WarRoom Battleground EP 977: On The Strange Silence From Some Evangelicals About Jewish Persecution Of Christians In The Holy Land
Stephen K. Bannon's March 2026 quote frames the episode, which pivots to Peter Kenney detailing the UK House of Lords' backdoor passage of Clause 208, effectively decriminalizing abortion up to birth despite lacking manifesto support. The discussion then shifts to Jason Jones of the Vulnerable People Project, who exposes Israeli settler atrocities against Palestinian Christians in the West Bank and Gaza, including arson and mass killings, while accusing radical Zionists of ethno-nationalist apartheid. Ultimately, the episode critiques the silence of US evangelicals and institutional Christianity, suggesting a dangerous prioritization of political alliances over the protection of persecuted believers globally. [Automatically generated summary]
Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's war room.
Something very significant took place in the UK last week, and I'm delighted that Peter Kenney from the Society from the Protection for the Protection of Unborn Children, S-P-U-C, SPUC, as it's popularly known in the UK, joins us to help digest this vote in the House of Lords to do with the clause 28 of a policing bill.
Peter, thanks for coming on the show.
This was specifically to do with the prosecution of women and the clause 208 says that women will not be prosecuted basically at any point regarding any motive to do with abortions.
Obviously, doctors and the medical profession involved in that might still be prosecuted if this takes place over.
I think this is a 24-week deadline.
There has been some reference to this in the Catholic press, the UK Catholic press, but very little in the domestic mainstream media.
And I think it has massive ramifications.
Why don't you just tell us what the bill was?
I know when it was passing through the House of Commons, it had like a 46-minute debate late at night.
And people think that it was deliberately designed that way so that it could be hijacked by the pro-choice lobby, as indeed it was done.
Tell us a bit more about what the bill is seeking to do, why the 208 Amendment clause is so important, and whether this really does basically provide a backdoor approach to legislating for abortions up to the point of birth.
For the benefit of your viewers, to give a bit of context here, there was a vote in the House of Lords last Wednesday.
That was the 18th of March.
And again, for the benefit of them, perhaps, the House of Lords is the upper chamber of the UK Parliament.
It's a two-chamber parliament.
It's also completely unelected.
That might be something that a lot of people in other countries find strange.
Frankly, a lot of people in this country find it strange as well.
But it's an unelected chamber of appointees.
Mostly they're political appointees.
Some are there on the hereditary principle.
They are peers, they are titled individuals.
And another group that are in there, again unusual, is the bishops of the Anglican Church.
Bishops of the Church of England, a number of them sit in the House of Lords as well.
So that's the background.
There are over 800 members.
And you spoke about the debate in the lower chamber, that was the House of Commons, lasting some 46 minutes, which most people quite rightly said was appalling and ridiculous.
How on earth can you deal with any sort of legislation as enormous as this in such a short time?
In the case of the House of Lords, it only lasted for two hours.
And I should say, within the two hours, this provision was a small part of that.
So as I say, there are over 800 members of the House of Lords, but only around 300 even turned up for the vote last week.
And of that 300, 185 voted for this provision and 148 voted against.
Also, unusual, this was an amendment to a crime and policing bill.
So this piece of legislation wasn't actually or specifically about abortion.
It wasn't about time limits.
It wasn't about life issues in general.
It was about crime and it was about policing.
And an individual member of parliament tagged on this amendment.
And the amendment was to decriminalise it, to decriminalise abortion in any situation under any circumstances.
So no woman would ever be investigated for aborting her own child at any point in the pregnancy.
There's an important point here to mention that this was the crime and policing bill.
Do you think the government here has allowed in this situation this clause 208 to be tacked on to this in order to get the end result,
but to do it in a very roundabout means to distract people because largely the British public would not be, whilst the British public, I think it's fair to say has a consensus view now towards the need for abortion at some point in the gestation period.
Almost, I think the late figures I saw were massively against like 70-80% against abortion up until the point of birth.
Do you think they've designed it this way in order to get this through under the general distraction because of the ideological?
This has been tagged on, it's been tucked in, it's been, if you like, hidden within a bigger bill and passed through.
Because you're also right, there is absolutely no public appetite for this and there is no public agreement with it.
SPUC UH, my organization carried out some polling last year and what we found on the question of abortion up to birth, just one percent of the population agree with that proposition that a woman should be allowed to abort her child up to the point of birth one percent.
No party had this in its manifesto.
