Israeli Politics of Cultural Cleansing in Jerusalem
Nicola Nasser* | 13.02.2007 11:52 | Analysis | World
By Nicola Nasser*
The Israeli arrogance of being the regional military super power, unequivocally backed by the U.S. world super power, is dictating a kind of politics that deals trivially with the national and religious grievances of Israel’s geopolitical neighbors, whom the Jewish state is supposedly aspiring to live with in peace and as a regional integral part.
The Israeli arrogance of being the regional military super power, unequivocally backed by the U.S. world super power, is dictating a kind of politics that deals trivially with the national and religious grievances of Israel’s geopolitical neighbors, whom the Jewish state is supposedly aspiring to live with in peace and as a regional integral part.
At the same time Israel is pursuing policies that antagonize those same neighbors to preclude altogether whatever potential is left for peace.
Ahead of a trilateral U.S.-sponsored Palestinian-Israeli summit on February 19, a meeting of the Quartet of international Middle East peace mediators on February 21 and amid daily clashes between native Palestinians and more than 3.000-force of special military and security units deployed within an area of five square kilometers in the Israeli-occupied Old Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers embarked on Thursday on an eight-month excavations project some 50 meters from the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, but on the grounds of the Islamic Haram al-Sharif, Islam’s third holiest site, amid clashes that wounded scores of Palestinians and hopeless prayers they would not develop into bloodletting.
Highlighting Israeli destructive arrogance of power, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday trivially dismissed the protesting Arab, Muslim and Christian outcries as merely “Arab extremists inciting violence,” adding: “There is no religious issue here,” immediately after his cabinet “approved continuation of construction at the approach to the Mughrabeh Gate within the proposed framework, at all possible speed,” spurning a call by his “defense” and two other cabinet ministers to consider halting the excavations and ostensibly expecting world public opinion to believe him and belie more than two billion Arabs, Muslims and Christians who have confirmed there was a very sensitive and highly-explosive “religious issue” and moved towards the United Nations and UNESCO in the hope they could overcome Olmert’s arrogance of power in a new round of lost battles between might and right.
Among the louder protesting voices whom Olmert dismissed as “extremists inciting violence,” in addition to Israel’s PLO partner in Oslo peace accords and Israeli Arab-Palestinians, are Jordan and Egypt, both U.S. allies and the only Arab countries to sign peace treaties with Israel, Saudi Arabia, another U.S ally and initiator of the Arab League-adopted initiative to make peace with Israel, the Turkish Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, whose country is a an important regional friend of Israel and a NATO member, and the Churches for Middle East Peace whose board chair Maureen Shea and executive director Corinne Whitlatch on Friday sent letters to the U.S. administration warning that “peacemaking may be overwhelmed by the consequences of Israel's actions in the Old City of Jerusalem,” to name a few.
The eye of the present storm is Bab al-Magharibah, located in the southern section of al-Haram al-Sharif's western wall, which connects Al Aqsa Mosque compound with Jerusalem's southern neighborhoods; it was used by the residents of the Magharibah Quarter which was demolished by Israeli bulldozers in June 1967 to build the “Jewish Quarter” in its place. On 28 September, 2000, the comatose former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, used Bab al- Magharibah as his entry point to “visit” the Haram al-Sharif, igniting a firestorm of protest and sparking the Al Aqsa Intifada (uprising), which brought the peace process to a deadlock until now. In August of 1929, the same site sparked an uprising known in Palestinian political literature as the “Al-Buraq Revolt.”
Al-buraq is the Arab-Islamic name of Al Aqsa compound’s western wall, which the Jews called the “Wailing Wall” before changing it to the “Western Wall (of the Temple Mount, a widely-spread knowledge that has yet to be vindicated by historical fact or archeological findings) after the creation of Israel in 1948. The Israeli Occupying power after its overwhelming victory in 1967 confiscated by force the keys to Bab al-Magharibah from the Islamic Waqf to make them ever since Israel’s “Achilles’ heel” or “Joha's nail” to claim its imposed “partnership” on the Haram al-Sharif, later using that self-proclaimed “partnership” at the Camp David negotiations in 2000 to demand joint sovereignty over the mosque area.
Jordan says Israeli excavations violate the peace treaty with Israel; according to this treaty the Jewish state accepted Jordan's custody of the Islamic and Christian holy places in eastern Jerusalem. The OIC says they are a flagrant violation to international law and that the occupying state is irreconcilable to alter the shape of religious and historical sites. Palestinians say the Israeli excavations are in violation of the status quo accord that governs Jerusalem since the British mandate. The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “Israel exploits the unlimited support from the USA and the unexplainable indifference on the part of the international community.”
