Alice Kisiya

“On Sunday, one of the weirdest images of recent times, and there are a lot of weird images, appeared on the Internet. Let me put it up on the screen. It appeared to show an Israeli soldier, an IDF soldier, using a sledgehammer to smash the face of a statue of Jesus. Now when people first saw this, we don't have a poll on it or anything, but we can imagine very few thought it was real.”

“So offensive that in some Israeli religious schools, the plus sign is not used in math. The plus sign, you know, that connotes addition. Why? Because it looks like a cross. And that's considered too offensive for the eyes of school children, and so an inverted t is used. That's a fact. You can look it up. There's only one other instance we've seen of this in the world, and that's in ISIS run madrasas where the cross was also considered offensive.”

“There was a study last year by a Jewish Israeli group, which, God bless them, keeps track of assaults on Christians in Jerusalem. They found in 2025, there were 61 physical assaults against Christians, mostly against Christian clergy, in Jerusalem. Physical assaults. It is so common for Christian priests to be spit on and roughed up to have their churches urinated on or defaced by radical religious Israelis that ask any Christian clergyman who is in Jerusalem. Some of them are afraid to go outside.”

“Yes. They are helping them with their funds, with their taxpayers, with everything, with their support for them. We are being ethnic cleansing because of them. And they are not really aware that they are erasing the history of the cradle of Jesus Christ. Because in our case, in in Al Makru, like, one of the settlers told me, like, after we take over Al Maghuder, which is one of the last, also like Saibe, one of the last Christian villages, he said that we will come to Bethlehem, and we will take over everything because Bethlehem is for us as Jews.”

“Apparently, they're so used to humiliation, American evangelical leaders, that they will even sit by and cheer as Mark Levin lectures them on the New Testament. Imagine sitting down with Mark Levin and saying, the one thing you don't understand, Mark Levin, is the Talmud. So be quiet as I tell you what your religion teaches. Well, of course not. No one could be that presumptuous except Mark Levin, who is entirely comfortable using his platform on Fox News to lecture Christians about what the Christian Bible teaches about violence.”

“They they attacked me. And once the settler, he he tried to chuck me in the car, and I called the police. And he also tried to attack my mom. And the police arrested both of both of us. And we slept in jail for nothing.”

“But I'm talking about the settlers, the youth. They gather them also from around the world from fosters. Most of the the settlers, they don't have parents or they have problems with the family, so they take them and they offer them agricultural school, which is on other Palestinian land. And this agricultural school, they teach them how to hate Arabs, how to be, so violent towards Arabs, and how to treat Palestinians, and how this is how they brainwash them.”

“Actually, it's not only helping me. It's helping Christianity or what what has left from Christianity in Bethlehem because we are less than 1%, and at least 200 families has, have immigrated since October, which is a this is a big number for less than 1%. So, they are trying so hard to convince Christians to leave the country somehow, by a Christian Zionist organizations or people and, give them support to travel, to offer them, job opportunities. And this is a way of ethnic cleansing, a systematic ethnic cleansing.”

“It appeared to show an Israeli soldier, an IDF soldier, using a sledgehammer to smash the face of a statue of Jesus. Now, when people first saw this, we don't have a poll on it or anything, but we can imagine very few thought it was real... But very quickly it emerged, no, this actually was real. And that raised a whole new set of questions, beginning with why would an Israeli soldier want to smash the face of Jesus?”

“One act that one soldier does is somehow emblematic in people's minds of what every IDF soldier is doing. Well, there's no evidence that that is the case, right? So we have to be really careful as Christians and as human beings... to not assume that there's a widespread problem simply because we're seeing one photo of it.”

“Clearly, he didn't think the thing was going to explode, or he wouldn't be hitting with a sledgehammer, a sledgehammer that you paid for as an American taxpayer, wearing a uniform you paid for. In fact, everything that soldier has in his possession, you paid for because the entire IDF is paid for by the United States taxpayer.”

“This does not look good at all for the Israelis and it's going to be circulating online in the US as well. We know who will take advantage of this. IRGC accounts already talk about this, post it everywhere. Definitely Hezbollah affiliated accounts. And this is again, another incident that is going to make a lot of bad portraying of the IDF.”

“In fact, it’s a very common occurrence where the Israeli military desecrates Christian religious symbols and churches and kills Christians. These are not accidents. This adds up to, well, what the SPLC might call a troubling pattern. But in fact, more than a troubling pattern, it's very close to a policy.”

“It appeared to show an Israeli soldier, an IDF soldier, using a sledgehammer to smash the face of a statue of Jesus. Now, when people first saw this, we don't have a poll on it or anything, but we can imagine very few thought it was real. For one thing, social media is famously full of manufactured images created for who knows what purpose, mostly political, using AI. They're not real. And this one seemed especially fake, because it was supposedly shot in Lebanon.”

“You wonder what Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher turned US. Ambassador to Israel, has to say about this? Nothing. You wonder what Mike Johnson, the Christian Speaker of the House, has to say about this? You can imagine that this event, whether you're forward or not, probably won't be consistent with Christian values or even Judeo-Christian values, whatever those are.”