No party claims this as policy, but yes, this was put in.
If I can use an analogy or a comparison, this is exactly the tactic that the current British government used on the topic of assisted suicide.
You might know there has been an assisted suicide bill also making its way through the British parliament, but not as a government bill, not sponsored by the government.
Again, the Labour Party, who are in government at the moment, did not have assisted suicide in their manifesto at the last election.
They did not say they were going to try and enact an assisted suicide law, but what they did was they allowed a labour backbench MP Kim Leadbeater, time and support to put a private member's bill into parliament pushing for assisted suicide.
So yes, there is an element here of deceit and of subterfuge, where some of these incredibly progressive pieces of wild social and political liberalism are being pushed onto the parliamentary agenda in a very, very underhand way.
And it's important to remember that there isn't public support for this.
Now, there has been some discussion around whether or not this constitutes legalization.
Some people have said, for example, in the UK and the European media, but it's not legalizing abortion.
It's only decriminalizing it.
I would argue that's a point of utter and complete semantics.
If the law is changed, for example, to decriminalize car theft and I come along and I steal your car and I know I can steal your car because that is no longer a crime to steal a car.
There is no substantive difference between that and the government legalizing car theft.
Either way, I've got your car, you've lost your car and I will not pay any penalty.
I think the semantics are important, or at least the way they are used and manipulate to shape public opinion from especially when people aren't sort of getting into the philosophical details here.
And most people, you know, I see that there's it's been reported there are about 100 or so prosecutions or pseudo prosecutions or police inquiries of women who have been involved in the abortions of their mothers who've been involved in the abortions of their own children over the 24 week limit.
And people would think, some people would think, you know, perhaps whilst I'm against the idea of abortion up to the point of birth, I'm hesitant that mothers should be prosecuted for it.
But then just to follow the philosophical point further, and it's not even, I mean, there's obviously a religious basis to the argument, but there's also a very strong secular philosophical argument as well that is just as convincing.
And it's this: well, okay, then, if you think mothers shouldn't be prosecuted for aborting their children, their babies, at the nine-month period just before birth, what about killing their babies a couple of days after birth?
And then, of course, people say, well, hang on, okay, you know, that's clearly wrong.
But there's really no difference because once you've unleashed the argument, once you've freed the argument from any basis around viability and said, we'll allow abortions beyond that, beyond viability, then the argument is philosophically, it's pretty much the same, whether the baby is on this side of the room or on that side of the room.
It's absurd to suddenly draw these arbitrary distinctions, whether it be at 24 weeks, which is the current UK legal limit.
And by the way, it's worth focusing on that just for a moment.
The UK at the moment allows abortion for effectively any reason up to 24 weeks.
That is an outlier.
Certainly in the European context, the norm, the average across the rest of Europe, would be about half that number, about 12 or 14 weeks.
So you cannot say that abortion laws are not extremely liberal within the UK at the moment.
So the argument that there is some sort of restriction or hindrance simply doesn't hold any water.
But no, you're absolutely right.
We know that the viability of extremely preterm babies is increasing all the time.
So if a child can survive at 22 or 23 weeks, which can happen and which does happen, then what is the difference between a child that was born very early at that age and a child that went to full term 40 weeks and was born?
What is the difference?
It's a continuum then.
We aren't talking about abortion, really, in this context.
We should be honest and we should be frank.
We're talking about infanticide.
That's what this has become.
We're talking about the deliberate taking of viable life.
Now, frankly, the viability isn't really the most substantive issue here because if we use viability as a standard, then by that mechanism or by that metric, a person who's being sustained on a life support system and it isn't viable, then their life counts for nothing either.
So it isn't the standard.
But it is used in this debate and it's used wrongly and it's used very, very misleadingly.
Because what we're talking about here is, without question, as close as you can get, if not an actual case of infanticide.
And I should also say on the question of prosecutions, number one, the police having a legal requirement to investigate and look into this does not on hardly any occasion ever lead to a prosecution.
Prosecutions of women are vanishingly rare.
In the one recent case where there was actually a successful prosecution, I think the sentence was somewhere like 30 or 40 days.
So we're not talking about very, very strict implementation of this or women being sent to prison and spending years in prison.
The prosecution service and the police do take a very broad view of this, but it's the principle that matters.
And that's why you need to consider buying gold from our friends at Birch Gold Group.
For thousands of years, gold has been a store of wealth.
