On Tuesday, October 5, 2021, Arutz Sheva reported that "Justice Bilhha Yahalom of the Jerusalem Magistrates Court ruled that silent prayers on the Temple Mount cannot be construed as a criminal act, and ordered police to drop a restraining order imposed on Rabbi Aryeh Lippo, who had been barred from the Mount over his silent prayers." This , as to be expected, angered Jordan.
Several days later, the site reported that the "Jerusalem District Court accepts police appeal against Magistrate Court ruling permitting Jews to pray silently on Temple Mount," providing Hamas with a reason to celebrate - which they did.
On October 11, Columbus day, now called Indigenous day, we should have put the emphasis on Islam's colonialist conquests of Constantinople and Jerusalem and their treatment of the indigenous populations. Today Muslims illegally occupy both the Hagia Sophia and the Temple Mount.
Muslims have the same claim to Hagia Sophia and Jerusalem that Columbus had to the Mayan Pyramids.
In fact, Columbus conquered America in 1492 shortly after Muslims conquered Constantinople in 1453. Muslims have the same claim to Hagia Sophia and Jerusalem that Columbus had to the Mayan Pyramids.
Adding insult to injury, forbidding Christians and Jews to pray in their holy sites is a violation of freedom of religion.
Today Arabs do not allow Jews to pray in the Temple Mount, but during the Jordanian occupation of Jerusalem (1948-1967) Jews were not allowed to pray at the Western Wall either. Despite that and their threats to riot if Jews are allowed to pray in the Temple Mount today, Jews allow Muslims to pray in Al Aqsa.
Those who do not know the Temple Mount cannot understand that there is enough space there for Jews to pray without interfering in Al Aqsa, there is even space to build a synagogue there without interfering in Al Aqsa.
Arabs built the Al Aqsa Mosque in Temple Mount to make Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity. because they know that Jerusalem's Temple Mount is to Judaism as the Kaaba in Mecca is to Islam.
Simon Sebag Montefiore describes, in his book Jerusalem, the Arab Conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire (Chapter 16, page 166) that Arabs built the Al Aqsa Mosque in Temple Mount to make Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity: “In 518, aged thirty-five, Justinian found himself the real ruler of the Eastern empire when his uncle Justin was raised to the throne…"
"Justinian demoted Judaism from a permited religion and banned Passover if it fell before Easter, converted synagogues into churches, forcibly baptized Jews, and commandeered Jewish History: in 537, when Justinian dedicated his breathtaking Church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom” in Constantinople, he is said to have reflected 'Solomon, I have surpassed thee.'
"Then he turned to Jerusalem to trump Solomon’s Temple. In 543 Justinian and Theodora started to build a basilica, the Nea Church of St.Mary Mother of God, almost 400 feet long and 187 feet high, with walls 16 feet thick, facing away from the Temple Mount and designed to overpower Solomon’s site…
"The Holy City was ruled by the rituals of Orthodox Christianity… The city was set up to host thousands of pilgrims: the grandees stayed with the patriarch; the poor pilgrims in the dormitories of Justinian’s hospices which had beds for 3,000; and ascetics in caves, often old Jewish tombs, in the surrounding hills…
"…Heraclitus seized power (of the Bizantine Empire) in 610…Constantinople was besieged by the Persians ( then Zoroastrians)…(Heraclitus) outmanoeuvred the Persian forces …then defeated their main army…
"… In 632 Muhammad, aged about sixty-two, died (in Saudi Arabia) and was succeeded by his father in law, Abu Bakr…
"Abu Bakr managed to pacify Arabia. Then he turned to the Byzantine and Persian empires, which Muslims regarded as evanescent, sinful and corrupt. The Commander dispatched contingent of warriors on camels to raid Iraq and Palestine…in Mecca, Abu Bakr died and was succeeded by Omar…
" …Heraclitus dispatched an army to stop the Arabs…After months of skirmishing, the Arabs finally lured the Byzantines to battle amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk river between today’s Jordan, Syria and Israeli Golan…and in August 636…
"Khalid cut of their retreat and by the end of the battle, the Christians were so exhausted that the Arabs found them lying down in their cloaks, ripe for the slaughter. Even the emperor’s brother was killed and Heraclitus himself never recovered from this defeat, one of the decisive battles in history, that lost Syria and Palestine. Byzantine rule, weakened by the Persian war, seems to have collapsed like a house of cards…
"The Arabs converged on the city which they called Ilya (Aelia Capitolina, the Roman name (for Jerusalem))… Omar offered Jerusalem a Covenant – dhimma- of Surrender that promised religious tolerance to the Christians in return for payment of jizya tax of submission. Once this was agreed, Omar set out for Jerusalem…
"Omar knew that Muhammad had revered David and Solomon. 'Take me to the sanctuary of David,' he ordered Sophronius (Jerusalem’s Christian Patriarch). He and his warriors entered Temple Mount, probably through the Prophet’s Gate in the south, and found it contaminated by 'a dungheap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.
