It's Hard to be a Christian, by Daniel Pipes

What some observers are calling a pogrom took place near Ramallah on the night of September 3-4. That's when 15 Muslim youths from one village, Deir Jarir, rampaged against Taibe, a neighboring all-Christian village of 1,500 people.

The reason for the assault? A Muslim woman from Deir Jarir, Hiyam Ajaj, 23, fell in love with her Christian boss, Mehdi Khouriyye, owner of a tailor shop in Taibe. The couple maintained a clandestine, two-year affair and she became pregnant in about March 2005. When her family learned of her condition, they murdered her.

That was on about September 1; unsatisfied even with this "honor killing" ? for Islamic law strictly forbids non-Muslim males to have sexual relations with Muslim females ? the Ajaj men sought to take vengeance against Khouriyye and his family.

They took it two days later in an assault on Taibe. The Ajajes and their friends broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances. They threw Molotov cocktails at some buildings and poured kerosene on others, then torched them. The damage included at least 16 houses, some stores, a farm and a gas station. The assailants vandalized cars, looted extensively, and destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.

"It was like a war," one Taibe resident told The Jerusalem Post. Hours passed before the Palestinian Authority security and fire services arrived. The 15 assailants spent only a few hours in police detention, then were released. As for Khouriyye, the Palestinian police arrested him, have kept him jail, and (his family says) repeatedly beaten him . . . .

The Khouriyyes and others recall the assailants shouting, Allahu akbar and anti-Christian slogans: "Burn the infidels, burn the Crusaders" . . . .

THIS ASSAULT fits a larger pattern. According to the Catholic Custodian of the Holy Land, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Christians in the Bethlehem region alone suffered 93 cases of injustice in 2000-04. In the worst of these, in 2002, Muslims murdered the two Amre sisters, 17 and 19, whom they called prostitutes. A post-mortem, however, showed the teenagers to have been virgins ? and to have been tortured on their genitals.

"Almost every day ? I repeat, almost every day ? our communities are harassed by the Islamic extremists in these regions," Pizzaballa says.