Here’s the story from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Safety pins and screws are still lodged in 15-year-old Ami Ortiz’s body three months after he opened a booby-trapped gift basket sent to his family. The explosion severed two toes, damaged his hearing and harmed a promising basketball career.

---

View Larger Image

---

Police say they are still searching for the assailants. But to the Ortiz family the motive is clear: The Ortizes are Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

Israel’s tiny community of Messianic Jews, a mixed group of 10,000 people who include the California-based Jews for Jesus, complains of threats, harassment and police indifference.

The March 20 bombing was the worst incident so far. In October, a mysterious fire damaged a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews, and last month ultra-Orthodox Jews torched a stack of Christian holy books distributed by missionaries.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry and two chief rabbis were quick to condemn the burning, but the Ortiz family says vigorous police action is needed.

“I believe that it will happen again, if not to us, then to other Messianic believers,” said Ami’s mother, Leah Ortiz, a 54-year-old native of South Orange, N.J.

Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a state that was established for a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus and has little tolerance for missionary work.

I was proud of my eldest son for pointing this out to me.  He hears from other Christians how Israel is God’s special nation.  I tell him that such statements are not true: the Church is God’s special nation whether comprised of Israelis, Arabs, subsaharan Africans, or even WASPS in North America.  But he feels pressured sometimes, I think, to express some sort of theological loyalty to the modern nation of Israel.  While a story above is horrible, and I pray for the day when that no longer happens, it does help teach him the difference.

Of course, compared to Sharia Law, Israel may be worth an alliance.  I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another.  But it saddens me to hear that heretical theology has such a stranglehold on Evangelicals that even in the twenty-first century prominant leaders attribute some sort of special divine identity to Israel.

And yes, I am regretful about some things I hear about Palin, if they are true.

One other thing: I hear people get incredulous or outraged when they learn that the Puritans and other settlers persecuted in England came to the New World to impose their own beliefs on others.  Well, it is fine to disapprove of that practice, but to act like it is completely unthinkable is rather strange.  Even the SF Chronicle seems to want to sympathize with Israel for exactly that kind of society.