Zero political outrage, zero clerical mobilization, and zero digital uproar for the Christians killed in Nigeria on Palm Sunday. Where are the fiery sermons, the hashtags, and the worldwide denunciations?
The Kotel, holiest place for Jews in Jerusalem, the closest point to what remains of the Temple, always crowded, day and night, has been empty for a month. Empty because of the war and Iranian missiles. But it seems that an antisemitic missile is not a missile, but a message of peace.
Thus, Israel closing the Church of Sepulchre to Cardinal Pizzaballa out of fear of Iranian attacks caused more noise and scandal than the Iranian missile that fell near the Sepulchre a few days earlier.
Antisemitism truly seems to be the socialism of fools (including Christian ones).
In the end, Prime Minister Netanyahu intervened to guarantee Pizzaballa safe passage to the Sepulchre for prayer and Mass. Case closed? Not so fast.
350,000 posts in 10 hours about the cardinal’s access to the Holy Sepulchre for security reasons, compared to 9,100 posts two weeks earlier, when a fragment of an Iranian missile had struck the same church.
This is called antisemitism, and we will pay dearly for it, as we all do every time. Because if left-wing and Islamic antisemitism have their own twisted “logic" (Jews as a symbol of the West and dhimmis to be erased), Christian antisemitism in 2026 is both pathological and masochistic.
Christians who today revel in antisemitism-whether from the nostalgic right or the third-worldist left-will discover too late that the Islamist enemy makes no fine theological distinctions. It wants to uproot Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then come for Peter and Paul.
There is only one place in the Middle East where Christians are growing rather than declining: Israel. They are 185,000 out of 10 million, whereas in 1948 they were 34,000.
In Syria, out of 25 million? 300,000 remain. In Jordan, out of 12 million? 200,000. In Iraq, out of 48 million? 250,000. Algeria? Fewer than 100,000 out of 48 million. And we are talking about countries that were historically cradles of Christianity: the Syria of Paul, the Jordan where Jesus was baptized, the Iraq of the Chaldeans, the Algeria of Augustine.
Within a decade, Israel will have the largest Christian population in the Middle East.
Not a single Israeli church in nearly 80 years has been attacked, as regularly occurs in every surrounding country.
Israeli Christians sit in Parliament and serve as judges on the Supreme Court. In which other Islamic country are there Christians in the highest court?
Haifa is the most multicultural city in the Middle East. There are Jews, Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, Druze, Arameans, and Baha’i, the community originally from Iran that has its headquarters in Israel. The syncretic Baha’i minority, persecuted by Iranian ayatollahs, has found refuge in that small state-smaller than Tuscany-with its twenty thousand square kilometers, compared to the 13 million square kilometers of the surrounding Arab-Islamic countries. The splendor of the Baha’i temple in Haifa testifies to this.
The great Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal defined Israel as “the vector of a terrible contradiction: that of the uniqueness of Islam. Israel is like the Gallic village that resists in a land that prevents it from being Islamic from beginning to end. It goes beyond politics and religion. It is ontological."
As the independent intellectual Michel Onfray put it: “Since, ten years ago, I began going to Israel, I have had the intimate conviction that those who have not been there reason only in the realm of ideas. My first awakening in Tel Aviv, with the call of the muezzin broadcast over loudspeakers, also heard in East Jerusalem, shows in practice that the two peoples already coexist in Israel. I am not aware that in Palestinian territories synagogues are open and safe."
In the so called “Palestinian West Bank" and Gaza there is not a single open and safe synagogue. Not one in Bethlehem, Nablus, Jenin, or Ramallah. The only ones are in the Israeli part of Hevron, the city of David, Rachel's tomb and the grave of the biblical patriarchs, but only thanks to a strong Israeli military presence.
By contrast, there are 400 mosques in Israel, all open and all safe, including 73 in Jerusalem.
Israel is not on the list of the 50 countries that persecute Christians.
In 1964, when Pope Paul VI arrived in Jerusalem for the first historic visit of a pontiff, the city was divided by barbed wire. Jordanian snipers were stationed on rooftops, landmines everywhere in the “no man’s land," seven kilometers long. The only passage between the two parts of the city, Israeli and Jordanian, was Mandelbaum Gate, named after the couple Esther and Simcha Mandelbaum, owners of the house where the border passed.
There were neighborhoods, like Abu Tor, with houses that had one entrance in the Jordanian section and one in the Israeli section. But while Paul VI and his entourage could move freely through Jerusalem to pray in holy sites, Israelis and Jews could only look across the barbed wire at the walls of the Old City and dream of the Kotel.
When three other pontiffs (John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis) later visited Jerusalem, they found an Israeli city open to all three religions. A city where anyone can come to pray and honor their God-even many Wahhabi Muslims arriving from Saudi Arabia to visit the Mosque Esplanade.
The holy city has been conquered by Jebusites, Jews, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and Jordanians. But in thousands of years, Jerusalem was divided only for nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967-and it was a nightmare.
During the years under Jordanian rule, every vestige of Jewish presence in the Jordanian part of the city was erased. Jews were never allowed to visit their holy sites in the occupied part of the city, in violation of international law and armistice agreements. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was systematically desecrated; ancient synagogues, such as the famous Hurva, and most buildings in the old Jewish quarter were deliberately destroyed.
For the first time in a thousand years, not a single Jew or synagogue remained in the Old City. It was a kind of ISIS before its time.
In 1947, Christians in Bethlehem-the birthplace of Jesus-made up 85 percent of the population; today they are less than 15 percent. In 2002 Palestinian Arab terrorists besieged the Church of the Nativity, held dozens of parishioners hostage, looted, and set fires.
When Barack Obama visited Bethlehem in 2013, even the ultra-liberal NBC reported on the “Islamization" of the city.
Only a fool, an ignoramus, or a useful idiot could suppose that the current wave of hatred against Israel and the West will stop with the Jews.
As Fabrice Hadjadj writes in Le Figaro:
“The ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ takes place in this alignment of stars, giving voice to a famous jihadist cry: ‘After Saturday comes Sunday,’ in other words: after the Jews, the Christians. The hour is decisive. It had to come. Israel could only end up producing a Dreyfus Affair on a global scale, in which everyone is called to take part. If the Hebrew Scriptures are our source, the Jewish state is our estuary. If Israel falls, Europe can only fall."
That is why I despise an antisemitic Christian more than a progressive or Quranic antisemite.
Also because, as it is said in “Submission" by Houellebecq, “there is no Israel for us".
Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.