Someone among the killers would think to cut the baby out of Mary, and raise him, the baby Jesus, as a Palestinian Arab and good Muslim. And come to think of it, that is exactly what Islam does when it appropriates, and changes, the Jesus of Christianity for the Jesus of Islam, about which Karen Armstrong is such an enthusiast.

That’s what would happen if a Jewish girl, the Virgin Mary, arrived nine months pregnant, and with labor pains beginning, anywhere that “Palestinian Arabs” were free to do what they do to any Israeli who happens to wander or stumble or arrive, unprotected, in their midst today. And if you need evidence for that, start with any number of Israeli hitchhikers picked up and murdered, or those two Israeli boys beaten to death in a cave, or those two Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn into Ramallah and were lynched, as those who killed them and gouged out their eyes held up their bloody hands to a crowd below hysterical with its own happiness and hate, or those four little Jewish girls sitting in their car, methodically shot to death, one by one, by one more brave hero — hailed as a hero, held up as a model — of the “Palestinian resistance.”–Hugh Fitzgerald