And today, it's a crucial part of any balanced strategy.
Even better, Birch Gold can help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered retirement account in gold.
Just text the name Bannon, that's B-A-N-N-O-N, to the number 989898 to receive your free info kit on gold.
No obligation, just useful information.
With an A plus rating with a better business bureau and tens of thousands of happy customers, let Birch Gold help you diversify with gold.
Text Bannon once again to 989898.
Again, that's Bannon to 989898.
And whilst we're at it, if you are a homeowner, you should be listening to this.
In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing home titles with more ease than ever before.
And your equity is the target.
Here's how it works: criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and boom, your home title has been transferred out of your name.
They then take out loans using your equity or even sell your property outright.
You won't even know it's happened until you get that collection or foreclosure notice.
So let me ask you, when was the last time you checked your home title?
If like me, the answer is, well, never.
And that's exactly what the scammers are counting on.
And that's why we at the War Room Trust Home Title Lock use promo code steve at home title lock.com to make sure your title is still in your name.
You'll also get a free title history report plus a 14-day trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.
That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes.
And if fraud should take place, they'll spend up to $1 million fixing it.
So go to home titlelock.com now, use promo code Steve, home titlelock.com, promo code Steve, back with Peter Kearney at the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.
So let's look at this.
In the first half of the show, we just spoke about the fact that this is backdoor legalization of abortion up to birth.
The second point I'd like to discuss with you is that this is also backdoor legalization now of gender selective abortion.
Just a few words, if you would mind, Peter, to our audience.
What is gender selective abortion and why did the government prohibit it?
Within the Abortion Act, which by the way was passed in 1867 in the UK and has been in force ever since, abortion was supposed to be very tightly controlled and very tightly regulated.
The reality has been the exact opposite.
It is very, very permissive.
One of the grounds which it is prohibited is for the gender selection of the child.
So even though parents might say they'd rather have a boy than a girl, that's not valid grounds, at least not in law, for them to have an abortion.
However, in reality, it is.
And we know for a fact that the number of baby girls aborted is significantly higher than the number of baby boys.
And we know in some communities it varies from community to community.
Some ethnic communities where the birth of a boy is prized more than the birth of a girl, where in effect the value of a boy is higher than a girl, we see higher than average abortions of baby girls.
Now, we're all familiar with China's notorious one-child policy, which stood for decades.
And one of the outworkings of that was a massive population disparity, which China is coming to terms with now, where there are far more young men than there are young marriage-age women.
And this is a significant problem for China.
Now, that's the current, if you like, ramifications or result of that.
The real result was the mass deaths, the genocidal level deaths of a whole generation of young women in China.
And the danger is that we're opening the door to that here.
And it's important also, Ben, to point out that there was a second issue voted on in that notorious House of Lords vote last week.
And that was the question of pills by post.
Viewers in other countries will be familiar with this.
Male order pills or pharmaceutical or telemedicine.
It's called a number of different names, but it's all the same thing.
It's where a woman can have abortion pills delivered to her home where she takes them at home.
Now, once you move to that sort of system, and the UK is moving rapidly towards that system at the moment, more than 70% of abortions are carried out via pills sent to a home.
You lose all controls.
You use controls over gestation level.
So the 24-week limit becomes effectively meaningless.
lose all other legal controls, particularly in the context of this discussion, whether or not the gender of the child has been a consideration, the unborn child.
And so what's happened here is, first of all, decriminalisation, which is bad enough.
And second of all, the embedding of the pills by post-policy, which was, by the way, a COVID-era, supposedly short-term emergency measure, which has now become completely and utterly built in to the healthcare system, as it's called here, so that pills will be the normal way that abortions are delivered in the UK going forward.
And as you can imagine, if all it requires is for a woman to phone and ask for the pills and then say she's asking on grounds that are legally valid, for example, her mental health, then the issue of gender won't even come up.
And if it does come up in the context of a phone call, then there's no reason why truth should be told and the pills shouldn't be asked for anyway.
We are aware of studies where people phoned pill providers and gave completely fictitious reasons and were sent the pills anyway.
So I expect what we will see is a growth in the number of self-selection for sex of children, unborn children, in the future.
And that is being facilitated by this policy.
The policy that, first of all, it's easy to obtain the pills, no questions will be asked.
And second of all, even if what you've done, something illegal does come to light, you're decriminalised anyway.