"Omar asked to be shown the Holy of Holies. A Jewish convert, Kaab al Ahbar, known as the Rabbi, replied that if the Commander preserved 'the wall'(perhaps referring to the last Herodian remains, including the Western Wall), 'I will reveal to him where are the ruins of the Temple.'
"Kaab showed Omar the foundation stone of the Temple, the rock which the Arabs called the Sakhra.Aided by his troops, Omar began to clear the debris to create somewhere to pray.
"Kaab sugested he place this north of the foundation stone 'so you will face make two qiblas, that of Moses and that of Muhammad.'
“'You still lean towards the Jews,' Omar supposedly told Kaab, placing his first prayer house south of the rock, roughly where the al-Aqsa Mosque stands today, so that it clearly faced Mecca.
"Omar had followed Muhammad’s wish to reach past Christianity to restore and co-opt this place of ancient holiness, to make Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity and outflank the Christians.” (Simon Sebag Montefiore “Jerusalem” page 166-184)
Until 1948 Jews were a majority of the population in Jerusalem. On December 11, 2017 Amb. Dore Gold wrote in the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs "By the mid-19th century, the British Consulate in Jerusalem made the following determination, according to this report, which I found in the Public Record Office in Kew, it states that Jews were a majority in Jerusalem, when? already in 1863 – that’s long before Theodor Herzl, before the Britt’s arrived, or Lord Balfour.
William Seward, Secretary of State of the United States during the American civil war under President Abraham Lincoln, visited the holy land, visited Jerusalem. And he wrote a memoir. And in his memoir, it is written, “There is a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.”
The Jewish Virtual Library reports “Before the United Nations voted in favor of the Patition Plan on November 29, 1947, the Arab Legion of Jordan attacked Jerusalem. Their forces blocked Jerusalem’s roads and cut off the city’s access to water.
After bitter fighting, the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City fell to the vastly superior arms and numbers of the Arab Legion. The surviving Jewish inhabitants fled to the “New City,” the four-fifths of the capital that Israel successfully held. The Old City, including the Jewish Quarter, officially fell to Jordan on May 27, 1948.
Nearly twenty years later, during the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel’s army liberated Jerusalem’s Old City, finding the area completely neglected and virtually destroyed.
… All but one of the thirty five synagogues within the Old City were destroyed; those note completely devastated had been used as hen houses and stables filled with dung-heaps, garbage and carcasses.
The revered Jewish graveyard on the Mount of Olives was in complete disarray with tens of thousands of tombstones broken into pieces to be used as building materials and large areas of the cemetery leveled to provide a short-cut to a new hotel.
Hundreds of Torah scrolls and thousands of holy books had been plundered and burned to ashes…”
Lyn Julius comments about George Bensoussan’ book Juifs en pays arabes: le grand deracinement 1850 – 1975:
“…Bensoussan, threatens to stand the notion of ”Jewish colonialism” on its head: it is the Jews who lived under Muslim rule who were the true victims of colonialism…By the time the Arab conquerors had swept over the Middle East and North Africa, the Jews had been living in the region for 1,000 years…Under Islam, according to the eighth-century Pact of Omar, indigenous Jews and Christians were permitted to practise as long as they acquiesced to the ”dhimmi” condition of inferiority and institutionalised humiliation…”
“… Bensoussan observes that the Islamic order was built on a ”colonial” notion – submission. The Muslim submits to Allah, the Muslim woman submits to her husband, the non-Muslim dhimmi submits to the Muslim. At the very bottom of the pile is the slave… He produces incontrovertible evidence that, 100 years before Israel was established, most Jews in Arab and Muslim lands lived in misery and fear….Jews were regularly mobbed, robbed, their possessions looted, beaten up on the slightest pretext, or false charge brought by a jealous neighbour. Jews were feminised in the Muslim imagination – cowardly, submissive, unable to stand up for themselves.
“…Bensoussan”s great achievement is not just to blow out of the water the myth of Arab-Jewish coexistence predating the creation of Israel, but unfashionably to place the colonial boot on the Arab foot…A sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel begins to look like the liberation of a colonized, indigenous people from 14 centuries of subjugation…”
Islamic Nations may be divided in other issues but the conquest of Jerusalem is a common cause.
Ayatollah Khamenei wrote a book proclaiming himself “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.” . An item on the books’ back cover describes Khamenei as “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.” The book explains that land that falls under Muslim rule, even briefly, can never again be ceded to non-Muslims.
On May 9, 2017 Hotair reported that Erdogan declared “Each day that Jerusalem is under occupation is an insult to us"
On Columbus day (now called indigenous day), American Jews should have made the world remember Islam's colonialist conquests of Constantinople and Jerusalem. Jews have to be proactive instead of allowing lies and omissions to create public opinion. Calling Israel "colonialist" and "occupier" while ignoring Islam's conquests is a total rewriting of history.
Ezequiel Doiny is author of "Obama's assault on Jerusalem's Western Wall"