For Christians, Christmas commemorates a time not only of joy, but also of threat. At Jesus’s birth, Herod conspired to kill him and murdered all the newborn boys in and around Bethlehem. In recounting this, Matthew’s gospel compares it with “Rachel weeping for her children” after massacres by the Assyrians.
Herod has his current imitators. In 1991, China’s state-run press noted the role of the churches in undercutting Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, adding that if China did “not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger.” Al-Qaeda has declared that all Middle Eastern Christians should be killed, and many Christians in Iraq have cancelled their Christmas celebrations lest they be targeted.
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