It's important here to tie these points together because that's really how you get the position that Spook have been highlighting here: that this is legislation via the back door for abortion up to the point of death, even though, of course, the authorities are saying, no, no, no, no, it's not.
But it is, because if you're going to give send abortion pills to mothers at home, and therefore there will be no health professionals there to be prosecuted, you are effectively allowing the abortion to take place at any point up until death.
Let me just come in with some of the statistics regarding the plight of gender-selective abortion around the world.
And these figures are the UN's own figures, the United Nations Population Fund figures.
And the UN, for anyone who's ever been involved at any degree with the pro-life front at the international level, will know that the UN is a prime instigator of abortion as an element of population control, always sort of snuck in under sexual and reproductive health rights nomenclature.
So when they come up with these figures, there's going to be the lower edge.
But they're citing 142 million missing girls globally due to the practice of gender selective abortion for the reasons that you are highlighting.
So it is a thing and it's a thing in the UK as well because a lot of people from different ethnic communities have a preference for boys.
Just in the three or so, two and a half or so minutes that we have left, just tell me something whether you think the visibility of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church has been high enough given the significance of this vote.
I noticed that the newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury used her position in the Lords to speak against this.
But I thought it was, I mean, of course, the Church of England isn't a particularly pro-life organisation.
I thought, I mean, she took the position, but it was slightly perfunctory, I thought, procedural.
Tell me there on the ground, do you think The institutional Christian churches really raised their opposition to this to the level of importance, or was it simply just a little bit perfunctory and performative?
Well, I think there was a spectrum here of responses.
First of all, in the pro-life sector in general, as you'll probably be aware, SPUC is the oldest and it's the largest pro-life organisation, not just in the UK, but in Europe, and the biggest also.
And we definitely did mobilize our supporters and our subscribers to contact members of the House of Lords, contact parliamentarians, and lobby against this.
So a lot of work was done there.
Within the institutional churches, I think it probably would be fair to draw a distinction between them.
I think the Catholic Church was clear across the board.
Its position on abortion is clear, it's unequivocal.
I think it's widely known and I think it's well known.
But as I said to begin with, the Catholic Church is not in the position of the established Church of England in the sense that the Catholic bishops don't have votes here.
They don't sit in the House of Lords.
So in that regard, what the Catholic Church said, what Catholic bishops and priests said, really was on a par with what ordinary members of the public said.
And do also keep in mind, as I mentioned to begin with, that the membership of the House of Lords are not elected.
So they're freed completely from the problems that politicians around the world generally have to face, and that is answering to their voters.
They don't have voters.
So that then brings us to the position of the established church, the Church of England.
And there are, as I say, members of the Anglican bishops who also sit in the House of Lords and have a vote.
You talked about the Archbishop of Canterbury.
You used the word perfunctory.
That probably is fair.
Other people have used that word.
In fact, there was some controversy on the day of the vote because it appeared to begin with as if the Archbishop, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, did not intend to attend the House of Lords and did not intend to participate in the vote.
And it was only because of a bit of a media outcry at her absence that she belatedly decided she would attend and she would participate.
Though I think it would be fair to say, while she did point out that, and she voted against, I should say she voted against, but I think a lot of people within the Anglican Church would have liked to hear a more ringing denunciation of what happened rather than simply a straightforward objection.
If the UK government were to ever pass legislation insisting on the immediate removal of all illegals in the UK, then you will see the Christian churches come in rolling up their steeves and fighting as if they really did believe in it.
That's what I mean when I say perfunctory.
So we've got time for Peter Kearney.
Thanks for coming on and telling us a little bit about the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children's work on this issue.
Very quickly, where do people go on social media to keep abreast of what you're working on?
It's where I put up exclusively all of my content.
24 hours a day.
You want to know what Steve Bannon's thinking?
unidentified
Go to get her.
That's right.
You can follow all your favourites.
Steve Bannon, Charlie Cook, Jack the Soviet, and so many more.
Download the Getter app now.
Sign up for free and be part of the new Bethlehem.
After a two-year pause, Christmas has returned to Bethlehem.
Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is home to the world's oldest Christian community.
These Christian communities are being pushed out by illegal Israeli settlements.
They literally hate Christians more than anything else in the world.
We have to fight oppression as a Christian leader.
22 Israeli settlements around us.
150,000 Israeli settlers surrounding Bethlehem from all sides, north, south, west, and east.
We have control or limited control as Palestinians over less than 13% of Bethlehem.
