Remember Christy, the brave and articulate palestinian woman who featured in this reader post?
Well, she’s under attack for expressing her pro-Israel views.
A Bethlehem father whose daughter recently released a pro-Israel video has condemned the move, saying that the family “rejects and distances” themselves from the content in a statement made to Bethlehem’s Radio Mawwal.
The Anastas family also denied claims that their daughter had been forced to flee, saying that they feared she had been the victim of “entrapment” and was under “pressure” from sponsors who had promised to pay her enrollment fees and housing costs for university in the United Kingdom.
The statement comes after a video featuring their daughter Christy was released on the internet in which she spoke of her belief that “God has given this land to the Jews as an everlasting covenant,” and claimed that she was forced to flee Palestine because of persecution for her beliefs.
The Anastas family expressed their “surprise” at the video, “deploring and condemning” her words, denying that she was ever forced to “flee” but instead that they she had left of her own free will to study abroad.
They added that the video “was a result of direct pressure that Christy is currently experiencing.”
They said in a statement that a year and a half ago, a British church official had come to their house and offered to pay for their daughter to attend university in the United Kingdom.
After accepting the offer and traveling to the UK, however, the family said that Christy’s behavior had become “incomprehensible and unclear,” and claimed that she was no longer enrolled in university.
They did not understand what the men who were paying for her education had done to her, they added.
“For as long as we know, Christy’s position was always against the wall and the Israeli occupation, which prevented her from living her childhood,” the family said, stressing that she had expressed this point of view “in more than one television interview in the past.”
They also said that they feared that Israeli authorities were trying to “exploit” their daughter “in order to weaken us and get us out of our house, which has been the target of the occupation since the construction of the apartheid wall.”
If the family’s explanation seems unlikely, that is probably because it is almost certainly a fabrication. The alternative explanation – that she was granted asylum after being threatened with murder for speaking out in defense of Israel’s right to exist – resonates, given the well documented Muslim palestinian persecution of their Christian brethren.
And I’m willing to bet Christy’s family felt compelled to say what they did under threat of violence.
The good news is this campaign against Christy shows she is making an impact.
