In late February, Haj Ikrama Tsabari, the Mufti of Jerusalem -- in keeping with the Fatah terrorist organization (a.k.a the Palestinian Authority) which during the Oslo years appointed him to kick out the previous Jordan-appointed cleric -- issued a ruling, in Arabic, a fatwa, which was pure bushwa.
According to Mr. Tsabari's sage opinion, the Western Wall was not part of the Holy Temple but is connected to al-Aqsa mosque (which sits upon the Temple Mount). Therefore, says he, it is a Muslim holy site and that the Islamic Trust (in Arabic the Waqf) must rule over it. He allowed that Jews may pray there but declared that there are no Jewish archaeological remnants connected to this place, which is of the Roman period. This, of course, is functionally, if not clinically, delusional. The entire Wall is one gigantic Jewish archeological site and artifact.
The Midrash says that when the Holy One Blessed be He offered the Torah to various peoples of the world, all said, "No thanks," because it contained at least one prohibition against an activity they liked indulging in. This nation was addicted to adultery, this one to bearing false witness, and when it came to the Children of Ishmael, they said, "No thank you" because the Torah says, "Thou shalt not steal."
This particular midrash may have influenced the great Rabbi Shlomo ben-Yitzhak, a.k.a. Rashi, the greatest of Torah commentators, who lived in 11th century France, when all he chose was one word to describe the character of Ishmael and his seed, which was listim, basically armed robbers.
This pretty much jibes with what even 20th century academic scholars, historians and anthropologists tell us about early Arab culture. Throughout history, certainly until the very recent (historically speaking) emergence of Islam in the 7th century, the Arabs' major vocation was indeed highway robbery; they were caravan raiders, like Amalekites, preying on exposed wayfarers. One wonders if, throughout history, Arab mothers, unlike Jewish mothers, characteristically did not aspire to see their sons become rabbis, teachers, doctors, lawyers and accountants but muggers and armed robbers.
Think also of what you yourself know about Arab culture, however basic. For example, the Arabs have given world literature the fanciful collection of folk tales called A Thousand and One Nights which contain the famous story of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.
Then there is one of Hollywood's most successful pictures, produced in its Golden Age, starring the Indian actor Sabu, called The Thief of Baghdad, which also drew on the same historical sources romanticizing a thief.
Or take that other great Hollywood film made 20 years later, Lawrence of Arabia, central to whose fact-based story was Lawrence's virtually idiotic attempt to turn desert marauders into liberal democrats liberated from the yoke of the Turkish Empire. The audience sees that every time Lawrence successfully rallied his Bedouin camel cavalry into attacking a Turkish garrison or supply train, all his "freedom fighters" wanted to do was not to regroup for the next engagement toward the ultimate goal of political independence as a nation, but just to drift away with their booty--which behavior indicated that while Lawrence may have wanted their motivations for such attacks to have been nationalistic, they were just larcenous.
This makes sense, because, as mentioned, pillaging for the Arabs throughout almost all their history was their lifestyle. Century in and century out, they were "wild asses" of undomesticated men, with one clan or tribe one day raiding the other, stealing off with their camels, women and goats, in the knowledge that before too long their victims would mount a counter-raid to take back what was ripped off and khap even more.
Such an operation in Arabic is called a razzia, and it is a likely source for the English word "raid."
Consider as well the Scud War, whose tenth anniversay we remembered last month. That began in August 1990, when Saddam.,the tribal chieftain in Iraq, strapped for cash after years of a failed raid against Iran, decided to invade the territory of the neighboring Kuwaiti tribe, and overnight Iraqi listim (robbers) in army uniforms, many of them illiterate peasants, poured across the border and crashed into Kuwait City in hours. The most disciplined of these very savage troops broke into bank vaults and carted off billions of dollars in gold bullion to be taken back to the regime in Baghdad, while the more feral among them burst into automobile show rooms, drove out the models by smashing them through the plate glass windows; broke into jewelry stores, boutiques and in general stripped Kuwait City clean.
And in the last days of that war, this rabble could be seen fleeing northward on the highway back into Iraq in their stolen cars where they got blasted from on high by Allied war planes, which turned miles of traffic-jammed highway into a snaking, blackened caravan of burning vehicles with lots of dead listim in their army uniforms and their now-smashed booty in them.
