A CRIME AGAINST HISTORY AND RELIGION
by Victor Sharpe
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda infamously said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." He told lies about the hapless Jews and millions of Germans and other Europeans believed them and willingly participated in the Holocaust.
Another such miscreant, the late and unlamented arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, told an enormous whopper, which has been repeated relentlessly by his fellow Arabs who call themselves Palestinians; namely that there were no Jewish Temples on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
Other Palestinian Arab 'notables' such as Chief Palestinian Justice, Sheik Taysir Tamimi, declared the Jewish Temples "never existed." And even the Palestinian so-called moderate who the Leftists and gullible liberals love to love, Sari Nusseibeh, had made the preposterous and malicious claim that "the historical ties and attachments of the Palestinians precede any Israeli claim to Jerusalem."
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the most sacred site of the Jewish people, the very place that the Jewish King David built the sanctuary for the Ark of the Covenant and made his capital some 3,000 years ago. It is where his son, King Solomon, built the first Temple destroyed by the Babylonians and Herod later built the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans.
The very name, Jerusalem, Yerushalayim in Hebrew, was always the source of Jewish yearning and prayers down the dark centuries of exile and persecution. For those Jews not living in the ancestral homeland, (and there were always Jewish communities in the land maintaining what numbers they could under successive alien occupations), the prayers expressed the longing to return and rebuild the eternal Jewish capital. It is not by accident that wherever in the world a synagogue stands, it faces Jerusalem.
At the conclusion of Israel's defensive war against Arab aggression in June, 1967 and the reunification of Jerusalem, which had been divided since the 1948 illegal Jordanian occupation of the eastern half of the city, the leftwing Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, committed a calamitous mistake.
Dayan believed that showing friendship to the Muslim aggressors by giving the Waqf, the erstwhile Jordanian Muslim religious authorities, the keys to the Temple Mount, they would reciprocate and Jews and Muslims would worship in peaceful harmony on the Mount. It was a monumental error. For the Waqf predictably chose to immediately discriminate against any signs of Jewish and Christian prayer on the Temple Mount. The holiest Jewish site in the world under the Waqf has practically become judenrein.
As Giulio Meotti, a journalist with the Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, wrote in 2012: "The Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all archaeological evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the Temple Mount. The Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, a Waqf sign says "The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.
"Today Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim observers supervising visits, Israeli police, to their shame, have frequently arrested Jews for various "violations," such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper.
"This week, a Jewish woman was arrested following claims by police and Waqf officials that they noticed she was praying on the Temple Mount. Why is it a crime for a Jew to pray to God on the Temple Mount? And why is the State of Israel complicit in enforcing this anti-Semitic rule?"
An Indian Hindu friend expressed to me his astonishment that Jews are not allowed to build their Temple again on their holiest site. He pointed out that growing up in India, people always knew that Jerusalem is to the Jews what Mecca is to the Muslims and Varanasi is to the Hindus.
Tragically, Israeli leaders are terrified of upsetting the Muslim world and this very timidity and fear allows for triumphalist and tyrannical Islam to commit unspeakable crimes against civilization and history. What do I mean by that? Consider:
What may well be one of the worst crimes against civilization is the ruthless and relentless destruction of Jewish and Christian artifacts and antiquities by the Moslem authorities, the Waqf, who were foolishly given permission to control the Temple Mount in 1967. Remember the Taliban destruction of the 2,500 year old statues of Buddha in Afghanistan? It is the same Muslim arrogance and hatred for all other religions.
The Muslims soon began using heavy bulldozers to dig up the ground in order to build yet another mosque, in addition to the two mosques Muslim conquerors built over the site of the two biblical Jewish Temples. Despite Israeli protests, they are building under the mount, and in the process deliberately desecrating tons of precious archaeologically rich soil. One archaeologist described the disturbed sites as "an archaeological crime" and an assault upon Jewish and Christian history.[1]
Now, funded by the City of David Foundation, and directed by Professor Gabriel Barkai, Israeli and other archeologists and volunteers are desperately searching through the tons of earth and rubble unceremoniously dumped by the Muslim Authorities in the nearby Kidron Valley.
