Via The Blaze:
The political director of the Huffington Post UK wrote a column earlier this week envisioning that if Joseph and Mary had traveled to Bethlehem today, they would have been stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint.
In response, a contributor to the Washington Post’s libertarian legal blog Volokh Conspiracy penned a piece challenging Hasan’s premise, a column titled “If Joseph and Mary tried to reach Bethlehem today, they might get murdered by Palestinian terrorists.”
The argument presented by the Huffington Post’s Mehdi Hasan followed a tradition of Palestinian efforts to frame Jesus as a Palestinian Arab, a theme that increases in volume around Christmastime. For example, in his Christmas message last year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Jesus a “Palestinian messenger.”
Hasan wrote on Monday, “How would that carpenter and his pregnant wife have circumnavigated the Kafkaesque network of Israeli settlements, roadblocks and closed military zones in the occupied West Bank? Would Mary have had to experience labor or childbirth at a checkpoint, as one in ten pregnant Palestinian women did between 2000 and 2007?”
(Note: serious questions have been raised about the validity of the “one in ten” figure cited by Hasan, as explained below.)
In response to the column, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein wrote, “Well, since Joseph and Mary were Judeans, i.e., Jews, from Nazareth, they wouldn’t need to be afraid of Israeli roadblocks needed.