The PLO condemned the excavations as “unilateral provocations (which) threaten to undermine a fragile opportunity for peace” and confirmed that, “the Haram Al-Sharif is under the administrative jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” adding: “Any work potentially affecting the Haram Al-Sharif must be coordinated with the Waqf, according to an agreement with Israel. Current work was not coordinated with the Waqf, in violation of the agreement;” Palestinian and non-Palestinian Islamic authorities agree and add that all renovations should be confined to restoring whatever sites damaged to their status quo ante.
Osnat Goaz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority rejected statements that the excavations posed any danger to the holy site, but Jordan's King Abdullah II called them “a threat to the foundations of the Al Aqsa mosque.” 18 leading Israeli archeologists in March 2006 objected to the plan, said it was “illegal” and warned it will cause grave damage to one of the most important archeological sites in Israel and the world.
The 22-member Arab League, the 54-member Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the more than 90-member Non-aligned Movement (NAM) and Churches for Middle East Peace, among many others, were on alert to avert the snowballing confrontation, held emergency meetings, and decided to move to the UN Security Council, hopelessly hoping that their move would not be aborted by the U.S. veto power as it had in previous similar cases; similar moves are planned with the UNESCO. Meanwhile on the ground the Higher Follow-up Committee of Arab Israelis, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the anti-Israeli occupation Palestinian factions are amassing popular peaceful protests amid mounting Israeli military reinforcements to quell such protests. Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat warned: “Enough is enough. Recent provocations risk bulldozing us back into the abyss.” Khaled Misha’al, the exiled leader of Hamas, warned also that Israel “is playing with fire.”
However the Israeli arrogance of power, from previous experience, is betting on the Arab, Islamic and peace-loving roaring protests being without teeth and that they would as in past similar cases subsidize, of course after the usual falling of Palestinian “martyrs!”
The Arab League chief on Saturday said Israel is attempting to alter the features of Jerusalem. Amr Moussa summed up the whole controversy or more closer to the truth the whole conflict, which the latest Israeli excavations are only an episode in a 60-year old Israeli pre-planned non-stop effort to follow up the ethnic cleansing (see “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Ilan Pappe, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, 2006) and the destruction of the material existence of Palestinian communities with a cultural cleansing that will erase the Palestinians from the world memory as it wiped out their country from the map of the world.
Whatever name you give to it -- being “construction,” “modernization,” “renovation,” “Judaization” or “archeological excavations” -- a process of cultural cleansing of Jerusalem has been going on in the Holy City since Israel occupied it in 1967.
Islam’s third holiest site in Jerusalem is the heart and soul of the Arab and Palestinian national, religious, historical and cultural heritage and the symbol of their more than 5.000-year uninterrupted existence on the land, long before the Hebrews swept into Palestine through the blood of butchered men, women and children of the completely destructed Jericho, according to the Old Testament. Destruction of Al Aqsa Mosque would, God forbids, crown the Israeli cleansing of the Palestinian cultural structure after obliterating their existential infrastructure.
Robert Bevan, author of “The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War,” should have visited Jerusalem or at least should have got access to the Holy City to update his book with the latest example of cultural cleansing in modern history: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was,” he wrote in an opening for the second chapter of his book, quoting from Milan Kundera’s The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
A reviewer of Bevan’s book, Abe Hayeem, (an architect and member of Architects & Planners for Justice) wrote on 3 February 2006: “Israel's ‘otherisation’ of the Palestinians by the building of the Separation Barrier, while destroying thousands of houses, trees and farms, and creating what are in effect vast prison enclaves, has ironic echoes of the ghettos that European Jews experienced.” Hayeem missed upgrading his review by how the Israeli occupation has changed Jerusalem’s landscape, including renaming its historical sites and even streets.
Similarly, Afif Safieh, PLO’s envoy in Washington D.C. and former Palestinian delegate to the Vatican and the U.K., seems also to have missed the point when, in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter on January 19, he quoted the Zionist leader Nachum Goldman as saying in the 1970s: “It seems to me that diplomacy in the Middle East is the art of delaying the inevitable as long as possible.”