In matters of religion too, Ishmael has proved himself a thief. The Christian faith took over the Hebrew Bible more or less in tact then added its own book to it, but the first Muslims did something radically different. They re-wrote the Hebrew Bible, tossed in pieces of pilfered and misconstrued Talmud and Aggadata, which behavior reflects a very different kind of mentality at work. The older faith took the story of the divine saga of the Jewish people through time in a direction it wanted to go in--which Jews of course are enjoined by the Torah itself never to accept-- but at least the Christians had the decency to recognize what had come before, more or less--versus the Muslims, who re-wrote the Jewish holy texts, called it the Qu'ran (The Reading) and claimed that it was the true version of the divine story restored by the Prophet Muhammed. It is a basic Islamic belief that Moses--whose name the Arabs mispronounce as Musa--was given the Qu'ran at Mt. Sinai which the perfidious Jews then went on mendaciously to re-write and rename the Torah.
In this ahistorical construction of reality, it is the Jews who did the stealing. Islam is a religion built upon the accusation that it was the Children of Israel who ripped off the Children of Ishmael, with the True Believers only retrieving what their rival half-brother had unjustly taken from them.
Thus today none should be surprised that one of the foul byproducts of the Al-Aqsa Intifada--which really should be called the Al-Aqsa Pogrom--is the Arab claim that the Temple Mount is not the Temple Mount, that the Western Wall belongs to Islam, that the Jews are the real thieves of "Balestine" (sic) and Jerusalem.
Perhaps what is going on here is that to this day, the Children of Ishmael have never quite gotten over the loss of their eponymous ancestor's status as Abraham's first-born, which he lost because he simply was not worthy of it. The Matriarch Sarah, that most righteous, insightful and wise of women, looked at the 14-year-old teenager Ishmael mocking her 3-year son Isaac, and penetrated to his essence and basic character flaw and told her husband that in this boy he had no worthy transmitter of his spiritual legacy.
It is in this episode that Rashi teaches us that the seed of Ishmael would evolve into a people of listim, violent armed robbers who believe there is nothing wrong in claiming as theirs what rightfully belongs to the Jews.
According to Mr. Tsabari's sage opinion, the Western Wall was not part of the Holy Temple but is connected to al-Aqsa mosque (which sits upon the Temple Mount). Therefore, says he, it is a Muslim holy site and that the Islamic Trust (in Arabic the Waqf) must rule over it. He allowed that Jews may pray there but declared that there are no Jewish archaeological remnants connected to this place, which is of the Roman period. This, of course, is functionally, if not clinically, delusional. The entire Wall is one gigantic Jewish archeological site and artifact.
The Midrash says that when the Holy One Blessed be He offered the Torah to various peoples of the world, all said, "No thanks," because it contained at least one prohibition against an activity they liked indulging in. This nation was addicted to adultery, this one to bearing false witness, and when it came to the Children of Ishmael, they said, "No thank you" because the Torah says, "Thou shalt not steal."
This particular midrash may have influenced the great Rabbi Shlomo ben-Yitzhak, a.k.a. Rashi, the greatest of Torah commentators, who lived in 11th century France, when all he chose was one word to describe the character of Ishmael and his seed, which was listim, basically armed robbers.
This pretty much jibes with what even 20th century academic scholars, historians and anthropologists tell us about early Arab culture. Throughout history, certainly until the very recent (historically speaking) emergence of Islam in the 7th century, the Arabs' major vocation was indeed highway robbery; they were caravan raiders, like Amalekites, preying on exposed wayfarers. One wonders if, throughout history, Arab mothers, unlike Jewish mothers, characteristically did not aspire to see their sons become rabbis, teachers, doctors, lawyers and accountants but muggers and armed robbers.
Think also of what you yourself know about Arab culture, however basic. For example, the Arabs have given world literature the fanciful collection of folk tales called A Thousand and One Nights which contain the famous story of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.
Then there is one of Hollywood's most successful pictures, produced in its Golden Age, starring the Indian actor Sabu, called The Thief of Baghdad, which also drew on the same historical sources romanticizing a thief.
