The Council for the National Interest Foundation is celebrating Christmas by bashing Israel... again... and again... and yet again. Now, it has placed a full page ad in The Sunday Times' "Week in Review" section. The ad asks the question: "Is Bethlehem Dying?" What the foundation pretends is its concern is the absence of Christians and Christmas from Bethlehem, and that is a worthy worry. But Manger Square is empty on Christmas as Bethlehem is emptying throughout the year because the Palestinian authorities--not the Palestinian Authority, especially, which in any case has no authority, but the "democratically" elected authority, Hamas--are turning nascent Palestine into an Islamic state, a sharia state. I remember Bethlehem during the holidays and during the summer when tourists and even just plain Israelis visited and purchased and ate in (very good) restaurants and when the locals (at least the Christian locals who made up as up to 80 percent of the town) would tell you, sometimes only sotto voce, that they wished their home would be annexed to Israel. But that was before the first and the second intifadas that turned Bethlehem into a war zone. Read Matthew Kalman's Christmas dispatch from Bethlehem in Sunday's Boston Globe. (Seventy percent, maybe 80%, of the town's residents are now Muslims.) And then recall the PLO's armed takeover of the birthplace of Jesus, the Church of the Nativity, among the holiest shrines of Christendom. What did the Palestinian Arabs do in this church? Four years ago, holding 200 ordinary people and Christian clergy hostage, Fatah's Tanzim brought arms into the church and befouled it. This ad is a lie, a big lie.