After The Saturday People, The Sunday People

The Muslims have been going after the Jews in what is now Israel even before the founding of the Jewish state. For according to Islamic doctrine, any territory that was once possessed by Muslims must forever remain a part of dar al-Islam. But it is not just the Jews whom Muslims are after; the slogan sometimes heard in the Middle East is “after the Saturday people, the Sunday people.” That is, “first we deal with the Jews, and then with the Christians.” More on this menace to the West can be found here: “Christians, mark my words: after the Jews, Islamists will come for you,” by Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, April 1, 2026:

Zero political outrage, zero clerical mobilization, and zero digital uproar for the Christians killed in Nigeria on Palm Sunday. Where are the fiery sermons, the hashtags, and the worldwide denunciations?

The Kotel, holiest place for Jews in Jerusalem, the closest point to what remains of the Temple, always crowded, day and night, has been empty for a month. Empty because of the war and Iranian missiles. But it seems that an antisemitic missile is not a missile, but a message of peace.

Thus, Israel closing the Church of Sepulchre to Cardinal Pizzaballa out of fear of Iranian attacks caused more noise and scandal than the Iranian missile that fell near the Sepulchre a few days earlier.

Antisemitism truly seems to be the socialism of fools (including Christian ones).

In the end, Prime Minister Netanyahu intervened to guarantee Pizzaballa safe passage to the Sepulchre for prayer and Mass. Case closed? Not so fast.

350,000 posts in 10 hours about the cardinal’s access to the Holy Sepulchre for security reasons, compared to 9,100 posts two weeks earlier, when a fragment of an Iranian missile had struck the same church….

There is only one place in the Middle East where Christians are growing rather than declining: Israel. They are 185,000 out of 10 million, whereas in 1948 they were 34,000.

In Syria, out of 25 million? 300,000 remain. In Jordan, out of 12 million? 200,000. In Iraq, out of 48 million? 250,000. Algeria? Fewer than 100,000 out of 48 million. And we are talking about countries that were historically cradles of Christianity: the Syria of Paul, the Jordan where Jesus was baptized, the Iraq of the Chaldeans, the Algeria of Augustine.

Within a decade, Israel will have the largest Christian population in the Middle East….

Here I disagree. There are many Iranians who, having been disgusted by the fanatical Muslims who have ruled over them for nearly a half-century, are converting to Christianity by the hundreds of thousands. Iran, not Israel, will have the largest Christian population in the Middle East by 2036.

Israel is not on the list of the 50 countries that persecute Christians.

In 1964, when Pope Paul VI arrived in Jerusalem for the first historic visit of a pontiff, the city was divided by barbed wire. Jordanian snipers were stationed on rooftops, landmines everywhere in the “no man’s land,” seven kilometers long. The only passage between the two parts of the city, Israeli and Jordanian, was the Mandelbaum Gate, named after the couple Esther and Simcha Mandelbaum, owners of the house where the border passed.

There were neighborhoods, like Abu Tor, with houses that had one entrance in the Jordanian section and one in the Israeli section. But while Paul VI and his entourage could move freely through Jerusalem to pray in holy sites, Israelis and Jews could only look across the barbed wire at the walls of the Old City and dream of the Kotel….

When Jordan controlled the Old City and east Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967, Jews were strictly forbidden to visit. They could not worship at the Kotel, nor visit the top of Temple Mount, the most sacred sites in Judaism. Now that all of Jerusalem is in Israeli hands, Muslims are free to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque, or at any of the 73 mosques now open in Jerusalem. There is complete freedom of worship.

As for Christians during the same period — from 1949 to 1967 — there were restrictions. These included the following: 1) limits were placed on the number of worshipers allowed into the Old City on Christmas and Easter; 2) Christian schools were subjected to strict controls, including the mandatory use of Arabic as the medium of instruction. They were required to close on Fridays (the Muslim holy day) rather than Sundays, and they had to teach the Qur’an to all students, including Christians; 3) Christian churches and charities were prohibited from purchasing land or real estate in Jerusalem; 4) In 1966, custom privileges previously extended to Christian religious institutions were abolished.

These restrictions contributed to a decline in the Christian population in the Old City from 25,000 in 1948 to 11,000 by 1967.

During the years under Jordanian rule, every vestige of Jewish presence in the Jordanian part of the city was erased. Jews were never allowed to visit their holy sites in the occupied part of the city, in violation of international law and armistice agreements. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was systematically desecrated; ancient synagogues, such as the famous Hurva, and most buildings in the old Jewish quarter were deliberately destroyed….

Ancient Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives, some more than two thousand years old, were dug up by the Jordanians and used to line the floors of Jordanian army latrines, or ground up to be used as gravel for road building.

And those Palestinians holed up in the Church of the Nativity also urinated and defecated, despite there being working toilets, all over the floors and walls of the Church — a sign of contempt for Christianity and Christians.

As Fabrice Hadjadj writes in Le Figaro:

“The ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ takes place in this alignment of stars, giving voice to a famous jihadist cry: ‘After Saturday comes Sunday,’ in other words: after the Jews, the Christians. The hour is decisive. It had to come. Israel could only end up producing a Dreyfus Affair on a global scale, in which everyone is called to take part. If the Hebrew Scriptures are our source, the Jewish state is our estuary. If Israel falls, Europe can only fall.”

That is why I despise an antisemitic Christian more than a progressive or Quranic antisemite.

Also because, as it is said in “Submission” by Houellebecq, “there is no Israel for us”.

Fabrice Hadjadj sees the Hebrew Scriptures as the Ur-text for Western civilization, and the Jewish state is the “estuary” through which that text now flows outward. If Israel is destroyed, she claims, Europe itself will follow after. The fates of the Jewish state and of Western civilization are intertwined. Does anyone doubt that if Israel were to disappear, along with all the “Saturday people,” that the world’s Muslims would then turn their full and murderous attention to the “Sunday people”?