| Jordan trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mountnoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 19 Jan 05:45 AM There was a brief international incident at | | There was a brief international incident at the Temple Mount on Tuesday: Jordan's ambassador to Israel visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Tuesday after earlier leaving the holy site in protest at being held up by police at the entrance, prompting a diplomatic protest from Amman. The Jordanian foreign ministry said it summoned Israel's envoy Eitan Surkis after Ghassan Majali was allegedly "refused entry" to the Temple Mount. A statement from the ministry said Surkis was handed a letter of condemnation. But Israeli police — and also Jordanian reports — indicated that rather than refusing him entry, cops briefly held him up since he hadn't coordinated the visit with them. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry issued a statement rejecting that visits of Jordanians to the site need to be coordinated...Read More |
From Ian: Meir Y. Soloveichik: Moshe Dayan's Tragic Blunder There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel's sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them. Dayan self-evidently thought otherwise. Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world, and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan's Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound's holy places. Netanyahu, Horovitz continued, had "wisely" adopted Dayan's approach previously, but now the prime minister had "sanctioned" an act of "potential pyromania." Horovitz's account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews. After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly...Read More |
UN resolutions that slap Israel's hands for protecting its own citizens, are legion. The latest UN resolution censures Israel for sanctioning the PA and Hamas. The sanctions in question are a reduction in Israeli aid to the two regimes, who use that aid to reward terrorists who murder Jews by way of its pay-for-slay scheme. Israel chooses not to fund the stipends to terrorists and their families that serve to incentivize and foment terror against the Israeli people. The newly-minted Netanyahu government will instead withhold aid in an amount equal to that spent on pay-to-slay and give much of it to Israeli victims of terror and their families. This, it appears, is something that the UN cannot countenance. The thought of Jews refusing to fund their own murders, God forbid, makes them livid. For this reason, over ninety UN member states signed a document damning Israel for supporting (Jewish) victims instead of the (Arab) terrorists who target them. But it's actually far worse than that. Many of the more than 90 nations that applied their John Hancocks—can we still say that?—to this antisemitic document, actually abstained or voted against the resolution. Then they turned right around and signed on to recommending punitive measures that punish Israel for supporting victims of terror instead of terror. The duplicity astounds! Make up your minds, oh Jew-hating nations of the UN that voted against the resolution...Read More |
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Susana Khalil describes herself as "Politologist and Researcher; Columnist and Activist; Founder of the Canaán Association."
She wrote a column in Al Mayadeen English today that is a love letter to murdering Jews.By renouncing the armed struggle, part of an imaginary, Il Fidaí (Freedom fighter), was lost. The raison d'être of the Palestinian Liberation Cause was disfigured. It disfigured this sacred feeling, extinguished the burning fire of resistance, spoiled the sweetness of dignity, and erased poetry and memory. We have become objective, yet objectivity does not really exist, and we have become marketing, elegant submissives. We have lost our rebelliousness. Armed struggle is no guarantee of liberation, but neither is peaceful struggle. The two must operate as a weave, one and the other is one and the same. no one has the right to impose on the native Palestinian their way of struggle. How can Israel dare oppose the sacred feeling of Palestinians as they blow up Jewish children in pizza shops? How monstrous is Israel to try to stop the sweetness of the dignity Palestinians experience when they shoot sniper bullets at the heads of infants? How unspeakably awful is Israel for trying to erase the poetry of butchering rabbis with machetes?
I've seen the worst terrorist supporters justify murdering Jews, and even claim that it is their human right. I've seen the worst mass murderers...Read More |
From Ian: The terror authority The P.A. has long been a strategic threat to Israel's security and continues to be one. It has been involved in terrorism since it was established, while Israel continues to view it as a force for stability. In fact, due to its unprecedented lack of popularity and legitimacy on the Palestinian "street," the P.A. is moving towards destabilizing actions, such as suing Israel in the ICC, taking the lead on U.N. resolutions targeting Israel and asking the ICJ to investigate the situation in Judea and Samaria, a clear violation of its Oslo commitments. Most important are the aforementioned P.A. payments to terrorists. Such payments have been official P.A. policy for decades. The P.A. offers stipends of between $400 to $3,500 monthly for every Palestinian terrorist who murders or attempts to murder innocent Israelis. Payments are promised in advance and wired to the terrorist in Israeli prison or the family of a terrorist killed in the course of his attack. These salaries are lifelong, and even terrorists released from Israeli prisons continue to receive them. The P.A. also guarantees released terrorists a safe position in the P.A. infrastructure, whether as a ghost employee or an actual one, alongside free healthcare and education. For the average Palestinian, this is like winning the lottery. A lifetime monthly salary of $3,500 is four times the average Palestinian wage and eight times...Read More |
What is the Arabic name for the Temple Mount? The answer is political.
I was somewhat surprised to find out that calling the entire esplanade "Al Aqsa Mosque" (al-Masjid al-'Aqṣā) is not a new phenomenon. Some noted Muslim geographers and scholars used that term as early as the tenth century, as the word "masjid" is not a direct translation of "mosque."
E. H. Palmer noted this in an 1871 article for the Palestine Exploration Quarterly: However, during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, some people decided to elevate the sanctity of the esplanade even more. "Haram" means "forbidden" in Arabic, meaning a place of the highest sanctity where certain activities like cutting down trees or killing animals are forbidden. Up until the Crusades the term referred exclusively to the mosques in Mecca and Medina. But after the Muslims regained Jerusalem from the Crusaders, there were some who wanted to elevate the area's sanctity even more to counter Christian claims on the site, and over time, they renamed the area the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary.
Not all Muslim scholars agreed. Yitzhak Reiter writes in Jerusalem and Its Role in Islamic Solidarity: Although, as noted before, Ibn-Taymiyya refuted the haram status of the Jerusalem mosque, al-Aqsa's upgrading to haram status...Read More |
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that a delegation from the EU visited the Temple Mount this morning, where they politely listened to anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda spouted by the head of the Waqf, Sheikh Azzam Al-Khatib. The delegation included 35 representatives and consuls from the European Union. Al-Khatib "stressed the importance of their visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque as an Islamic mosque under the tutelage of King Abdullah II, the guardian of Islamic and Christian holy sites in Al-Quds Al-Sharif." Al-Khatib accompanied the 35 representatives and consuls on a tour where he described "the occupation's attempt to change the status quo" on the site. He then told them that the only ones that should be changing the status quo were the Muslims, claiming that there were many Hashemite construction projects there that Israel prevents from being completed. In a sane world, new construction projects on the Temple Mount would be considered a violation of the status quo. Al Khatib then described his description of the status quo: he called for a "return to the historic status quo of the mosque as an Islamic mosque for Muslims alone, with its 144 dunams, with all its prayer corners, courtyards and complexes, below the ground and above it." According to Jordan News, the delegation...Read More |
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