Israel: A Journalist Dressed as a Franciscan Is Spat Upon

Yossi Eli of Israel's Channel 13 wanted to investigate the spike in hate crimes against Christians. Dressed in the Franciscan habit and accompanied by Fr. Alberto Pari, secretary of the Custody of the Holy Land, he began to wander around Jerusalem. Five minutes after leaving, Eli was spat on by Jewish Israeli settlers.

So that viewers of the channel can take the measure of this daily contempt and the hateful manifestations of which Christians, and particularly religious, are the target, the Custody of the Holy Land has agreed to lend him a habit, in which the journalist concealed a camera.

During their walk, the journalist and Fr. Alberto passed through the Jewish quarter of the old city, where a man taunted them in Hebrew: “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.” Further on, an 8-year-old child spits on them. At Mount Sion, a place of regular inter-religious tensions, the two Franciscans come across a group of soldiers in military service. One spits at their feet. Shocked, the journalist took off his coat and explained his approach to the military group.

Eli tweeted images of settler attacks, along with comments rejecting attempts to play down the spike in hate crimes against Christians. These acts of hate are neither isolated nor new. However, the phenomenon has grown exponentially in recent months.

Interviewed in the Channel 13 documentary, Fr. Francesco Patton, Custos of the Holy Land, notes that anti-Christian attitudes have multiplied “when political language has become more violent” and underlines “the responsibility of leaders, of those who have the power.”

In a Haaretz article, Fr. Patton mentioned the desecration of a Lutheran cemetery, the vandalism of a Maronite prayer hall and the inscription “death to Christians” on an Armenian property, all in the space of a few weeks. In an earlier warning of attacks on Christians in Palestine, he said they were “threatened with extinction” by “radical” Israeli groups.

Police reports regularly justify the “incivility” as the “mental instability” of their authors. “The justification of some Jewish groups for hate crimes is that they are 'mentally ill. So no. It’s not true,” explains Yossi Eli, in a Facebook post. “Our investigation proved that the attacks are really not from the mentally ill, but people with a clear opinion who simply hate something they are not. Brainwash them that Jesus is bad. Young extremists, children, and most sadly soldiers, the 'salt of the earth', express their hatred towards Christianity."

Eli asked what the reaction would be if Jews were spat at instead of Christians. “Just think what the reaction of those Jews would have been if a Christian had spat on them in Europe,” he said, adding that being a priest for a day “was very difficult to digest.”