The Past and the Present in Jerusalem

"In April 1920, as a gesture to the Zionists, the British government created a region called “Palestine” designed to be the eventual “national home for the Jewish people.” Then in May 1921, it appointed Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974) as mufti of Jerusalem, a dreadful decision whose repercussions still reverberate today."
"Husseini harbored a monstrous hostility toward Jews; as Klaus Gensicke puts it in his important 2007 study, 'The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis,' Husseini’s 'hatred of Jews knew no mercy, and he always intervened with particular zeal whenever he feared that some of the Jews could escape annihilation.' Toward this end, he initiated an uncompromising campaign of rejectionism — the intent to eliminate every vestige of Jewish presence in Palestine — and used any and all tactics toward this foul end."
"For example, he can be largely held responsibility for the Middle East’s endemic anti-Semitism, having spread the anti-Semitic forgery 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the blood libel and Holocaust denial throughout the region. His other legacies include making Jerusalem into the flash point it remains today, spreading many of the anti-Zionist conspiracy theories that afflict the Middle East, and being one of the first Islamists to call for jihad."
"He encouraged and organized unprovoked violence against the British and the Jews, including a three-year long intifada in 1936-39. Then he worked with the Nazis, living in Germany during the war years, 1941-45, proving so useful that he earned an audience with Hitler. Nor was this a courtesy visit; as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly pointed out on Oct. 20, Husseini had a central role in formulating the Final Solution that led eventually to the murder of 6 million Jews."
"Husseini tutored his young relative, the future Yasser Arafat, and Arafat faithfully carried out the mufti’s program for 35 years, after which his apparatchik Mahmoud Abbas keeps the legacy alive. In other words, Husseini’s rejectionism still dominates the Palestinian Authority. In addition, he spent the postwar years in Egypt, where he influenced the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Hamas spin-off also bears his hallmark rejectionism. Thus do both principal Palestinian movements pursue his murderous and self-defeating methods."
Daniel Pipes, president, Middle East Forum

Spencer Platt/Getty Images   The Dome of the Rock at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem.

First things first: it is an absolute absurdity that a nation in possession of their religion's most sacred and hallowed site is denied, by an outside source, access to that site, much less forbidden by another religion entirely to pray at the site. The threats inherent in not complying with this forbiddingly sinister denial of rights are, however, sufficient in view of the mass weight of numbers of Muslims as compared to the slight numbers of Jews, and the wish to avoid further confrontations and conflict, to persuade Israel to comply with those demands.

This most basic of human rights; denying an entire people the right to approach the foremost symbol of their divine belief, is considered appropriate by the world community which subscribes to basic human rights extended to all, with the exception of Judaism and Jews. Muslims, whose religion is based upon the millennia-earlier monotheistic religion of Judaism, deny the authenticity of Judaism and its heritage site of Jerusalem.

As is typical of Islam, religious sites expressing the heritage of predecessors are destroyed or built over, or re-purposed to Islam.

Islamic clerics of the present era claim that Israel never existed, that Jews never had a heritage site in the Middle East, much less that Jerusalem was the capital of ancient Israel, and in Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount, thousands of years before Islam was invented by an charismatic Arab merchant with a grand vision as a prophet, two successive Temples dedicated to Yahweh (Jehovah) were erected to hold Judaism's sacred scripts.

The cry to arms for Muslims, urged on by their leaders, is that the State of Israel is planning to deny Muslims their right to what they term the Noble Sanctuary where Muhammad was said to have ascended to heaven astride a white steed. This incitement to tribal, religious conflict has once again fired the flames of hostile resentment by Muslims against Jews. But even before the present stoning and knifing and random killing of Israeli Jews by Palestinians began, there was a malign campaign.

Should any Palestinian choose to believe that a Jew visiting the Temple Mount is discreetly praying, there is a call to action to deny that Jew his tendency to worship his god. Palestinian women garbed in all-encompassing black appear like hate-harpies to follow Jews about on the Mount, screaming at them "Allahu Akbar!" And young Palestinian men and women 'activists' linger in the Al-Aqsa Mosque with a specific purpose in mind.

Palestinian Arab young men with masks, inside Al-Aqsa Mosque (some wearing shoes), stockpile rocks to use for throwing at Jews who visit the Temple Mount, September 27, 2015 -- Gatestone Institute
 
Looking out for any Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, when people appear wearing items that identify them as Jews they are stoned. If the Islamists could destroy the Jewish heritage of the site that Muslims claim as the third most holy in Islam, they would; as it is they claim that Israeli archaeology takes place for the specific purpose of destroying the Arab/Muslim sites on the Mount, to replace them with a third Temple of Solomon.

brucesmideastsoundbites.blogspot.com  As the struggle over the Temple Mount escalates, the number of Muslim male and female recruits to the Mourabitoun, responsible for inflaming and fanning hatred

"We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah", rhapsodizes Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority president. When Palestinian men successfully attack Jews and themselves are killed, they are memorialized, sung of as heroes, mentors to other Palestinians who seek to achieve their own glorification through violent action.

"I will personally expel every Jew who comes to the Temple Mount in a provocative manner", (i.e., to pray) promises Jamal Zahalka, an Israeli Arab Knesset member, in reflection of the notorious hate-mongering Haj Amin Al-Husseini, a collaborator with Hitler's Third Reich program of extermination of Europe's Jews, who extended that program to the Middle East.

When Israel was under conquest in 637 by early Islam and Jerusalem was taken from Byzantine Christianity, the second of the Muslim Caliphs following Mohammad's death formally recognized the rights of all three of the 'Abrahamic' religions, though Islam was recognized as the final version of the religion that Israel had initiated, Christ had amended and extended, and Mohammad had pre-empted in its 'final' and 'complete' god-sanctioned version.

In those ancient times, though no longer in control of Jerusalem, Jews were permitted to pray on the Temple Mount, to build a synagogue there. After the Crusades when Jerusalem fell under the control once again of Christians local traditions were recognized and Jews prayed on the Temple Mount. When Saladin reconquered Jerusalem Jewish rights of prayer were restored. It has taken the modern political Islamist ideology to transform relations between Jews and Muslims to pure hatred.

What redeeming feature is there in Islam that it roils the world at large with its claims to superiority over all other religions, and in persuading its faithful of their obligation to jihad, to transform the entire world population to surrender to Islam, slaughters its own in an unending spasm of sectarian bloodshed?