel's soldiers would turn them away," goes one line of slander.
Vistors to the Amos Trust website can read about how Israel has "taken the land" from the Palestinian Arabs - a bald-faced lie. They can learn that the "Israeli occupation" is a modern-day version of the Roman occupation of Judea in the time of Christ.
Also available to download, free of charge, is a song called "They've cancelled Christmas in Bethlehem."
As the lyrics tell us, "they" are the Israelis who have "locked the little town behind a ghetto wall" and are preventing its people from hearing the singing angels in the "land that is no longer holy."
"And if our Christmas songs and prayers are not to be in vain, we must pull down that wall that is strangling Bethlehem. ... They've stopped the wise men at the checkpoint. ... If peace on earth is to come, the wall must fall."
Two small but proactive British branches of Jerusalem-based Christian organizations have protested the actions of the Amos Trust.
A spokesman for the UK branch of Christian Friends of Israel decried "attempts to make one-sided political capital out of the Bethlehem story."
Geoffrey Smith stressed that "[n]obody wants a security barrier but so long as terrorists continue to threaten the lives of Jews and of Arabs in Israel, the people there have to defend themselves in ways that will stop the bombers."
The London office of the Bridges for Peace organization echoed this statement.
Original Source