Christmas appears to have arrived early in the pages of The Globe and Mail. Typically around Christmastime, the Canadian news media airs and publishes content chronicling the situation in Bethlehem, where a once-Christian majority has been reduced to a small rump. The culprit is not identified as Palestinian Islamists, but Israel and its security measures, which are often depicted as being the cause of Bethlehem’s woes.

In an October 16 opinion column in The Globe and Mail, “Palestinian Christians share the fate of all Palestinians,” Dean Dettloff – a writer focused on issues such as “Christian anti-capitalism, Christianity and Marxism, and prison abolition,” attempted a bigger argument, to portray all Palestinian Christians (to the degree that many continue to exist at all) as victims of supposed Israeli aggression.

Dettloff, research and advocacy officer for Development and Peace – Caritas Canada, a taxpayer-supported registered charity and official arm of the Catholic Church, continually raised the spectre of “settler violence,” depicting Israelis as the cause of suffering for Palestinian Christians.

Dettloff’s characterization of Israelis living in Judea as “settlers” was particularly eyebrow-raising, given his own organization’s Catholic affiliation, and his reference to Jesus’ habitation in the region. Would Dettloff also refer to Jesus, a Jew living in Judea, as a “settler?”

Dettloff referred to a small village in Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”), writing that “it is the last remaining Palestinian community made up entirely of Christians,” clearly recognizing that Palestinian Christians – like Christians across the Middle East – are increasingly an endangered species.

Except Israel. The Jewish State is the only place in the Middle East with a growing Christian population, a towering fact that was nowhere to be seen anywhere in Dettloff’s opinion column. Israel – unlike the Palestinian territories – offers freedom of religion and association to its citizens, but rather than acknowledge this obvious reality, and how it points to the Palestinians, not Israel, as the cause of the decline in Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”), Dettloff made zero mention of this.

Dettloff did not share with readers anything relating to the widespread abuse, harassment, intimidation and theft of Christian land by Islamist radicals, including instances of kidnapping, sexual harassment and even forced marriage, and that is under the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority (PA), not the terrorist government of Hamas.

Predictably, the column praised the anti-Israel steps taken by the Carney government, with Dettloff thanking Ottawa for the Canada Revenue Agency’s revocation of charities connected to Israel, a campaign that has been termed a weaponization of the federal government targeting Jewish organizations. Given that Caridas is a registered charity enjoying the benefits of Canadian taxpayers, all while apparently engaging in admittedly non-charitable endeavours by praising the federal government’s anti-Israel policies, his appreciation for the targeting of Jewish charities is particularly problematic.

If Dettloff and Development and Peace – Caritas Canada wish to chronicle the suffering of the small number of Palestinian Christians, they are free to do so, but any accurate assessment would acknowledge the central role played by Islamist radicals, while recognizing that Israel remains the singular country anywhere in the region where Christians can live, work, worship and associate with freedom.

That Dettloff did not share any of this with readers, alongside his failure to point out the three millennia of Jewish presence in the land, serves as a fatal defeater for his central thesis that Israel is the reason for the woes of Palestinian Christians.