Safieh interprets the inevitable as the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel in 1967, but the facts Israel is creating on the ground in Jerusalem are pre-empting the creation of such a state and is more realistically making Goldman’s quotation a valid description of the inevitable end goal of the current Israeli policies, a cultural cleansing to crown the eroding Palestinian infrastructural existence in the Holy City, a cleansing that starts with erasing the Arab-Islamic memory of the city and would inevitably make a similar erasing of its Christian memory easier later on.
*Nicola Nasser is veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli occupied territories.
Ahead of a trilateral U.S.-sponsored Palestinian-Israeli summit on February 19, a meeting of the Quartet of international Middle East peace mediators on February 21 and amid daily clashes between native Palestinians and more than 3.000-force of special military and security units deployed within an area of five square kilometers in the Israeli-occupied Old Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers embarked on Thursday on an eight-month excavations project some 50 meters from the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, but on the grounds of the Islamic Haram al-Sharif, Islam’s third holiest site, amid clashes that wounded scores of Palestinians and hopeless prayers they would not develop into bloodletting.
Highlighting Israeli destructive arrogance of power, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday trivially dismissed the protesting Arab, Muslim and Christian outcries as merely “Arab extremists inciting violence,” adding: “There is no religious issue here,” immediately after his cabinet “approved continuation of construction at the approach to the Mughrabeh Gate within the proposed framework, at all possible speed,” spurning a call by his “defense” and two other cabinet ministers to consider halting the excavations and ostensibly expecting world public opinion to believe him and belie more than two billion Arabs, Muslims and Christians who have confirmed there was a very sensitive and highly-explosive “religious issue” and moved towards the United Nations and UNESCO in the hope they could overcome Olmert’s arrogance of power in a new round of lost battles between might and right.
Among the louder protesting voices whom Olmert dismissed as “extremists inciting violence,” in addition to Israel’s PLO partner in Oslo peace accords and Israeli Arab-Palestinians, are Jordan and Egypt, both U.S. allies and the only Arab countries to sign peace treaties with Israel, Saudi Arabia, another U.S ally and initiator of the Arab League-adopted initiative to make peace with Israel, the Turkish Secretary General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, whose country is a an important regional friend of Israel and a NATO member, and the Churches for Middle East Peace whose board chair Maureen Shea and executive director Corinne Whitlatch on Friday sent letters to the U.S. administration warning that “peacemaking may be overwhelmed by the consequences of Israel's actions in the Old City of Jerusalem,” to name a few.
The eye of the present storm is Bab al-Magharibah, located in the southern section of al-Haram al-Sharif's western wall, which connects Al Aqsa Mosque compound with Jerusalem's southern neighborhoods; it was used by the residents of the Magharibah Quarter which was demolished by Israeli bulldozers in June 1967 to build the “Jewish Quarter” in its place. On 28 September, 2000, the comatose former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, used Bab al- Magharibah as his entry point to “visit” the Haram al-Sharif, igniting a firestorm of protest and sparking the Al Aqsa Intifada (uprising), which brought the peace process to a deadlock until now. In August of 1929, the same site sparked an uprising known in Palestinian political literature as the “Al-Buraq Revolt.”
Al-buraq is the Arab-Islamic name of Al Aqsa compound’s western wall, which the Jews called the “Wailing Wall” before changing it to the “Western Wall (of the Temple Mount, a widely-spread knowledge that has yet to be vindicated by historical fact or archeological findings) after the creation of Israel in 1948. The Israeli Occupying power after its overwhelming victory in 1967 confiscated by force the keys to Bab al-Magharibah from the Islamic Waqf to make them ever since Israel’s “Achilles’ heel” or “Joha's nail” to claim its imposed “partnership” on the Haram al-Sharif, later using that self-proclaimed “partnership” at the Camp David negotiations in 2000 to demand joint sovereignty over the mosque area.
Jordan says Israeli excavations violate the peace treaty with Israel; according to this treaty the Jewish state accepted Jordan's custody of the Islamic and Christian holy places in eastern Jerusalem. The OIC says they are a flagrant violation to international law and that the occupying state is irreconcilable to alter the shape of religious and historical sites. Palestinians say the Israeli excavations are in violation of the status quo accord that governs Jerusalem since the British mandate. The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “Israel exploits the unlimited support from the USA and the unexplainable indifference on the part of the international community.”
The PLO condemned the excavations as “unilateral provocations (which) threaten to undermine a fragile opportunity for peace” and confirmed that, “the Haram Al-Sharif is under the administrative jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” adding: “Any work potentially affecting the Haram Al-Sharif must be coordinated with the Waqf, according to an agreement with Israel. Current work was not coordinated with the Waqf, in violation of the agreement;” Palestinian and non-Palestinian Islamic authorities agree and add that all renovations should be confined to restoring whatever sites damaged to their status quo ante.
