IS PROSELYTIZING PERSECUTION?

Apparently it depends on who you ask. To Bradley Burston it is if you're Jewish and someone (oh the humanity!) gives you a flyer:

We were driving in the Galilee, waiting for a red light to change, when they came up to the car. Their smiles were engagingly open as they wished us a fine trip. Then they offered us the flyer.

Jews for Jesus. Who says that evil can't be imported, and delivered, free of charge, direct to your car door?

Yes, it's that dangerous group Jews for Jesus in action. And their evil isn't because of their character (they are acknowledged as "pure souls"), but because of their target:

But bear with me for one brief moment, if only to read the next sentence, which has specifically to do with you, as well as with your Jewish prey, thousands of years of Jewish history, and evil:

Proselytizing is persecution.

Granted, it's not the same as burning us at the stake for Christ's sake, firebombing our homes for Christ's sake, staging apres-church pogroms for Christ's sake, ostracizing and terrorizing and beating our children for having killed Christ, lynching Jewish adults for church-distributed blood libels, torturing Jews to force them to convert, converting entire Jewish communities on point of death, deporting entire Jewish communities on point of death for having resisted conversion, or, after eliminating the conversion option, annihilating entire Jewish communities with the complicitous blind eye of the Holy See.

But there's more than one way to wipe out a people, and poison, like gas, comes in many forms. Sometimes it looks like a leaflet. Sometimes it looks like the Internet. Sometimes it looks like a smile.

One wonders how acknowledgement of the Jewish Messiah, the Son of David, could possibly be persecution. Certainly the 3,000 Jews who heard the gospel about the Jewish Messiah gladly on Pentecost from a Jewish preacher named Peter didn't seem persecuted.

Who knew?