I believe President Trump failed to move the U.S. Embassy
due to massive political pressure from camps that pay homage to Palestinian
lies and from the political Establishment too concerned with acerbating
conflict with Muslim-Arab allies that align with American National Interests
against ISIS and Iran.
I believe the official reason given – to promote peace
between Israel and the Arabs claiming to be Palestinians is bogus.
Along the lines of bogus Palestinians, authors Klein and Dr.
Mandel explain the fake Palestinian and Islamic claim in general that Jerusalem
is holy to Muslims. It is a Muslim lie to perpetuate conflict with the Jewish
State of Israel.
JRH 6/2/17
*******************
The Myth Of Jerusalem’s Holiness To Muslims
8 Sivan 5777 – June 2,
2017
Having just marked the 50th
anniversary of Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem, there is no better time to
focus on the propaganda myth that Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims.
The Muslim fixation and
clamor on Jerusalem is actually a very recent development – a product of
political conflict, not historical truth.
Jerusalem rates not a single
mention in the Koran, and Muslims face Mecca in prayer. In the 7th century
A.D., the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counterweight
to Mecca. This is when the important Muslim shrines the Dome of the Rock (691)
and the Al-Aqsa mosque (705) were intentionally built on the site of the
destroyed biblical Jewish Temples – a time-honored practice to physically
signal the predominance of Islam.
Yet references in the Koran
and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the
“farthest mosque” couldn’t mean Jerusalem, because the Koran refers to the land
of Israel as the “nearest” place. It couldn’t have been a reference to the
Al-Aqsa mosque, for the simple reason that Al-Aqsa didn’t exist in Muhammad’s
day.
With the demise of the
Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into
a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in
the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain,
visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”
Jerusalem did, however,
become a Jewish-majority city during the 19th century. The 1907 Baedekers
Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims
and 7,000 Christians. Jerusalem meant so little to the Ottomans that, during
World War I, they let it fall into British hands without a fight and even
contemplated entirely destroying the city before pulling out.
When did Jerusalem become a
passionate Islamic issue? Only with the Arab confrontation with Zionism in the
20th century. It was Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, a vociferous
anti-Semite and later Nazi collaborator, who expended enormous energy to focus
Islamic attention on the city.
Seeking to foment a Muslim
war on British Palestine’s Jews, he fabricated a tradition that the wall to
which Muhammad was believed to have tethered his steed Buraq was not the
southern or eastern walls, as Muslims had asserted for centuries, but the
Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site. (The Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian
status quo agreement forbids Jewish prayer at the religion’s holiest site, the
Temple Mount.) This turned the Western Wall into a flashpoint.
The massive Arab assault on
Jews across British Palestine in 1929, in which 133 Jews were murdered and
hundreds more maimed, was triggered by false rumors that Jews had attacked, or
were intending to attack, the mosques atop the Temple Mount.
Strangely, even under the
mufti, the Temple Mount was still recognized by Muslims as the site of the
biblical Jewish Temples. Thus, the Jerusalem Muslim Supreme Council’s publication
“A Brief Guide to the Haram Al-Sharif” states regarding
Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, “Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is
beyond dispute.” (After 1954, all such references to the biblical temples were
excised from this publication.)
During Jordan’s illegal
occupation and annexation of eastern Jerusalem from 1948-1967, Amman remained
the Jordanian capital, not Jerusalem. No Arab rulers, other than Jordan’s
kings, ever visited.
Neither the PLO’s National Charter nor the Fatah Constitution (the
latter drafted during Jordanian rule) even mentions Jerusalem, let alone calls
for its establishment as a Palestinian capital.
But today, Palestinian
Authority officials deny Judaism’s connection to Jerusalem. PA Mufti Muhammad
Hussein sneers at Jews’ “alleged
Temple” and insists “Palestinians have an exclusive right…which they share with no one” to the Temple Mount. Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, former
chief justice of the PA’s religious court, insists he does
not “know of any Jewish holy sites” in Jerusalem.
And the PA uses Jerusalem as
a propaganda instrument to incite violence. In 1996, Yasir Arafat used Israel’s
opening of an archaeological tunnel near the Temple Mount to incite riots on
the basis of the lie that the tunnel threatened the stability of the Al-Aqsa
mosque. Twenty-five Israeli soldiers and 100 Palestinian rioters were killed in
the ensuing violence.
In 2015, PA President Mahmoud
Abbas urged violence over Jews visiting the Temple Mount,
borrowing from Haj Amin al-Husseini’s playbook the fabricated claims of Jewish
assaults on the mosques. More than 30 Israelis were murdered and more than 200
Palestinians, the vast majority terrorists or rioters, were killed in
subsequent attacks and clashes.
When a senior White House
official told Bloomberg News that
President Trump –reneging on his pre-election promise – would not move the U.S.
embassy to Jerusalem “at this time” because “we’re not looking to provoke
anyone when everyone’s playing really nice,” it gave the Palestinians their
latest reason to believe violence over Jerusalem reaps rewards.
Far from aiding the cause of
peace, the fabrication of Jerusalem’s importance to Islam enables the
instigation of bloodshed. If the propaganda myth persists, expect no change.
______________
Morton A. Klein is national
president of the Zionist Organization of America. Dr. Daniel Mandel is director
of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy and author of "H.V. Evatt
& the Establishment of Israel" (Routledge, 2004).
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