Osnat Goaz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority rejected statements that the excavations posed any danger to the holy site, but Jordan's King Abdullah II called them “a threat to the foundations of the Al Aqsa mosque.” 18 leading Israeli archeologists in March 2006 objected to the plan, said it was “illegal” and warned it will cause grave damage to one of the most important archeological sites in Israel and the world.
The 22-member Arab League, the 54-member Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the more than 90-member Non-aligned Movement (NAM) and Churches for Middle East Peace, among many others, were on alert to avert the snowballing confrontation, held emergency meetings, and decided to move to the UN Security Council, hopelessly hoping that their move would not be aborted by the U.S. veto power as it had in previous similar cases; similar moves are planned with the UNESCO. Meanwhile on the ground the Higher Follow-up Committee of Arab Israelis, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the anti-Israeli occupation Palestinian factions are amassing popular peaceful protests amid mounting Israeli military reinforcements to quell such protests. Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat warned: “Enough is enough. Recent provocations risk bulldozing us back into the abyss.” Khaled Misha’al, the exiled leader of Hamas, warned also that Israel “is playing with fire.”
However the Israeli arrogance of power, from previous experience, is betting on the Arab, Islamic and peace-loving roaring protests being without teeth and that they would as in past similar cases subsidize, of course after the usual falling of Palestinian “martyrs!”
The Arab League chief on Saturday said Israel is attempting to alter the features of Jerusalem. Amr Moussa summed up the whole controversy or more closer to the truth the whole conflict, which the latest Israeli excavations are only an episode in a 60-year old Israeli pre-planned non-stop effort to follow up the ethnic cleansing (see “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Ilan Pappe, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, 2006) and the destruction of the material existence of Palestinian communities with a cultural cleansing that will erase the Palestinians from the world memory as it wiped out their country from the map of the world.
Whatever name you give to it -- being “construction,” “modernization,” “renovation,” “Judaization” or “archeological excavations” -- a process of cultural cleansing of Jerusalem has been going on in the Holy City since Israel occupied it in 1967.
Islam’s third holiest site in Jerusalem is the heart and soul of the Arab and Palestinian national, religious, historical and cultural heritage and the symbol of their more than 5.000-year uninterrupted existence on the land, long before the Hebrews swept into Palestine through the blood of butchered men, women and children of the completely destructed Jericho, according to the Old Testament. Destruction of Al Aqsa Mosque would, God forbids, crown the Israeli cleansing of the Palestinian cultural structure after obliterating their existential infrastructure.
Robert Bevan, author of “The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War,” should have visited Jerusalem or at least should have got access to the Holy City to update his book with the latest example of cultural cleansing in modern history: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was,” he wrote in an opening for the second chapter of his book, quoting from Milan Kundera’s The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
A reviewer of Bevan’s book, Abe Hayeem, (an architect and member of Architects & Planners for Justice) wrote on 3 February 2006: “Israel's ‘otherisation’ of the Palestinians by the building of the Separation Barrier, while destroying thousands of houses, trees and farms, and creating what are in effect vast prison enclaves, has ironic echoes of the ghettos that European Jews experienced.” Hayeem missed upgrading his review by how the Israeli occupation has changed Jerusalem’s landscape, including renaming its historical sites and even streets.
Similarly, Afif Safieh, PLO’s envoy in Washington D.C. and former Palestinian delegate to the Vatican and the U.K., seems also to have missed the point when, in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter on January 19, he quoted the Zionist leader Nachum Goldman as saying in the 1970s: “It seems to me that diplomacy in the Middle East is the art of delaying the inevitable as long as possible.”
Safieh interprets the inevitable as the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel in 1967, but the facts Israel is creating on the ground in Jerusalem are pre-empting the creation of such a state and is more realistically making Goldman’s quotation a valid description of the inevitable end goal of the current Israeli policies, a cultural cleansing to crown the eroding Palestinian infrastructural existence in the Holy City, a cleansing that starts with erasing the Arab-Islamic memory of the city and would inevitably make a similar erasing of its Christian memory easier later on.
*Nicola Nasser is veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli occupied territories.
Nicola Nasser*
e-mail:
nicolanasser@yahoo.com
Comments
Hide the following 2 comments
Reality check time
13.02.2007 12:42
But that's neither here nor there. What I want to discuss is the likely fate of the control of the "Old City". And I want us to consider for a moment the possibility that this issue ISN'T going to be decided either by Israeli might or the claims of the Palestinains but NECESSITY.