The intrepid archaeologists and their helpers have uncovered thousands of rare and important artifacts from the First and Second Temple periods, as well as from Roman and Byzantine periods, among them a rare bulla dating from the First Temple period.[2]
But each precious find, ripped and torn from its age old location upon the Temple Mount by Palestinian Muslims, fatally compromises what each item can tell us: a most grievous and barbarous sin against history and civilization.
The catastrophe is continuing even now as the Muslim Waqf continues remorselessly desecrating and gleefully destroying all evidence of Judeo-Christian civilization and religion upon Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
One can only shudder at what discoveries of profound spiritual and historical importance have already been destroyed and lost.
Footnotes
[1] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/153152#.UuRbL5vTnAU
[2] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=776922
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Some of the comments that added useful information.
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chuckbob Victor Sharpe has said it again in his usual articulate way, holding nothing back. Too many Jews in Israel suffer from what they call in the US "white guilt". To think that much of the discussion of the so-called peace process today centers around which and how much lands we will give away from our eternal heritage. To think that all our leaders can propose is that we should be prepared to make "painful concessions". To think that Moshe Dayan had so little Jewish knowledge or pride that he gave the Temple Mount to the Waqf!! Jerusalem isn't even mentioned in the Koran although it's in our Torah 656 times. The Arabs have 22 nations and 5 million square miles. We have one nation and 10,000 square miles. We should give them nothing and demand (or simply take) the right to pray on certain parts of the Temple Mount. As for those who say halachically we mustn't go up there, we have a long-standing proverb: Et La'asot LaShem...Heferu toratecha, meaning, It's time to act for G-d; they (our enemies) are destroying Your Torah/ This had been used in the past to authorize actions that may have seemed halachically somewhat daring. How about this case, where they are not destroying His Torah, but seeking to destroy Jewish men, women, and children - the second six million. The time to act is now to preserve the honor of the Jewish people and the honor of the One who brought us up out of Egypt to give us this Land (not so that we could give it away and kowtow to Ishmael's children)! |
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Tasha Ballou Damn the Israeli government. Afraid. Afraid to stand up for their own people, history and entire raison d'etre. The more they cower, the more the world thinks, "Maybe the world has a point, if they won't even stand up for their own existence." Hey people, I have, along with Victor and countless other brave souls, tried to educate and stimulate Israel's position. Me? Since 1987. I gave up. No support from rabbis, ADL, AIPAC, Israeli politicians, and G-d Forbid, the "media." We will prevail, but there's a special hell for those who have cowered in fear of "what others will think." Oh, and by the way. The victims of the Holocaust didn't say, "Never Again." They cried, "Avenge Us!" We let them down every day. |
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z-man I used to work with a Muslim. We had several discussions about religion, history, etc. He denied that "Palestine" was once part of the Roman Empire. He said that was a lie. According to him, "Muslims" have lived in Palestine for thousands of years until the Christians temporarily conquered it, then of course when the Jews "invaded" after WWII. The fact that we have 2000+ years of archeology, anthropology, and reams of written history didn't matter to him. He was easily one of the most ignorant, mis-informed people I ever ran across. |
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Yisrael Medad thank you for this. and this site details much destruction:
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Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer with articles and essays
published in FrontPageMag.com, Townhall.com, Outpost, The Jewish
Press, American Thinker, Renew America, Israel News Daily, Family
Security Matters, Jewish Voice & Opinion, Page One Daily, The
Jerusalem Connection, Israel National News and many other
publications. He is also the author of Volumes One & Two of
Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State and The Blue
Hour and Other Strange Tales. This article appeared Jnauary 29,
2014 in the Canada
Free Press and is archived at
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/60789
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