Neil Oliver: Christmas Killings!

"It would be wrong. this week of all weeks, not to talk about the murder of the mother and daughter shot by snipers in the compound of the Holy Family Church in Gaza, where they were where they had been sheltering from the ongoing war between the state of Israel and Hamas and Gaza...

The Christians of Gaza and the West Bank are said by some to be the remnants of the oldest Christian Community in the world. The roots of Christianity there... for obvious reasons/ They go all the way down all the way back to the first century AD, all the way back to people, some of them who actually knew Jesus personall,y while he was a living, breathing man. Imagine that.

The Palestinian Christians are called by some, by tradition, The Living Stones... How do we go about preparing to celebrate children and family when there's so much horror unfolding in the so-called Holy Land?... One of the latest atrocities then, in a place of atrocity, has been the targeting, by a sniper, of two Christian women among a group, a little group, sheltering in the compound, the wider area of the Holy Family Church in Gaza. Within the compound there's a convent. Nuns and... the whole little ad hoc community in there, of people in need being cared for from from a time before the the war.

You know how easy is it to forget, from where we sit with our view of the Middle East and Gaza and the West Bank that's curated for us, if we let them get away with it, by the mainstream media, how easy is it to forget that Christians are under attack in those places too.

The Latin uh patriarch of Jerusalem heard about what had happened and said the mother and daughter... were shot in cold blood. He said, and I quote: 'One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety! Seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound. No warning was given, no notification was provided... We cannot but Express that we are at a loss to comprehend how such an attack could be carried out. Even more so, as the whole church, that is to say, the Christian Church, prepares for Christmas.'

And within that statement the line that strikes me hardest, is about the one being shot while trying to help the other. Which means that whoever was looking through the sights of the rifle, whoever pulled the trigger, let's say for the second time used the love of the one, the attempt of the one to help rather than to flee, the person pulling the trigger used the love of the one to kill the other, exploited that connection in the worst way.

It's estimated that there may be only a few hundred Christians left in Gaza, a few thousand maybe in the West Bank. If they were a species you'd have to say that the Christians there are on the brink of Extinction."