Let us for a moment consider the BEST possible outcome for the Palestinians (in terms of what they can demand BY RIGHT). Let us assume that Isralies completely withdraw from the occupied territories, allow the Palestinains to form a totally independent state INCLUDING control of their side of their borders with the outside world (the sea, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel).
What would the Palestinians STILL need to have a viable state? Let's see.........
1) Transit routes across Israel. It's simply too far going long way around, uneconomic via Egypt, ferry across the Red Sea, Jordan. BUT (a big but) it is a theoretical route so the Plaestinains cannot claim routes across Israel BY RIGHT. They would have to negotiate this and pay a "price".
2) Transshipment of goods via Israeli ports. Same thing.
3) Jobs in Israel (work permits, etc.)
Like DUH......... what is one of the things the Israelis will be able to demand be included in that package of "prices" the Palestinians will be "forced" to negotiate away. The "Old City", yes.
Mike Novack
e-mail:
stepbystpefarm mtdata.com
Arabs Claim what that which does not belong to them
14.02.2007 16:25
Mohammed died in 632 C.E. During his lifetime an imaginative story floated by an unknown follower was circulated about Mohammed's midnight dream ride on a flying horse to "Al Aksa". Serious Islamic scholars were embarrassed by this crass imagination that made no sense -- as follows:
In the time it takes a clay water jar to tip and spill its first drop, Mohammed, in his mythical dream, flew from Mecca to the "the furthest place." In Arabic, "the furthest place" is "Al Aksa." At that time "Al Aksa" (or "furthest place") would be either a mosque in Medina or Allah's Courtyard in Paradise. There was no mosque, no "Al Aksa" mosque, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in Mohammed's lifetime.
From 685-705 CE the Umayyad Caliph Abd-el Malik built the Dome of the Rock, also on the Temple Mount, Mount Moriah. (It is now called the "Golden Dome" after it was covered with gold by the King of Trans-Jordan.) Caliph Abd-el Malik, who lived in Damascus, wished to be viewed as Mohammed's heir and leader of Islam. He attempted to re-direct the Islamic religious/political compass away from Mecca towards Jerusalem and his sphere of religious/political power. The political thrust of all this was that al-Malik failed.
Islam as a religion and Muslims as a group continued to ignore Jerusalem as a non-entity and continued to bow in their worship toward Mecca. However, the myth was created among the (uneducated) Muslim/Arabs, that, by right of conquest, they owned the Temple of the Jews which existed as Solomon's Temple of the Jews for thousands of years before Mohammed and Islam. However, the myth took root among the Muslims -- as history was pushed aside.
That childish myth has become factual history, as the Arab/Muslims claimed the Jews' most holy religious site, built thousands of years before Christianity or the beginnings of Islam. But, the West oohs and aahs as the Mullahs babble about their non-existent history, harking back to the Philistines (a warlike tribe of Phoenicians who came to the sea coast of Eretz Yisrael) and other tribes long gone.
The "Al Aksa" mosque was not considered a true holy site of Islam until Saladin, the Kurdish warrior in the 12th Century, needed an excuse to attack the Christian Crusaders who had taken Jerusalem. Saladin then claimed Mohammed's dream of "Al Aksa" was the mosque built on top of the Jewish Temple and, therefore, holy to Islam. But, their claims are accepted today as if they were not a backward, uncivilized culture but an advanced society of great thinkers and, therefore, worthy of being taken seriously. The media was presented with the scholarly history of the Jewish Temple numerous times, but they prefer the "mythical" version created by the Muslim/Arabs.
Sixty years after Mohammed's death, Caliph Abd el-Malik from Damascus did build the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, over the site where the Jewish Temple stood in ancient times. It was later covered with gold leaf to become known as the Golden Dome. Caliph El-Malik's objective was to turn the political loyalty to Mohammed which was epi-centered in Mecca toward him as the next leader. Even the Media, always in a state of lazy denial must admit that every long dead visionary is followed by wannabe pretenders to the crown so he conveniently revises history toward himself and his new goals.
That ploy failed and the Dome of the Rock was NOT visited as a holy place as were Mecca and Medina. It eventually fell into ruins through neglect and lack of interest. Twenty years after El Malik built the Dome of the Rock, his son al-Waleed, built a nearby building and named it Al Aksa after the dream allocated to Mohammed. This story of how Mohammed was to travel to "Al Aksa," the farthest place is interesting. As the story goes, Mohammed mounted a giant white horse named el-Baraq, with great wings, the face and breasts of a woman and the tail of a peacock. Clearly, these were the fantasies of a zealous but ignorant follower of Mohammed anxious to expand the influence of the man whom he revered as his earthly deity.
