by Phyllis Chesler
Al-Kotel Al-Ma’aravi?
The Muslims – not the Islamists – mean to take over every Jewish site in Jewish Israel. And the United Nations means to assist them.
The Palestinian Authority has recently issued a new and particularly brazen report in which it declares that the Kotel (Western Wall), the outer wall of the Jewish Temple complex which was first built by the Jewish King Solomon in 960 BCE, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, rebuilt again by Jews in 515 BCE – more than a millennium before the rise of Islam – is not really a Jewish site.
It is now, purportedly, a Muslim holy site.
(Picture: Prof. Chesler) The report states: “Jews did not worship at the Wailing Wall at any time until the Balfour Declaration of 1917…nor can any Muslim, or Arab, or Palestinian give up a single stone or piece of dust from the Wailing Wall or other holy places because that would be a concession on the Temple Mount.” Not only is this claim part of crass Islamic revisionist history – the Muslims are fast destroying the archeological evidence as well.
Just a minute. There is a well-known photo of religious Jewish men and women seen praying at the Kotel in 1905 – before the Balfour Declaration. And, there are two thousand years of stories told by both Jewish and non-Jewish travelers who visited Jerusalem either to pray at the Kotel or to visit the site where they saw Jews at prayer in that exact spot.
However, afraid that propaganda and Big Lies might not be enough, beginning in 1999, the Waqf (the Islamic religious authority) took away 400 truckloads of precious archeological evidence from the Temple Mount – evidence which would further establish that there has been a long-time Jewish presence here.
But, in the land of the one-eyed, like 1967 Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who gave the Arab Waqf control over the Temple Mount (a step he would surely regret if he were alive today), a truly sighted person is King. To me, there is a pattern here, as clear to me as my own right hand, as clear as the stars above on a crisp, clean Jerusalem night.
The Muslims (not the Islamists, but the Muslims) mean to take over every Jewish site in Jewish Israel. And the United Nations means to assist them.
Long before a sovereign Jewish state ever existed, Muslims massacred the Jews of Hevron in 1929. Surviving Jews returned, but were then forced to flee again during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. This burial chamber of our Jewish ancestors is a cave whose purchase is carefully and exhaustively reported in the fifth parasha (portion) of the Torah. According to Jewish religious sources, this purchase took place in approximately 1677 BCE.
Please remember: In 1929, when the Muslims massacred the Jews of Hevron, there were no Jewish “settlements” in “occupied Palestinian land.” There was no Muslim “Palestine” and no sovereign Jewish state. In 1996, under the Wye Accords, Jewish Israel surrendered most Jewish access to this Cave to the Waqf.
Today, Jews can pray there in an outer, small chamber only under heavy guard and only a few times a year in the main prayer chamber. Muslims took the lion’s share of the main prayer hall because, as they claim, Abraham is also their forefather.
As half-siblings however, Muslims have not been as close to Jews as Yishmael once was to his half-brother Yitzchak. Yishmael was the son of a pagan Egyptian mother, Hagar, and an Iraqi-born father, Abraham); Yitzchak, was the son of the same father but of another mother, Sarah. If Abraham is truly the father of Muslims, too – then his Muslim descendants have surely shamed him.
On October 8, 2000, Muslims destroyed Joseph’s Tomb and martyred Rabbi Hillel Lieberman as he tried to rescue a Torah scroll from the burning building. Please understand that the Biblical Joseph was a highly assimilated Jew and beloved Grand Vizier to the Egyptian Pharaoh.
However, Joseph saved the Jews as well as the Egyptians from a famine, and his sons comprise two of the twelve Jewish tribes. Nevertheless, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared the Tomb a Muslim holy site only. He explicitly said that Joseph himself was a Muslim.
If Joseph is a Muslim, so are my blessed Jewish grandparents and parents.
Muslims did not stop here. This year, on October 21, 2010, Muslims persuaded UNESCO to declare that Rachel’s Tomb is really a mosque. Before then, it was widely assumed that Rachel’s Tomb was most definitely a Jewish holy site. This revisionist counter-claim originated only in 1996.
This Muslim take-over of the holy sites of other religions is all part of a pattern; it is one that precedes the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 and the post-1967 war of self defense which Israel was forced to fight and which it won in six days. The first alleged West Bank “settlements” in “Palestinian” territory” dated back to 1975.
In the seventh century, Muslims began destroying both pagan and Christian holy sites as well as living pagan and Christian human beings across the Arab Middle East, and into North Africa and central Asia. They have never stopped this bloody reign of terror, this carnage and pillage, which continues today. Muslims began their destruction of Hindu and Buddhist holy sites as well as of living Hindu and Buddhist human beings a century later. Forced conversion was often the only way to survive.
As for my people, the Jews, Mohammed himself presided over the genocide of an entire Jewish tribe in Arabia. His soldiers beheaded every last Jewish man, then took the women captive; Mohammed brazenly force-converted and married one Jewish female survivor, Safiya bint Huyay, right after she had witnessed the murder of her husband, family, and entire tribe.
In addition, down the centuries, Muslims continued to torture, murder, and exile living Jewish beings. They also systematically destroyed or despoiled Jewish holy sites all over the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. As with churches, (The Church of St. John in Damascus, Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, The Great Church of Cordoba), Muslims also converted ancient synagogues into mosques in what is now Israel (Katzrin) and in Algeria, where the Great Synagogue of Oran, which had been built in 1880, was confiscated and converted into a mosque after Algerian independence.
Please realize that the Jewish state of Israel has safeguarded the holy sites of all religions, both Christian and Muslim, and has given asylum to the Baha’i who were forced to flee Iran. Also realize that Arafat’s Palestinian terrorists actually took the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem hostage in 2002; they kept priests as hostages there as well. They vandalized the church which thereafter reeked of urine, was strewn with dirty pots and pans, cigarette butts, lighters, etc. Some priests subsequently denied they were held hostage, but what else could they say if they wished to keep the Church which is located in hostile Muslim territory?
This is no different from how Muslims (not Islamists, not jihadists) have, in the past, treated Jewish holy sites in the Middle East as well. It is a well known fact that Jordanian Muslims used the narrow alley before the Kotel (Western Wall) as a stable and garbage dump. Yes, this is the same Kotel/Western Wall area which the Waqf is now declaring sacred to Muslims.
I am not ascribing this aggression to Islamists. I am not talking about “wronged” Palestinians. I am writing about what Muslims, in the name of Islam, have done, and are still doing to the holy sites of other religions. And yet, simultaneously, Muslims demand more and more Muslim religious rights in the West: more mega-mosques, more minarets, more time off for prayers, more segregated public facilities, more veiled women, more respect for “Muslim” ways, even if that includes respect for Muslim religious hatred and a Muslim sense of superiority towards all non-Muslims.
The handwriting is on the sky for all who can see. Where once the Jewish Temples proudly stood, we now have the al-Aqsa Mosque. Are the Muslim supremacists soon going to call the Kotel below “Al Kotel Al-Ma’aravi?”
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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