The ruins of the Church of St. George on Monday, they became the target of an alleged arson attack at the hands of illegal settlers.
More than half of the town's territory has become a target for illegal settlements.
If this continues, there will be no Christians in Bethlehem.
Persecution of Palestinian Christians00:07:46
unidentified
We need to keep reminding the world in a time when Palestinians are sadly, many times dehumanized to the extent that when our children are killed and start, it's justified in political terms.
Jason, I think we were last on the show together on Christmas Eve when you were broadcasting from, was it Manger Square?
I was broadcasting from St. Peter's Piazza and Steve was tying it all together.
That was a great show and I remember, I think you had the local pastor there.
I think many people watching that short video, especially folks who follow the war room, will be slightly surprised by the fact because it doesn't really get any attention at all on US television.
Slightly surprised by the fact that Christians, Palestinian Christians on the West Bank are under a particularly heavy form of persecution right now.
We're going to be talking about some of the US figures as well in this second part of this half.
But first of all, right now, what I wanted to ask you, following on from that video, it is your thesis that West Bank settlers hate Christians most in the world, even more than they hate Muslims.
That would surprise a lot of people.
Just tell me a little bit about that, if you wouldn't mind, and the general background of the work that you're doing with the Vulnerable People Project to highlight this situation really to the United States, where political power ought to be concentrating a little bit more.
Ben, first of all, thanks for having me on your show.
And it was great.
That Christmas special to me was one of the highlights of our work here in 23 years at the Vulnerable People Project live from Bethlehem to share the plight of truly the most vulnerable Christian community in the world, which is the oldest Christian community in the world, those Catholic and Orthodox Christians in the West Bank and in Gaza.
And it was something that was very surprising to me when I first started going to the West Bank and to Israel and meeting with the Christian communities.
And you can hear it from the settlers' own mouths that they have a special disdain for Christians more than they despise Muslims.
And they really are so heavily propagandized.
Have friends that are settlers in the West Bank, friends that are settlers that I know from my work in Hollywood and in Washington, D.C., who really believe they have a right to the land that the ancient Christian communities hold.
They fear those Christian communities and they give them no quarter.
They spit on priests, they spit on nuns.
This young woman you heard in the video, Alice Kassia, her homes have been destroyed multiple times.
She has been beaten and then arrested for defending herself.
Just in this year alone, 2026, 10 Christians have been killed in the West Bank.
And we've seen brutal attacks on the only 100% Christian village left in the West Bank, Taibe.
We've seen brutal attacks almost every single day.
And although President Trump has said that these settlements are illegal and need to stop, just in the past couple of months, Israel has approved a new settlement called Shtema, where they will destroy 11,000 predominantly Christian homes to make way for settlers.
This would effectively be the end of the Christian community in Bethlehem and in the Shepherd's Field.
And it would be really tragic to see the oldest Christian community in the world erased before our very eyes.
One of the reasons I wanted folks to see that video that I think was made just in the run-up to Christmas of last year is there's a scene halfway in there that will surprise a lot of this audience.
It's only there for about two seconds, but you basically see a group of Orthodox Jews guys walking down and spitting at the Christian religious sisters and they're wearing habits as they're walking past them.
As I said in my introduction, that will surprise people because it's not what the general message of what's being communicated in the shaping of U.S. opinion, which is sort of massively in favor towards Israel and Israeli expansion.
Just give me like two minutes, if you wouldn't mind, and explain.
Was that a one-off or does that sort of thing happen frequently to Christians on the West Bank?
Well, it happens to the indigenous Christian community every day, and being spit on is just the tip of the iceberg.
They're murdered, they're raped, their homes are stolen from them, they're imprisoned.
We just saw a one-year-old baby this week that was released, tortured in front of his father by the IDF.
There hasn't been a prosecution of a settler that's assaulted or murdered a Palestinian in the West Bank since 2020.
So in six years of relentless assaults and murders, there hasn't been a single settler charged or prosecuted.
Yet, if the Palestinians so much as raise their hand in defense of themselves, they can be shot or prosecuted for assault.
And it is something that's shocking to most American Christians who have been told that Israel is our greatest ally.
But spitting on Christians is something that they believe that they have to do, I guess, from the Talmud is a religious duty.
Now, to be fair, to be fair, when you go to most places in Israel, you know, you go to Haifa, you can see Palestinians and you can see Israelis, you see Drews, Christians, Jews, and Muslims living together in peace and harmony.
