The Foreign Ministry published a message today denouncing a report that anti-Christian attacks were on the rise in Israel.

"The Wall Street Journal chose to write about Christians in Israel. They took radical voices and extreme cases and turned it into the face of an entire country, while ignoring nearly 200,000 Christians whose lives tell the opposite story," the Foreign Ministry began.

"Over the past month, Christian Israelis have appeared on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ social media channels. They spoke in their own words about their lives, their freedom, their success, their integration and their pride in being Israeli. Not one of those Christians was included."

The Foreign Ministry explained that the report followed a worrying pattern in American media. "Instead, after The Washington Post, CNN and others, the Wall Street Journal has now repeated the same formula: find those most willing to condemn Israel, present them as so called “authentic" Christian voice, and reduce the Christian experience here to the disgraceful actions of a tiny extremist fringe."

The Foreign Ministry insisted that the report ignored the real statistics of Israel's Christian community. "Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is consistently growing. Christian citizens serve on the Supreme Court. They are doctors, professors, mayors, military officers, diplomats and ambassadors. Christian schools are among the strongest in the country. Churches operate freely. Christians participate at the highest levels of Israeli society. What the WSJ published is a distortion of reality disguised as reporting. It is disingenuous, misleading and shameful."