Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens. (1612)
The biblical narrative of Herod’s decision to butcher some 3,000 innocent children inspired Rennaissance and Baroque artists to produce hundreds of dramatic and powerful harrowing canvases of all sizes. Under the title The Massacre of the Innocents, this genocide, ordered and overseen by Herod, has been memorialized in art by Peter Paul Rubens, Guido Reni, Giotto, Breughel the Elder, and Nicolas Poussin, to name but a few.
Because it captures the dastardly event in all its lurid and gut-wrenching orgiastic carnage, Peter Paul Rubens’ 1611 The Massacre of the Innocents stands far above similar paintings of this genre.
In the Christian holy text Matthew tells his readers about the unique events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ, a Palestinian Jewish child, conceived miraculously to a young Nazarene maiden, and born in a manger to Joseph of Nazareth and Mary, his betrothed. And because there was no room at any of the Beit Lahem (Bethlehem) inns, Mary delivered the infant child in a manger in the Holy City of Beit Lahem, Palestine.
In some ways circumstances in Palestine some two-thousand years ago were no different from what they are today. Palestine was a Roman colony, and as such, the colonizers ruled with a brutal iron fist and exacted hefty taxes. After the Roman Senate declared Herod King of Judea (a vassal king to impose Pax Romana), his paranoiac affliction and ruthlessness inflicted misery on the people of Palestine, Jews and others alike. Fearing that the birth of Jesus, the promised Messiah, would eventually depose him, he ordered the murder of some three thousand innocent children in Bethlehem and environs. In first century Palestine violence and executions, taxation without representation, human rights violations, segregation, slavery, exploitation, xenophobia, expulsion, and the confiscation of personal and communal properties were the norm in a society that demeaned and deprecated its indigenous non-Jewish populations.
As an example, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Levites of Jesus’ time considered the Samaritans and others inferior races, claiming that the Samaritans were mongrel Jews, and that God excluded all others from his Covenant. This legalistic and intolerant ethnocentrism paved the way for the ethnocentric hypocrites of the time to transfer the mixed group Samaritans to Samaria; the latter were reviled, persecuted, ostracized, and restricted to the West Bank’s Mt. Gerizim. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan was no doubt based on and directed at the bigotry and xenophobia that prevailed during that epoch. And this, my favorite parable, has held true in every clime and geographical locale.
If one were to compare conditions in Pax Romana Palestine at the time of Jesus’ birth to Pax Americana/Israelica in modern day occupied Palestine, one would be shocked to discover that Roman occupation was infinitely more benign. Further, the biblical narrative informs us that at the time of Christ’s birth Palestine was an extension of Augustus’ massive empire. Palestina/Falasteen was sandwiched between Egypt and Syria; the first served as Rome’s breadbasket, and the second as Rome’s eastern line of defense and the last stop of the ancient Silk Road – and one of the conduits that fed the insatiable Roman treasury to maintain its stranglehold on its expansive Pax Romana Empire. Ironic it is that American, British, and European hegemony in that same region (including the bloody Crusades) are no different from Rome’s. And since 1917, the Brits, French, and later the Americans have been drawing and redrawing the boundaries of the oil-rich Near-East; and “What we say, goes” is the new Anglo-Franco-Americana Pax Oleum Petra.
Utilizing the Jewish King Herod as a friendly client and puppet, the Romans gave him a free hand. And, as long as he collected taxes to help enrich Rome’s coffers, Herod’s heavy-handed rule was viewed benignly by Rome. Perceiving the birth of the promised Messiah/King as a threat to his rule, Herod ordered the genocidal killing of all male infants in Bethlehem and environs.
What Rome was to Herod, America (and subservient US presidents and Congresses) and its acquiescent European US vassals are to Netanyahu and Israel.
It is more than fair to say that if one compared living conditions in Palestine and the occupied West Bank and Gaza during the time of Jesus’ birth to current living conditions of Palestinians all across the Holy Land, one would be shocked at the shrieking (think Edvard Munch’s The Scream) and howling of anguished cries of a nation robbed of its birthright.
On the 8th of December 2024 I sent the following email to a handful of friends, acquaintances, editors of moderate Baptist online publications, including a genocide expert: “That Palestinians are brown, and that most are Muslims, does that mean they are fair game because in the Evangelical and West’s taxonomy of human beings they are children of a lesser God?
Before, during, and well after the Thanksgiving meal my stomach churned. How could I enjoy a family meal when 2.3 million Gaza Palestinians are deliberately starved by Biden’s cowardice and full throttle support of the Gaza carnage and Netanyahu’s belligerent defiance, his hangman? The silence of America and Europe’s Christians is very telling.”
The Institute of Middle Eastern Understanding’s October 7, 2024 report under the title “Fact Sheet: One Year of Israeli Genocide in Gaza, By the Numbers,” is a comprehensive and chilling report on Israel’s deliberate and systematic malevolent destruction and erasure of man, beast, physical structures, and an ancient and rich culture. The report stated that since October 7, 2023, 45,841 Gazans have been killed, 70% of whom are women and children, with 106,962 thousand wounded. 19,812 of the dead are children – male/female, with approximately 1,300 infants and toddlers under two. The Lancet Medical Journal puts the dead at 225,140 thousand. In the Occupied West Bank 813 children have been killed. The aforementioned does not include the thousands of victims missing and buried under the rubble, over 4,000 of whom are children. Oxfam reported that “More women and children have been killed in Gaza over the past year than any other conflict over the past two decades.” Over 26,500 children have been diagnosed with life-threatening acute malnutrition and starvation. Over 1,200 children have had one or both legs amputated. This prompted U.N.C.E.F. to state that “The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”
Unfortunately, on today’s world stage and with Pope Francis as an exception, there’s not even a single Wise Man from either the East or the West. And not one, but many Near Eastern and Western Grinches have stolen Christmas from millions of kids around the world, Innocents who yearn not for the expensive toys, but for a warm bed, warm clothes, safe shelter, three decent meals a day, safe schools and communities, playgrounds, dignity, freedom, and hope for a future free from the threat of evil by the likes of our modern-day Assads, Netan-Herods and Bidens Et. Al.
The expression of agony on Poussin’s mother in his masterpiece The Massacre of the Innocents is the same expression one witnesses on the faces of Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Afghani, Sudanese, and Somali mothers and children, including all the suffering mothers around the world victimized by apartheid, bigotry, intolerance, oppression, and wars.
My email ended thusly: “And Jesus wept for Palestine and her orphaned children. He also wept for an apathetic America and a Western civilization that is fueling and financing the carnage. In deep pain and deeper sorrow.”
As my dear friend, the Honorable Judge/Preacher Wendell Griffen says, “Jesus was an occupied Palestinian, not an Israeli occupier. Get your story straight.”
Buon Natale, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
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