Flying horses, flying dragons and gods able to fly were a common myth centuries before Mohammed, often grafted onto new religions. The story continues that Mohammed, in his dream, flew to the farthest place (al Aksa). But, the mosque named "Al Aksa" was NOT built until 80 years after Mohammed's death. So even in such minds with maximum imagination, 80 years out of sync tells us, there was no "Al Aksa" to support the myth.
It wasn't until the 12th Century C.E. that the myth took a new turn. Salah a-Din, the great Kurdish warrior wanted an excuse to attack Jerusalem and drive the knights of the Christian Crusaders off of the Temple Mount and out of the Holy City. The Temple Mount has been Holy for three thousand years because it was chosen by G-d -- which is why the Jews built their two Temples there; the Christians later built churches there; the Muslims called it the Noble Sanctuary and built their two Mosques on top of the site of the Jewish Temples.
Since that time the Muslims have used the ready excuse of Al Aksa being attacked to gather forces and riot. This, of course, is happening right now as the Mullah and self-appointed leaders call for the Arab Muslim Palestinians to riot over the repair of the Mugrabi ramp.
Some will recall the years of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spread the rumor that the Jews were going to attack Al Aksa mosque. That was in 1929 and started the riots that killed hundreds of Jews. The Grand Mufti, "Haj" Amin al-Husseini, was a close follower of Hitler during WW II, hoping to entice him to bring his Jew-killing mechanisms to Jerusalem. The only condition Husseini set for assisting the Nazis was that, after they won the war, they would murder all the Jews in Palestine. You would not be surprised that Yassir Arafat was a nephew of Uncle Haj Amin al-Husseini. Arafat was born in Cairo named Rahman Abdul Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini. Arafat took over the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) which was established in 1964 by Gamal Abdul Nasser.
In 1929, the Arabs responded to Husseini's "rumor" and rioted in Jerusalem, Motza, Hebron, Safed, Jaffa and other areas -- all over what was then British Mandate Palestine. The Arabs murdered a total of 133 Jews, wounding more than 300 wherever they could find them. In Hebron 67-69 Jews were murdered, with 58 wounded and women were raped; in Safed 18-20 were murdered with 80 wounded. The British evacuated the Jewish survivors, leaving their homes and belongings to be taken and occupied by the Arabs from 1929 to 1967 when Hebron was liberated along with the east side of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. 1929 was not the only time Husseini initiated attacks against Jews.
Reports today on CNN (February 12th) indicate that the Arabs have started to riot in Hebron because of the false accusations that the Jews are undermining the "Al Aksa" mosque in Jerusalem.
The use of "Al Aksa" is an excellent spark to inflame the familiar joyful hysterical rage so very near the surface for Muslims. The story continues that Mohammed flew to a certain spot in the "farthest place" which they have now named "Al Aksa" mosque in Jerusalem. It was "supposedly" the rock where Abraham was to have sacrificed Isaac in the Akeda. The "winged horse" el Buraq landed and left a giant hoof print in the stone.
The myth continues: In his dream Mohammed flew on el-Buraq to the Seventh Heaven where he meets all the Jewish prophets, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses and even Jesus. The story teller says: They gave Mohammed the stamp of approval that he was to be the last and only prophet of G-d. Ostensibly, Mohammed absorbed the older religions of Judaism (The Root) and Christianity. He claimed descent from the prophets as the foundation for the new religion of Islam.
At that moment in his dream, he flies back to earth in an instant -- remember the drop of water at the beginning? Regrettably, the Media and even nations hesitate to question the basis of the myth of the midnight flight and the giant flying horse, el-Buraq. The Muslim people have accepted many myths and interpretations of the Koran as suits the needs and the imaginations of their Mullahs.
However, only since 1967 through the cleverness of Yassir Arafat, did they claim that Jerusalem is their third holiest city and give credence to another myth that of a non-people as a nation of history. Never before, whenever the Muslim conquerors had control did they establish a capital in Jerusalem. If you check out photos of the Temple Mount when the Muslims were in control, please note the grass growing up between the paving stones. The crowds of Muslims weren't there until the leaders started to remake their PR that Jerusalem is their third holiest city.
We See in the Dark