We’re a week away now from the terrorist bombings in Sri Lanka that led to the eventual deaths of more than 300 “Easter worshippers.” And the week before was the tragic fire at Notre Dame cathedral, which as the AP pointed out in a headline, was not just a tourist mecca but “also revered as a place of worship.”

In short, news organizations found themselves having to report about Christianity, which we imagine leads to everyone in the newsroom looking around to see if they recognize anyone who’s a Christian and might know something about it.

The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy noted this correction in The New York Times:

It turns out that wasn’t the only “Jesus was a Palestinian” take of the week. As The Jerusalem Post reported a couple of days ago, Rep. Ilhan Omar retweeted a New York Times op-ed that claimed that “Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.”

Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman reports:

The writer was exploring why Jesus is so often illustrated as a white man with blue eyes, but [Rabbi Abraham] Cooper contends that Omar likely had another agenda in sharing the article, which she did with the following message: “Don’t they (Christians) know Jesus was a Palestinian?”

“The claim that Jesus was a Palestinian is so bizarre that the question becomes what one gains by making that allegation,” Cooper told The Jerusalem Post. “For people who have no theological or historical rooting, the idea that Jesus was a Palestinian creates a new narrative for Palestinian history, which otherwise does not date back very far. If one can say that Jesus was Palestinian 2,000 years ago, then that means the Jews are occupying Palestinian land.”

…

Cooper said that if the Palestinians admit that Jesus was a Jew, then the idea that the Jews only arrived in Israel in 1948 and occupied Palestinian indigenous land becomes an absurdity.

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Tags: BethlehemIlhan OmarJerusalem TimesJesusJewJudeanew york timesPalestinian