But there are these radical Zionists that hold to a brutal ethno-nationalist, apartheid ideology that sees Christians and Palestinians as unworthy of basic human rights and protections.
I tell you, Jason, what I see here is knowing how strongly the American public feels about its support of Israel, I see a tremendous opportunity here for it.
I think your organization is the only one that I'm aware of that's speaking out for Christians, for the evangelical lobby in the United States to say, our support of the state of Israel is not under question here, but to use the political weight that US evangelicals have to intervene here directly in the protection of West Bank Christians,
because otherwise there are too many serious questions that will need to be asked about evangelical leadership itself and the institutional silence.
And we're going to be discussing that in just a few minutes more with Jason Jones, president of the Vulnerable People Project.
First, however, do you owe back taxes or you haven't filed in years?
Now is the time to resolve your tax matters.
With the national conversation around abolishing the income tax system, the IRS is fighting back and proving it's here to stay by becoming more aggressive than ever before.
They're sending out more collection notices, filling more tax liens and collecting billions more than in recent years.
If you owe, the IRS can garnish your wages, levy your bank accounts, seize your retirement and even your home.
And if you owe or haven't filed, it's not a question of if the IRS will act, it's when.
Right now, Tax Network USA is offering a completely free IRS research and discovery call to show you exactly where you stand and what they can do to stop it before it's too late.
Their powerful programs and strategies can save you thousands or even eliminate your debt entirely if you qualify.
Call 1-800-958-1000.
That's 1-800-958-1000 or visit tiernusa.com slash bannon for your free discovery call with Tax Network USA.
And I'll just do a quick shout out while we're here to allfamilypharmacy.com.
They've got a couple of great offers now for methylene blue and for the NAD injections.
You might want to check out their website again, allfamilypharmacy.com slash bannon and to place your orders or find out more.
They're doing a great service there, widening Americans access to healthcare or familypharmacy.com slash Bannon.
All right, back now with Jason Jones.
So what caught my eye then just a couple of days ago is that the auxiliary bishop of Jerusalem, Bishop William Shamali, was speaking with EWTN News, the Eternal World Television Network, the largest religious broadcaster in the world, in which he was indicating the plight that Palestinian Christians have.
He's explicitly used the word aggression that they're suffering, that Palestinian Christians are suffering.
And what caught my eye specifically, and I'm quoting him literally, is that he said, and we communicated this news to all the world, even to the American ambassador in Tel Aviv, who came to visit, and he promised to do something, but not many things were done.
And that's the Auxiliary Bishop of Jerusalem.
When he's talking about the U.S. Ambassador to Tel Aviv, he's obviously talking about Ambassador Mike Huckabee, though I think he might have relocated to Jerusalem.
I expect he would have done.
Now, that really did surprise me because Mike Huckabee is a well-known face.
I think he's a pastor, right?
Big evangelical voice.
He's there.
He's been there.
He's been shown what's happened by the bishop on the ground, and yet he has done absolutely nothing.
Could you help clear up the confusion in my mind why that might possibly be the case?
I'm shocked and disappointed by Ambassador Huckabee.
In fact, I was in the West Bank when he was named ambassador.
I've known Mike Huckabee since 2006, 2007.
He's someone that I've admired.
I thought of him as a godly and sincere man, and I understood that he held, I'm a Catholic, and I understood that he held to a dispensationalist theology of Christian Zionism.
But I also thought of him as a very sincere and humane Christian.
And I thought as ambassador, when he sees the intelligence briefings and the reports, when he really begins to understand what's happening on the ground in Gaza and on the ground in the West Bank as a Christian man, you know, he will speak up.
But I have to say, he's been shockingly disappointing, not just on the West Bank.
You know, I was sitting a few rows behind him at Midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity just an hour or so after we did our Christmas Eve broadcast.
And when Sarah saw me, she whispered to her father, Jason Jones, who's behind us, and they both rolled their eyes.
So clearly, they weren't happy with our reporting of the crimes of the state of Israel against the oldest Christian community in the world that's situated in the West Bank.
But it's not just Ambassador Huckabee.
Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, went to the West Bank.
He didn't visit the Palestinian Christian communities, which descend from those Christians that were in the upper room.
Those families have been there since the first century and before the first century.
But who did the Speaker of the House go to meet with?
He went to meet with the settlers, the ones that were committing the brutal acts of terrorism against this Christian community.
