by Ruthie Blum
During morning prayers
at a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday, two Arabs with massacre on their
minds entered the premises armed with guns and axes. They managed to
kill four worshippers and wound several others before being shot down by
police.
Immediately this was
reported in the media as a revenge attack for the death of an Arab bus
driver (employed by the Israeli company, Egged) on Sunday night. A
forensic examination, conducted on Monday in the presence of an Arab
coroner, showed that the deceased had hanged himself. But his parents
insisted he was murdered by Jews. Riots ensued.
But then, mass protests
against perceived Israeli crimes have been going on for months. Each is
given a specific label, but they are all part of what I would call the
"Temple Mount Intifada."
This latest war of
attrition against Israel was ostensibly caused by a movement of Jews who
wish to alter the status quo and be allowed to pray at the Temple
Mount. But Muslims, who have free rein to worship at the Al-Aqsa mosque,
consider this an assault.
They rationalize their rejection of religious coexistence by denying a Jewish connection to the site.
"Temple denial" is a
term coined by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs head Dore Gold, a
former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and current foreign policy adviser
to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his 2007 book, "The Fight for
Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,"
Gold called the attempt on the part of Palestinian Liberation
Organization chief Yasser Arafat to delegitimize Israel by rejecting
Jewish claims to the holy city.
Since then, Gold has
shown how Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has picked up
where Arafat left off, continuing the campaign to cast aspersions on
Israel's connection to Jerusalem in general and to the Temple Mount in
particular. Indeed, Abbas and other PA figures have taken many
opportunities to assert that if there was a Jewish Temple 2,000 years
ago, it was located in Nablus.
When Gold first began
to warn about Temple denial as a dangerous propaganda tool with a
contagious message, some pundits shrugged it off. After all, there is
not only a religious connection on the part of the Jews to the holiest
site in Judaism; there is also abundant archaeological evidence on and
around the site to prove it.
Furthermore, as Gold
wrote in these pages ("Abbas' Temple denial," March 2, 2012), "The great
irony of this new Palestinian version of Jerusalem's history is that it
contradicts the original Islamic tradition. Abu Ja'far Muhammad bin
Jarir al-Tabari (839-923 C.E.) was a leading commentator on the Quran
and is known as one of Islam's greatest historians. In his account of
the conquest of Jerusalem by the second caliph, Umar bin al-Khattab,
al-Tabari describes him heading toward 'the area where the Romans buried
the Temple [bayt al-maqdis] at the time of the sons of Israel.'"
Gold's analysis and admonitions were prescient.
The current wave of
Palestinian terrorism is the culmination of decades of revisionist
history, raised by Arafat at the end of the Camp David summit in 2000,
and relentlessly promoted since then by his successors in the PA and by
radical Muslims elsewhere.
It is this, too, that is enabling Islamic State to gain a foothold in Jerusalem.
According to the online
news site Vocativ, a campaign called "Recruitment for Al-Aqsa" has been
circulating on Islamic State social media sites.
"The goal of this holy
campaign is to prepare suicide and jihadi attacks against the Jews … in
order to implement the law of Allah and liberate the captive Al-Aqsa
mosque from the hands of the filthy Jews," says the group behind it.
This mission statement
is accompanied by Skype, Twitter, phone and e-mail contacts, as well as
calls for volunteers and a fund-raising pitch that reads as follows:
"Our Muslim brother, if
you can't be a mujahid by yourself, then you should know that your
brothers in Palestine promised to Allah to go in the path of jihad.
Don't be cheap with your money."
When Vocativ called the
number listed on the posting, a man answered and said that the aim is
to recruit 50 fighters and pay each one a $2,500 stipend in cash, to
cover the cost of a Kalashnikov rifle, magazines and bullets.
So here we have it. The Temple Mount is even being used by Islamic State supporters to attract recruits.
The United States and
Europe have wasted precious energy and resources on myopic "solutions"
to what has become an almost uncontainable global phenomenon. Blaming
Israel for any of it not only reeks of anti-Semitism; it is also utterly
counter-productive.
The Temple Mount is not the cause of the "controversy." Nor are Jews who insist on the right to pray there "provocateurs."
It is this fact that
must be recognized and reckoned with. Otherwise, it won't be long before
decapitation videos start going viral from Jerusalem.
Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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