Last week in Jerusalem, as Jews celebrated Passover and Muslims observed Ramadan, violent
images were broadcast of Palestinian thugs vandalizing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hurling
Molotov cocktails, stones, and fireworks on the Temple Mount itself and at Jews praying at the
Western Wall.
The motivation behind the Arab rage? Initially, false rumors were promoted that settlers were
planning to make animal sacrifices, a claim that Ofir Gendelman, spokesperson to the Arab
media in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, stressed was false and, in fact, had been promoted
by Hamas for the express purpose of inciting terror,
But that spurious charge against Israelis was merely a new variant of the long-standing
accusation made against Jews by Arabs that dastardly Jews were plotting to destroy the sacred
Al-Aqsa Mosque, a baseless but recurring charge that Israeli journalist Nadav Shragai referred to
as the “Al-Aksa [sic] Is in Danger” libel. In fact, as early as the 1920s, when Amin al-Husseini,
the Nazi-loving Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, rallied Muslims with accusations that Jews intended
to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Jewish Temple, Arabs have attempted to ignore and obscure any Jewish connection to the site and have sought to “liberate” purported Muslim
holy places from the grip of the "occupying Zionists".
While the current round of violence was predictably blamed on Israel, in fact, as with previous
clashes on the Temple Mount, the violence and rioting were neither random nor pointless and
had both a strategic and tactical purpose—to degrade the Jewish claim to Jerusalem and all of
Palestine by erasing the Jewish identity, history, and religious significance of the Temple Mount
and Islamicizing the entire site through physical and spiritual control.
This was the precise purpose behind the 2016 effort by the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) vote to approve a resolution stripping the
Temple Mount and Western Wall of its Jewish identity, and elevating a Muslim claim to this site most
central to Judaism. The hallucinatory and willfully delusional vote from Jew-hating nations in
the thralls of Palestinianism, of course, was not surprising, given the U.N.’s promiscuous bias
and historical inversions when assessing the perceived shortcomings of Israel.
The contortions of history and the delusionary fables inherent in the UNESCO resolution are of
course shared with Palestinian Arab leadership, as evidenced by comments made at the time on
official PA TV by Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious and Islamic
Affairs. “Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian land. Jerusalem is the property of the Palestinians,”
he said. “. . . UNESCO’s resolution confirms . . . that Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in
particular, and the Al-Buraq Wall and the Al-Buraq plaza are all purely Islamic and Palestinian
assets and no one has the right to be our partner in that. No one has the right. We are the owners
and we have the right to it.”
Al-Buraq Wall, of course, is the Arabic name for the Western Wall and Al-Buraq plaza refers to
the entire 35-acre Temple Mount, so in case anyone had any doubt about who the Palestinian Arabs
and their enablers consider the rightful owners of the Temple Mount and all of its Jewish
elements and structures, statements like these reveal that Muslim authorities do not consider any
part of the Temple Mount to be Jewish, nor should Jews even be allowed near or on it.
This sentiment, of course, is part of the willful disbelief in and the denial of the historical evidence of
the Jewish roots of both the Temple Mount and the entire land that became Israel, reflected in the
corrosive words of Article 11 of the Hamas Charter which adamantly, though mendaciously
proclaims that “The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for
future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it
or any part of it.”
It is no coincidence that the Dome of the Rock was built on top of Judaism’s most sacred
place—indeed, 1692 years after the construction of the First Temple—a temporal act of
replacing and subsuming the very spirit of Judaism and signaling the ascendancy and domination
of Islam.
The other aspect of Muslim ownership and control of the Temple Mount is the recurring fiction
about Jews invading, storming, and “defiling” (in the words of Mahmoud Abbas) what is now
perceived to be Muslim holy space, hence the calls to protect the Al-Aqsa from attack and
desecration by Zionist settlers and “occupation forces.” A March 23rd news story on Palestinian
Authority TV, for example, revealed that weeks before the recent violent clashes, Palestinian
religious figures were already exhorting their flocks to protect Al-Aqsa from the perfidious Jews
celebrating Passover who were likely to “storm” the sacred grounds during Ramadan, that, once
again, their mosque was in danger of attack.
“[PA] Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories and blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque
preacher Sheikh Muhammad Hussein,” the broadcast reported, “warned against the occupation
authorities continuing to give permission to groups of extremist settlers to invade the Al-Aqsa
Mosque. The grand mufti said that the concerns that the occupation authorities are spreading . . .
are nothing but a prelude to their cunning intentions that they will carry out against the Al-Aqsa
Mosque, and he warned of the consequences of these attacks.” [Emphasis added.]
