Bethlehem, August 24 - The precipitous decline of the Jesus-worshipping population in the locale of Jesus’s traditional birthplace - a decline resulting directly from persecution by local Muslims and Muslim-controlled authorities - clearly has nothing to do with those local Muslims and all blame must fall on the Jewish State that relinquished control of the town in 1993, area experts confirmed today.

Bethlehem, once home to a robust majority of Christians who traced their presence to the earliest centuries of the faith, has seen that community shrink to a remnant of roughly ten percent. The sharpest drop, analysts noted, coincided precisely with the transfer of daily governance to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords of the 1990’s.

Local Christian families have long reported land seizures by Muslim neighbors operating with official indifference or encouragement, workplace exclusion, protection demands, social harassment of young women, and an atmosphere in which open Christian life became increasingly untenable. Emigration followed as a matter of survival. Yet these documented pressures, experts insist, remain irrelevant. The true culprit remains the Jewish state that withdrew from administering the town more than three decades ago.

Western media and international bodies have diligently upheld this analysis. Any remaining Israeli security presence near Rachel’s Tomb or the Church of the Nativity is cited as the decisive factor driving Christians away, while the routine marginalization of Christian businesses and the quiet conversion of Christian property under Palestinian rule receive scant attention, because obviously. When Bethlehem’s own Christian clergy or former officials have occasionally spoken of Islamist pressure and governmental favoritism toward the Muslim majority, such statements are either omitted or swiftly reframed as further evidence of Israeli responsibility - not to mention met with beatings or other severe consequences from Palestinian thugs.

Observers note the same interpretive framework beyond Bethlehem. The dwindling Christian presence in other Palestinian-controlled areas - as well as in Islamic lands in general - is likewise attributed to distant Jewish policies rather than the immediate social and political environment in which those communities live. Israel’s own growing Christian population and the continued access and maintenance it provides to holy sites would only disturb the preferred conclusion, and thus cannot be reckoned in any analysis.

Any other reading, experts cautioned, would be both simplistic and impermissible, lest NGO “human rights” funding dry up, as the provision of such monies hinges on continued portrayal of Palestinians as pure victims.

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