Jerusalem church leader lies about why Christians leave Jerusalem

Anadolu Agency reports:

A church leader in Jerusalem has expressed concern over the steep decline of the holy city’s Christian population over the years.

Wadih Abu Nassar, the spokesman for the Council of Heads of Catholic Churches in Jerusalem, said Christians constituted about 25% of the population of Jerusalem in 1922. But the number has since fallen drastically to less than 1%, he noted.

According to Israeli sources, the population of Jerusalem was 936,000 as of 2019. Jews made up 62% of the city’s population, with Palestinians making up the remaining 38%.

Abu Nassar said the Christian population accounts for less than 10,000 of the total number of Jerusalemites.

He attributed the drop in the number of Christians to a combination of reasons ranging from economic to political.

...Abu Nassar has also blamed attacks by Jewish extremists on Palestinians and expansion of illegal settlements as another key reason behind the decline in Jerusalem’s Christian population.

"There is an increase in illegal settlement activity in many neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and this is not a secret, and it targets many places, including some Christian holy sites," he said.

OK, let's look at Jerusalem's Christian population since 1922. This is based on the Wikipedia article on Demographic History of Jerusalem and the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics for the 2020 number.

Today, there aren't less than 10,000 Christians in Jerusalem - there are 16,300, and the number has been slowly rising since 1967. There has been no decline in the Christian population since 1922.

The only time that the number of Christians has ever decreased  in Jerusalem since 1900 has been under Muslim rule - both under Ottoman rule, although those numbers from the 19th century are not reliable, and most emphatically during Jordanian rule, when more than half the Christians in Jerusalem fled the city even as the number of Muslims nearly doubled. 

Under Israeli rule, the number of Muslims skyrocketed while the number of Christians have steadily increased, although not close to the rate of the rest of the city.

Which shows that "Jewish extremists" have no discernible impact on Christians leaving Jerusalem - but Muslim control definitely does. 

You will find that the Christian population of cities in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, like Bethlehem, have been decreasing markedly under Palestinian Muslim rule. Which means that, as with the rest of the region, Christians are fleeing because of Muslims - not because of Jews. 

Wadih Abu Nassar is lying both about the absolute numbers and about the reasons. Not once does he mention Muslim intimidation and attacks on Christians that have been the primary reason for Christian flight throughout the entire Middle East. 

This is not surprising - Christian Arabs are historically more antisemitic than Muslim Arabs and they are more frightened of a backlash from Arab Muslims, so they play the dhimmi role to the hilt. 

Also not surprisingly, anti-Israel media like Palestine Chronicle and Middle East Monitor have picked up on this story, because the lie that Jews are discriminating against Christians (while somehow Muslims keep increasing their numbers under Jewish rule) is one of the big lies they love to promulgate.

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