by Boaz Bismuth
"Israeli police shoot
two Palestinians in synagogue," the website for the Daily Telegraph in
Great Britain reported on Tuesday. CNN, simultaneously, included "two
dead Palestinians" in its casualty count. The CNN correspondent
apparently woke up on the Left side of the bed and presented the
incident as "an attack on a mosque." It took a while for the network to
correct the mistake and apologize. One wonders what Freud would have to
say about all this.
The excruciating
incident on Tuesday in Jerusalem's Har Nof neighborhood was no ordinary
terrorist attack. It is not often one sees images of tallitot drenched
in blood and bodies with tefillin still wrapped around the arms of the
victims, even in the Jewish state, which has known so many terrorist
attacks. And perhaps because of this the French Le Monde newspaper,
which normally doesn't spare us any criticism, chose the following
headline: "Massacre in Jerusalem synagogue."
The international press
learned that not only Islamic State terrorists engage in slaughter,
that Palestinian terrorists are also quite accomplished in the art of
wielding knives. Maybe this time they will also put it in print. The
pundits around the globe, however, explained that construction in
settlements is behind the recent escalation of hostilities in Jerusalem.
In other words, the world still thinks the problem between Israel and
the Palestinians is territorial. If only that were the case, the
conflict would have been resolved long ago.
It needs to be
understood once and for all that the conflict is of a religious nature.
Like Yasser Arafat in 2000, his successor Mahmoud Abbas has emphasized
the religious aspect of the conflict. The Palestinian Authority
president is a pyromaniac at night and a firefighter in the morning.
Examples? Abbas still
persistently refuses to recognize the Jewish character of Israel. Why
should a Jew have a state? Beyond this, he incites against the Jews from
his home in Ramallah. He was quoted, during a rally of Fatah
supporters, as saying "what is needed is to prevent them (the settlers),
in any way possible, from entering our mosque and defiling it."
Abbas is referring, of
course, to Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem),
where Jews are seeking to pray. From his view, the compound is a Muslim
holy site, which the Jews incidentally accept as such (evidenced by the
Jordanian Waqf responsible for oversight there). The Palestinians,
however, have a tendency to ignore the fact that in 967 B.C.E. King
Solomon built the First Temple in the exact same spot. The Palestinians
have never excelled at learning the history of the Land of Israel.
And the world? It is
apparently preoccupied with the changing demographics at home and with
the guilt over its not-so-distant past, which leads to quite a bit of
confusion over the chronology and to believe the Temple Mount has only
been "in our hands" since 1967.
Boaz Bismuth
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10643
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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