Christians kept from Jerusalem conference

Should the pope check his tablet on the way to lunch, he may be unhappy to learn that some 20 Middle Eastern Christians on their way to a conference in Jerusalem were recently denied entry into Israel, as Mitch Ginsburg reports.

The Crossroads Conference 2014, run by Vicar David Pileggi, the head of Christ Church Jerusalem, was to host 100 Christians from Egypt, Jordan and Iraq (the Kurdish areas), along with several Armenians and Iranian refugees. The “Vicar of Baghdad,” Canon Andrew White, was the guest of honor.

The participants, including two Kurdish parliamentarians who had been granted permission to travel to Israel by the Kurdish Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, one Coptic lawyer and several church leaders, were to take part in a conference that sought to “try and advance greater Christian presence in Muslim lands” and to “encourage them to get out of their ghettos,” Pileggi told The Times of Israel in a phone interview.

Despite 40 visa applications being submitted, only 20 people were allowed in, with an Israeli academic telling Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar the procedure was random.

Read the whole story here.