Behind a 30-Foot prison wall, “Merry Christmas in Bethlehem” becomes a media lie

Wall Writings- If you relied on your local newspaper to tell you how things went in Bethlehem this Christmas season, don’t believe what you read.

Newspapers across America relied heavily on an Associated Press story to inform their readers that “Bethlehem Celebrates its Merriest Christmas in Years”.

It did not. Ask the people who live and work there.

The same optimistic headline ran over the same upbeat AP story, in US newspapers from Lafourche Parish, Louisiana to both major dailies in Washington, DC.

By virtue of its tight control over the AP bureau in Jerusalem, the Israeli government took advantage of a lazy, parsimonious American media and an equally lazy and complacent American public to guarantee yet another distorted portrait of life in the land Jesus made holy.

A Google search reveals more than 1300 references to that “Bethlehem is merry” AP story. Editors in Marietta, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; San Diego and San Francisco, California, to cite a few of them, relied on that Israeli-approved version that readers could smile over as they stripped open their Yuletide gifts and downed their cholesterol-packed eggnog.

In Jerusalem, the “merry Christmas” lie that blanketed the US, was received as one more “well done” effort by those Israeli officials who work hard to whitewash the brutality with which Israel’s army rules Palestine.

Bethlehem was anything but “merry” this Christmas because its citizens continue to live in a prison behind a 30 foot high wall, not a “security barrier”, as every US newspaper called the wall in its AP story.

The AP story also reports, without blushing, that Israel “allowed” 500 citizens from Gaza, to go through the “security barrier” to reach the Church of the Nativity. Was there not a single copy editor in America who knew that they were using the barrier term dictated by the ruling occupiers?

Here is the opening of the AP story as it entered homes across America on Christmas weekend. If you do not weep for the state of American journalism when you read it, you have made one too many Israeli-sponsored trips into Palestine. Read more