Help bring aid trucks into Gaza: LifeFunder
(LifeSiteNews) — On this episode of The John Henry Westen Show, Catholic humanitarian and founder of the Vulnerable People Project (VPP), Jason Jones, joins me to discuss the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) horrifying persecution of Christians in the Holy Land and Gaza.
I began the episode by noting how much flak he and his organization receive for their efforts from even Catholics and Christians who should be paying attention to what’s going on to their brothers and sisters in the Holy Land. Jones told me, “It’s unbelievable,” “It’s striking to me that I’m actually being attacked for speaking up for truly the most powerless people on the earth, the people of Gaza, specifically the Christians in Gaza.”
“I’ve been told to hush up, to zip it, that if I want to continue to advocate for vulnerable communities and have any legitimacy or credibility, that I should [shut up].” Jones said he’s even been told that he’s “confusing” people by exposing the truth about the persecution of Christians in Gaza.
The humanitarian then emphasized that the IDF doesn’t see Christians or Muslims, churches or mosques when they bomb them; they just see Palestinians and attack indiscriminately. Describing some of the horror he’s seen:
St. Porphyrius was bombed twice this week. And there’s a young man who works for us. His father died, his sister was killed by the IDF, [she was] 18 years old. And just this past week, his other sister was wounded when his church was bombed again, and his cousin was wounded.
Jones noted that for telling these stories, he’s often called a liar and propagandist for Hamas.
This horror show VPP sees on the ground in Gaza reminds Jones of part of the Bible that has always inspired him, Ecclesiastes 4:1, in which Solomon looked over the world and only saw oppression, with the side of the oppressor being in power. He further underscored that today, the world is very different from when Solomon wrote those words because we have the Mystical Body of Christ. And, so, we should see this mystical body standing with the pre-monotheistic Yazdi, or the Uyghurs, Muslim minorities suffering genocide in Chinese-occupied East Turkistan, but even more so for our fellow Christians in the Holy Land.
“The Palestinian families in Gaza, they’re standing up against multiple nuclear powers, the U.K, the United States. We just sent billions of dollars of weapons for a community of less than several hundred thousand adults. And, of course, Hamas has [only] 40,000 fighters. But we now know that there are over 40,000 dead civilians, and the real numbers there are probably around 30,000 dead children. And the idea that I’m going to be silent is absurd; I can’t be silent,” Jones said. The humanitarian also stressed that these Palestinians are literal descendants of the apostles, the first-century Christians, and we need to advocate for them.
I jumped in, telling Jones the silence of Christians is unbelievable, and asked him to explain more of the situation on the ground in Gaza because even good Catholics believe all these gruesome stories are because of this antisemitic Muslim group, Hamas, that wants to destroy Israel, and that Israel is just defending itself. I added that these same people also believe that the modern day Israeli state is still the Israel talked about in the scriptures.
Jones first reminded listeners that, as Christians, we are called to advocate for persecuted Jews just like any other oppressed people, but the fear of being called an antisemite shouldn’t silence us. He also noted that we all have a Western prejudice; we should examine our consciences and that if the violence we’ve been seeing in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa for the last three decades with revolutions, civil wars, and millions of civilians killed were taking place in Europe, we’d call it World War III.
“But then we sit here, and we think they’re so violent, they’re so uncivilized. And then now you look at Israel, you know, imagine if Russia behaved this way in Ukraine. It was striking that a Russian missile landed in a hospital the same week Israel bombed a hospital,” Jones noted, adding:
Now, that’s easy to do for Russia because Israel bombs hospitals every week. But the world reacted with horror, and the headlines were ‘Russia bombs,’ how barbaric Russia bombs hospital. And then, for Israel, it was like ‘hospital bombed.’ [They] didn’t say who did it, you know, it was the IDF flying American jets, dropping American bombs, all paid for by American tax dollars.
A bit later, Jones dove into some of the torture that Palestinian women have endured at the hands of the IDF. I showed a video Jones sent me that showed a Christian woman outside of Bethlehem, whose ancestors walked with Jesus Christ, showing her land registration and explaining how IDF soldiers had stolen this land from her and her family. This woman was evicted from her home with a stun grenade, beaten, and thrown in prison.
“They say this is a war against Hamas. Well, then, why are they destroying the roads in the West Bank? Why did Benjamin Netanyahu go on Israeli television and put up a map with West Bank erased from the map? It’s because they are stealing the ancestral land from the oldest Christian community in the world. And the Church in the West is silent,” Jones said.
To hear more about the horrors of Israel’s persecution of people in the Holy Land, how Christians have suffered, the issues with Christian Zionism, and more, watch or listen to my full interview with Jason Jones.
The John-Henry Westen Show is available by video on the show’s YouTube channel and right here on my LifeSite blog.
It is also available in audio format on platforms such as Spotify, Soundcloud, and Acast. We are awaiting approval for iTunes and Google Play as well. To subscribe to the audio version on various channels, visit the Acast webpage here.
We’ve created a special email list for the show so that we can notify you every week when we post a new episode. Please sign up now by clicking here. You can also subscribe to the YouTube channel, and you’ll be notified by YouTube when there is new content.
You can send me feedback, or ideas for show topics by emailing [email protected].
Help bring aid trucks into Gaza: LifeFunder
