In a Christmas message posted to her Instagram account, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez reiterated Yasser Arafat’s propaganda claiming that Jesus was a Palestinian.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) posted a Christmas eve message to Instagram featuring a photo of a child in the rubble in Gaza .
“In the story of Christmas, Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents,” the Congresswoman wrote. “He was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power. Mary and Joseph, displaced by violence and forced to flee, became refugees in Egypt with a newborn waiting to one day return home.”
Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians, so much so that the Christian community in Bethlehem has canceled this year’s Christmas Eve celebrations out of both [fear for their] safety and respect,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
“And yet, also today, holy children are still being born in a place of unspeakable violence — for every child born, of any identity and from any place, is sacred. Especially the children of Gaza,” AOC said.
“The entire story of Christmas and Christ himself is about standing with the poor and powerless, the marginalized and maligned, the refugees and immigrants, the outcast and misunderstood without exception,” she wrote.
“This high Christian holiday is about honoring the precious sanctity of a family that, if the story were to unfold today, would be Jewish Palestinians,” the Democrat said.
“Merry Christmas. May there be peace on Earth, amen.”
AOC’s statement is inaccurate on every level. Both the New Testament and the Koran record Jesus being born in Bethlehem in the region assigned to the tribe of Judah, some 600 years before the birth of Muhammad.
Her description of Jesus as “a Jewish Palestinian” is also perplexing because Jews are prohibited from living in Bethlehem or any other area under the supervision of the Palestinian Authority.
Syria Palestina was the name assigned to the same region by the Romans in the Second Century after the Romans exiled the bulk of the Jewish people from Judea, long after the period in which Jesus lived. Eager to erase the Jewish identity to the land, the Roman emperor Hadrian did something that had heretofore been unheard of for the Romans, who never changed the name of provinces: he named the area “Palestina” after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines. The Philistines had been defeated by King David in his memorable defeat of Goliath; they were again defeated by David’s descendant King Hezekiah. They eventually were completely defeated by the Assyrians and had ceased to exist long before the Jews fought with Rome.
Never in history has there been an independent nation named Palestine. As ethnic Arabs, Palestinians originated in the Arabian Peninsula.
This perception of Jesus is certainly not an accurate depiction of history or even a religious statement. It is, in fact, a reiteration of a false narrative adopted by the Palestinian Authority. It is believed that the credo was an invention of Yasser Arafat’s adviser Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian, who said in an interview to the Washington Jewish Week on February 22, 2001, that “Jesus was a Palestinian.”
This became the official PLO platform as evidenced by their frequent reference to Jesus as “the first Palestinian martyr” and whose annual Christmas statement reads, “Every Christmas, Palestine celebrates the birth of one of its own: Jesus.” This year, the PA prohibited public celebrations of Christmas in Bethlehem.
This narrative was adopted by left-wing activist Linda Sarsour and several times in the New York Times.
This egregious perversion of history and religion is becoming mainstream in the Democratic party. In 2019, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, retweeted the NYT op-ed. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and a Democratic candidate for the US Senate, referred to Jesus in one of his sermons as “a Palestinian prophet.”
James Sinkinson, president of Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), wrote an article, referring to the narrative as “the Big Lie.” Sinkinson noted three reasons for perpetuating the Big Lie:
- Establish a Palestinian people when there was none.
- Place Palestinian Arabs in the Holy Land long before Arabs actually arrived there.
- Characterize Jews as religious adherents, not a people.
AOC has demonstrated an ignorance of Judaism bordering on disrespect and antisemitism multiple times in the past. In a radio interview after the October 7 Hamas massacre, she blamed the massacre on right-wing “Christian fundamentalism and nationalism — which has also been extremely anti-Semitic”.
She also made a stunning claim that the Jews today are not the descendants of the Biblical nation.
“The country that is Israel today is not the Israel of the Bible,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “The country that is Israel today was established in this century.”
She demonstrated a total ignorance of what defines Jewish identity when, in 2018, she told a Jewish audience that “a very very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews,” she said, referring to Jews who are originally from Spain or the Iberian Peninsula.