And as a Catholic, as a Christian, it is a little heartbreaking to see a sincere evangelical Christian like Huckabee, like Mike Huckabee, just sit on his hands and close his eyes and pretend not to know what's going on.
He knows very well what's going on.
I'd like to see him brought before Congress and asked under oath if he saw signs of war crimes or famine in Gaza.
He returned from Gaza and said he saw no famine.
He saw no evidence of war crimes.
But I know people that were with him on the ground and said they were shocked at the press conference that Huckabee held with Witkoff after that visit because they were right next to him and he clearly saw evidence of famine and severe hunger.
He also saw evidence of war crimes.
And so I'd like to see him ask.
I pray to God one day he has to answer those questions under oath.
I noticed that there's a convent of religious sisters, right, just outside of Bethlehem of all places of symbolism here.
And their little acre of plot of land where they were growing olives and what have you.
This is according to Bishop Shmali.
It says that the Israeli West Bank settlers have basically taken, commandeered the monastery, the convent, and its land.
And this isn't just to a religious community of nuns.
They're doing this to Christian families as well.
Now, you know, we should get you on again and talk about the wider issues here.
Because in the two or so minutes left, there isn't time.
And I don't want to put words into your mouth, but it would seem to me that by some, evangelicals are more interested in promoting Zionism within evangelicalism than they are interested in speaking out and talking about actual Christians who are trying to live a faithful life to Jesus Christ.
And that would indicate to me somewhat a badly ordered hierarchy of priorities there.
Yeah, I would say that this small sect of evangelical Christianity is dying.
It's died in Gaza.
Dispensationalist theology has died in Gaza.
It's not going to continue past the boomer generation that still clings to it today.
We see young evangelicals flocking to the Catholic and Orthodox Church because they're horrified by their parents and their pastors advocating ethno-nationalist apartheid states and genocide.
So, yeah, I think that it is, it's quite sorrowful.
I'd like to see the USCCB and Catholic bishops like Bishop Barron and Cardinal Dolan raise their voice for the Christians in the West Bank instead of attacking heroes like Kerry Prajan Bowler, who's been a vocal advocate for the Palestinian Christians, even though she began all this process as a committed Christian Zionist herself.
But Ben, as you said, we cannot look away.
We cannot look away from the atrocities that the state of Israel is committing.
Settlers, with the protection of the IDF, are burning down Christian farms, slaughtering their animals, destroying their homes, raping and assaulting Christians, including nuns.
And we have Mike Huckabee, who met with Jonathan Pollard, a convicted spy, a notorious spy, not making a committed effort to meeting with the Palestinian Christian community in the West Bank.
And I would mention Israel is not allowing the Christian children in Gaza to leave for their cancer treatments, the children with cancer.
I mean, to me, this is absolutely unbelievable that this administration isn't saying to Israel, let those children get their cancer treatments and stop the ecclesia side of the oldest Christian community in the world in Bethlehem.
You mentioned, because we've got like about 60 seconds left, you mentioned that Mike and Sarah Huckabee, they rolled their eyes when they saw you just sitting behind them.
You're obviously taking a heroic position here to defend the plight of Christians on the West Bank.
What is the general position within institutional Christianity in the United States towards your apostolate here and what you're doing?
How much support do you actually get in this?
Or does basically nobody wants to hear what you're saying because it's just too uncomfortable?
I get a lot of people whispering to me, including bishops and cardinals.
Thank you for your courage.
And I wish they didn't feel like they had to whisper, you know, but this is whether you're standing up to the CCP, the institutional church isn't speaking about the 10 Catholic bishops that have been disappeared.
Jimmy Lai has effectively a death sentence.
And we, you know, so when, or in India, the Hindu, the Hindu nationalists have destroyed 300 churches in one state.
We see silence.
So whether it's the state of Israel, the CCP, the power elite in India, it seems like it's hard to find their voice.
But at the Vulnerable People Project, I founded this organization in 2002 specifically to stand with those communities that it takes courage to advocate for.
And But when the cavalry shows up, when everyone shows up, we leave like the Lone Ranger to the next vulnerable community to advocate for.
And we're heartened to see that on October 18th, after the horrible terrorist attack of October 7th, when St. Puforius Church was bombed by Israel and we spoke up against this, we were alone.
But over the past two years, we've seen the conservative movement wake up to the reality.
and beauty and grandeur and dignity of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Christian community specifically.