Or take that other great Hollywood film made 20 years later, Lawrence of Arabia, central to whose fact-based story was Lawrence's virtually idiotic attempt to turn desert marauders into liberal democrats liberated from the yoke of the Turkish Empire. The audience sees that every time Lawrence successfully rallied his Bedouin camel cavalry into attacking a Turkish garrison or supply train, all his "freedom fighters" wanted to do was not to regroup for the next engagement toward the ultimate goal of political independence as a nation, but just to drift away with their booty--which behavior indicated that while Lawrence may have wanted their motivations for such attacks to have been nationalistic, they were just larcenous.
This makes sense, because, as mentioned, pillaging for the Arabs throughout almost all their history was their lifestyle. Century in and century out, they were "wild asses" of undomesticated men, with one clan or tribe one day raiding the other, stealing off with their camels, women and goats, in the knowledge that before too long their victims would mount a counter-raid to take back what was ripped off and khap even more.
Such an operation in Arabic is called a razzia, and it is a likely source for the English word "raid."
Consider as well the Scud War, whose tenth anniversay we remembered last month. That began in August 1990, when Saddam.,the tribal chieftain in Iraq, strapped for cash after years of a failed raid against Iran, decided to invade the territory of the neighboring Kuwaiti tribe, and overnight Iraqi listim (robbers) in army uniforms, many of them illiterate peasants, poured across the border and crashed into Kuwait City in hours. The most disciplined of these very savage troops broke into bank vaults and carted off billions of dollars in gold bullion to be taken back to the regime in Baghdad, while the more feral among them burst into automobile show rooms, drove out the models by smashing them through the plate glass windows; broke into jewelry stores, boutiques and in general stripped Kuwait City clean.
And in the last days of that war, this rabble could be seen fleeing northward on the highway back into Iraq in their stolen cars where they got blasted from on high by Allied war planes, which turned miles of traffic-jammed highway into a snaking, blackened caravan of burning vehicles with lots of dead listim in their army uniforms and their now-smashed booty in them.
In matters of religion too, Ishmael has proved himself a thief. The Christian faith took over the Hebrew Bible more or less in tact then added its own book to it, but the first Muslims did something radically different. They re-wrote the Hebrew Bible, tossed in pieces of pilfered and misconstrued Talmud and Aggadata, which behavior reflects a very different kind of mentality at work. The older faith took the story of the divine saga of the Jewish people through time in a direction it wanted to go in--which Jews of course are enjoined by the Torah itself never to accept-- but at least the Christians had the decency to recognize what had come before, more or less--versus the Muslims, who re-wrote the Jewish holy texts, called it the Qu'ran (The Reading) and claimed that it was the true version of the divine story restored by the Prophet Muhammed. It is a basic Islamic belief that Moses--whose name the Arabs mispronounce as Musa--was given the Qu'ran at Mt. Sinai which the perfidious Jews then went on mendaciously to re-write and rename the Torah.
In this ahistorical construction of reality, it is the Jews who did the stealing. Islam is a religion built upon the accusation that it was the Children of Israel who ripped off the Children of Ishmael, with the True Believers only retrieving what their rival half-brother had unjustly taken from them.
Thus today none should be surprised that one of the foul byproducts of the Al-Aqsa Intifada--which really should be called the Al-Aqsa Pogrom--is the Arab claim that the Temple Mount is not the Temple Mount, that the Western Wall belongs to Islam, that the Jews are the real thieves of "Balestine" (sic) and Jerusalem.
Perhaps what is going on here is that to this day, the Children of Ishmael have never quite gotten over the loss of their eponymous ancestor's status as Abraham's first-born, which he lost because he simply was not worthy of it. The Matriarch Sarah, that most righteous, insightful and wise of women, looked at the 14-year-old teenager Ishmael mocking her 3-year son Isaac, and penetrated to his essence and basic character flaw and told her husband that in this boy he had no worthy transmitter of his spiritual legacy.
It is in this episode that Rashi teaches us that the seed of Ishmael would evolve into a people of listim, violent armed robbers who believe there is nothing wrong in claiming as theirs what rightfully belongs to the Jews.