It is unsurprising that Palestinian religious leaders would rail against a Jewish presence in what is
perceived to be holy Muslim territory. More troubling was an inciteful statement issued on April
13 th by the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a group of some 40 organizations
that promoted the lie that, “The occupation's armed forces and the flocks of its settlers have
mobilized their falsehood and prepared their cavalry, infantry and evil to carry out a large scale
storming of the sacred Aqsa mosque during the so-called Passover . . . in a clear attempt to
impose an extremely dangerous new reality there,” in other words, to alter the status quo which
denies Jews of almost all rights to visit or pray anywhere on the Temple Mount.
“The scholars stress that we are witnessing an extremely dangerous and advanced crime,” the
statement cautioned. “These kinds of planned storming events are meant to reinforce the
objectives of the Zionist enemy in turning the sacred Al-Aqsa mosque [sic] into a legitimate right
for the Zionists . . . one of the ugliest Zionist attempts to destroy Al-Aqsa mosque.” [Emphasis
added]
The tendentious statement also reasserted the oft-repeated claim that Jews have absolutely no
connection or right to any portion of the Temple Mount—ignoring history and fact—and that the
entirety of the property is sacred Muslim ground.
“The sacred Al-Aqsa mosque,” the statement preposterously asserted, “including all of its
sections, buildings, walls, and fences, and what is above it and beneath it, belongs exclusively to
the Muslims, and that any attack on it or on any part of it is considered an attack on the third
most sacred place for all Muslims . . . .”
More troubling was the statement’s direct appeal for violence and aggression against Jews to protect Al-Aqsa, suggesting that “it is an obligation incumbent upon the entire ummah to march forth and act within the available resources to stop this criminal aggression.” [Emphasis added]
And most dangerously, coming as it was from a group of purported scholars, was the language of
the statement that called for intifada and the murder, if necessary, of Jews attempting to visit the
holiest site of their faith. Specifically, the purported scholars called “on all the sons of the
Palestinian nation who have been standing guard and waging jihad in the occupied territories of
1948 and in the West Bank, revealing with this language that they believe that even current-day
Israel, “the occupied territories of 1948,” is Muslim territory and that Jews, the sons of apes and
pigs, have no legal, moral, or spiritual claim to any part of Palestine.
If Muslims consider the entirety of the Al Aqsa compound, al-Haram al-Sharif, to be holy and
sacred then they are clearly compromising their faith and reverence by using the mosque as a
staging ground for rock-throwing, hurling Molotov cocktails, lighting fires, and other incitement
to draw in the Israeli forces who are compelled by this disorder to restore calm.
And when Muslim youths shower Jewish civilians praying at the Western Wall with rocks because they refuse to acknowledge Judaism’s 3000 year-long connection to the site and because they will not
accommodate any other faith anywhere on the Temple Mount, they cannot then complain when
the IDF is called on to forcibly repress this riotous, undignified, and criminal rioting. Predictably,
however, the world press only reported the aggression of the IDF in suppressing violence in and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque, minimizing or ignoring altogether the unhinged violence and
destruction being carried out by masked psychopaths willing to desecrate their own holy places
in the most current jihad against the "pernicious and cunning Jews".
Dore Gold, Israel’s UN ambassador from 1997 to 1999, noted in his book, The Fight for
Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City, that the sinister process
aimed at establishing a spiritual as well as political presence in Jerusalem for Islam, while
simultaneously diminishing Jewish historical links to the city, has been underway for some time
now.
Gold believed this trend began at the 2000 Camp David meetings when Yasser Arafat first stated
publicly his breathtaking belief that there had never been a Jewish Temple at the site of the
Temple Mount. Arafat, wrote Gold, thereby tossed “a stone of historical lies into a lake and its
ripples spread all over the Middle East. ‘Temple Denial’ became a common theme at seminars in
the UAE or in Jordan in the years that followed. European professors joined this anti-biblical
trend.”
Ever since Camp David, the Palestinians have been relentless in creating a false impression of
how important Jerusalem is to them, while at the same time they have de-Judaized Jerusalem and
tried to obscure the Jewish relationship with and continuing presence in the holy city, something
Middle East scholar Martin Kramer has called their desire to effect “a reversal of history.”
The Arab world’s own complicity in playing fast and loose with history, and obscuring the actual
“facts on the ground” in an attempt to create a historical narrative conforming to a political
agenda, makes the Palestinians’ accusations against Jews bent on the undermining of Muslim
and Christian holy sites all the more disingenuous.
In yet another example of “turnspeak,” the Arab world has accused Israel of the misdeeds, lies about history, and destruction of nationhood that they themselves are committing.
It is part of a relentless and continuing effort to delegitimize Israel and finally eliminate it
through a false historical narrative that is repeated in Palestinian Arab schoolbooks, in sermons, in the
Arab press, in Middle Eastern study centers at universities, and in the politicized scholarship and
dialogue generated by Israel-haters, anti-Semites, and Palestinian apologists around the world,
something columnist Nadav Shragai has aptly called a “tissue of lies.”
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free
Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author
of Jew-Hatred Rising: