*Originally posted in December of 2010
Usually I keep my opinions on this particular subject to myself, and having studied the Big Three World Religions for over 10 years now, I'm hoping that what I say here today won't be received in the wrong way.
I've been reading up the last while about the ongoing debate over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. For those just tuning in, there's this gold plated mosque/masjid (Islamic 'church' - if you will) on what is called "The Temple Mount" in Jerusalem.
In Islam, this is considered one of the "holy sites". Little known fact being that at one point in time in recorded Islamic history, the entire Muslim world prayed facing this place. Now your Muslim friends pray facing Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
One of the articles I just finished reading, here, shows political and religious Muslim leaders going to some pretty astounding lengths to emphasize the non-existence of the very "Temple Mount" I just referred to. It may seem lengthly, but I would ask that you at least read the following, least of all for a crash course in Peace In The Middle East 101:
"Below are examples of statements by Palestinian political and religious leaders and academics as well as other Arab and Muslim leaders denying the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, especially during negotiations over Jerusalem and its holy sites.
1) Palestinian Political Leaders
Yasir Arafat
Ambassador Dennis Ross, who shaped U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process as Special Middle East Coordinator and who presided over President Clinton's failed Israeli-Palestinian peace summit at Camp David in 2000, reported that Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat raised only one idea at the Camp David talks – namely, to deny the core of the Jewish faith by claiming that the Temple had never existed in Jerusalem, but in Nablus.
Arafat feared acknowledging the existence of a Jewish connection. He told Clinton "I am a religious man, and I will not allow it to be written of me [in history] that I have… confirmed the existence of the so-called temple underneath the mountain." {Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, August 12, 2000, Translation: MEMRI )
Later, in an Oct. 5, 2002 interview with London’s Al Hayat, he went even further in his denial of Jewish history, changing the story once more. He alleged not only that the Jewish Temple never existed in Jerusalem, but that it had never existed in any of Palestine:
For 34 years they [Jews] have dug tunnels, the most dangerous of which is the great tunnel. They found not a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there, because historically the Temple was not in Palestine [at all]. They found only remnants of a shrine of the Roman Herod. (Translation: MEMRI)
Mahmoud Abbas
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, bolstered by the West as a moderate, similarly denies that a Jewish Temple existed on the Temple Mount. He was quoted as saying:
Anyone who wants to forget the past [the Israelis] cannot come and claim that the [Jewish] temple is situated beneath the Haram. They demand that we forget what happened 50 years ago to the refugees – and I speak as a living, breathing refugee – while at the same time they claim that 2000 years ago they had a temple. I challenge the assertion that this is so [that there has ever been a Jewish Temple}. But even if it is so, we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace. (Kul Al-Arab (Israel), August 25, 2000; Translation: MEMRI)
Nabil Sha’ath
Other Palestinian political leaders have followed suit. For example, Nabil Sha’ath of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas who previously was chief negotiator in Israeli-Palestinian talks labels the Jewish temple as "fictitious." He said:
[The Israelis] are insisting on sovereignty over the Al-Aqsa mosque on the pretext that an Israeli Temple is buried beneath it and that, through their continued sovereignty, they can one day unearth it…Their claim was not substantiated by the excavations they carried out around and under the mosque. [Voice of Palestine Radio Station, July 26, 2000]
Israel demands control of the Temple Mount based on its claim that its fictitious temple stood there. (Al-Ayyam, July 27, 2000).
Walid Awad
Walid Awad, foreign press spokesman for the Fatah Central Media Commission and formerly director of foreign publications for the PLO's Ministry of Information, stated an interview with IMRA on Dec. 25, 1996:
There is no tangible evidence of Jewish existence from the so-called 'Temple Mount Era'. . . . The location of the Temple Mount is in question. . . . It might be in Jericho or somewhere else.
In an online article "Jerusalem, A City Crying Out For Justice" put out by Awad as the director of foreign publications for the PA Ministry of Information (the PA Web site is no longer available), Awad accuses Israel of falsifying history and archeology after 1967 in order to create a Jewish connection to Jerusalem:
Immediately after Israeli soldiers occupied Arab East Jerusalem back in 1967, the Hebrew University, the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Department of Antiquities collectively and individually began a massive excavation campaign in Arab East Jerusalem in a bid to find allocate traces of Jewish existence from the so called 'Temple Mount Era.'
The fact of the matter is that almost thirty years of excavations did not reveal anything Jewish, no tangible evidence of theirs was unearthed. Much to their chagrin, what surfaced from their underground excavations turned out to be more Muslim palaces, courts and mosques. Other excavations revealed archeological ruins belonging to the Romans, Greeks and Canaanites...
...To give credibility to these claims, and to translate the ingenious falsified historical accounts of the city in order for them to obtain worldwide authenticity, they[Israeli archeologists and authorities] decided to manipulate connect the history of Jerusalem as they want it to be seen by the world, and to present it in a way acceptable to contemporary thinking of everyday people...
...Jerusalem is not a Jewish city, despite the biblical myth implanted in some minds. Nothing tangible has been found to give credibility to these claims.
2) Palestinian Religious Leaders
Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, previous Mufti of Jerusalem
Ikrima Sabri, until recently the Palestinian Authority-appointed mufti of Jerusalem and the highest ranking Islamic clerical authority in the PA, insists Jews have no connection to any part of the Temple Mount, including the Western Wall. In 1997, he proclaimed:
The Al-Buraq Wall [Western Wall] and its plaza are a Muslim religious property, and the Israeli government’s decisions do not affect it…The Al-Buraq Wall is part of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The Jews have no relation to it. (Al Ayam, Nov. 22, 1997)
In 2000, he reiterated this in an Israeli-Arab weekly::
No stone of the Al-Buraq [the Western] Wall has any relation to Judaism. [Kul Al-Arab, August 18, 2000]
And a few months later, he gave an interview to a German daily in which he again asserted:
There is not [even] the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish Temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history... The Jews cannot legitimately claim [the Western] wall, neither religiously nor historically. The Committee of the League of Nations recommended in 1930, to allow the Jews to pray there, in order to keep them quiet. But by no means did it acknowledge that the wall belongs to them. [Die Welt, January 17, 2001]
In 2002, Sabri wrote a booklet, entitled Palestine – the Human Factor and the Land which was published in Egypt in August 2002. In it, he used as evidence the anti-Semitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"to support his allegation that the Jews have for centuries been secretly plotting to take over Palestine. He denied any Jewish historic connection and right to the land, labelling the Jewish Temple built by Solomon as "imaginary."
Tayseer Tamimi, Chief Religious Justice of the PA
The Palestinian Authority's chief religious official, Tayseer Tamimi frequently speaks at public events and on Palestinian TV. In a televised interview on June 9, 2009, he demonized Jews, denying Jewish heritage and ties to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
I know of Muslim and Christian holy sites in [Jerusalem]. I don't know of any Jewish holy sites in it... Israel has been excavating since 1967 in search of remains of their Temple or their fictitious Jewish history.
Reversing history and turning truth on its head, he accused Jews of falsely converting the "Al Buraq" wall into a Jewish site.
When the Prophet [Muhammad] entered Jerusalem, after landing with his 'riding animal' in the Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, he tied it to the western wall, which is known today [by Muslims] as the al-Buraq Wall, and which the Jews usurped by falsification and deception [saying it is the Western Wall of the Temple].
He made absurd allegations about Jewish scientific attempts to destroy Arab holy sites:
The [Israeli] excavations' purpose is to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In fact, its foundations have been removed. Chemical acids were injected into the rocks to dissolve them. The soil and the pillars [were moved] so the mosque is hanging in midair. There is an Israeli plan to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to build the Temple.
3) Palestinian Academics
Palestinian academics, using their credentials to lend weight to their claims–often on Palestinian educational TV– have frequently denied the Jewish historical connection to the land, replacing it with a fictitious Arab connection. According to them, the Bible has no historical veracity. Palestinians, they claim, are the direct descendents of Canaanites, while Jews, they say, are descendents of Khazars who have no claim to the land.
Dr. Issam Sissalem, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the Islamic University of Gaza, frequently appears on PA television, denying any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.
About Solomon’s Temple, he asserts:
This is the biggest lie in history by those liars. (PA TV, Oct. 8, 2001)
There is no historical text that proves the existence [of Solomon’s Temple] or that it has a real history other than the Bible, and the Bible as we have previously mentioned… was written based on ancient legends. (PA TV, Aug. 2, 2004)
And about the Western Wall, he claims:
That's the place where Muhammad went to Heaven and is part of Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Zionist enemy falsely claims that this wall is part of the so-called temple. This is a deceitful lie. {PA TV, Oct. 8, 2001)
In fact, Sissalem attempts to erase all Jewish connection to the Land of Israel:
As I've already said, the ancient Hebrews were destroyed. Utterly decimated. Actually, they were foreigners in this land. They were primitive Bedouin from the Arabian Desert. This land is ours. Jerusalem, and every one of her stones, are ours. {PA TV, Oct. 8, 2001)
I want to point out that we should not focus much on what is called the [Biblical] Hebrew tribes, who are in fact Bedouin – Arab tribes. There is no connection between them and these Khazar Jews [of Israel today]. (Aug. 2, 2004)
The Jews lived in isolated areas, in ghettos in Poland and in Russia. They were the remains of the Khazars with no connection to our land or its history ... (PA TV, Nov. 21, 2004)
Historian and former Arafat advisor Jarar al Qidwa makes similar assertions:
Solomon’s Temple, I believe, was built by the Canaanites who were the neighbors of the Israelis, the Israelites... I want to state several words clearly: the Bible became an archival document, not representing what the Israelis and the first Jews were, but what they thought they were, what they imagined. The Temple is the fruit of their imagination. In any case, when our nation or our Canaanite forefathers came to Palestine, they built the Temple… a temple in Jerusalem...
...The issue of the temple is a Zionist innovation. No one said that the temple that was built in Jerusalem, neither the Canaanite nor Roman, no one said that it was in the place of the [Islamic] Al Haram." (PA TV, Aug. 2, 2004)
4) Other Arab and Muslim Claims
The attempt to erase the Jewish connection to Israel is not limited to the Palestinians. The extent to which this denial has caught on in the Arab and Muslim world was revealed in Yitzhak Reiter’s study (in Hebrew) which was based on thousands of Islamic legal rulings, proclamations and writings that he found at the Cairo book fair, Arabic websites and Islamic bookshops. (Ha’aretz columnist Nadav Shragai summarized some of Reiter’s findings in a November 27, 2005 column entitled "In the beginning was Al-Aqsa.")
Below are just a few of many examples since 1967:
On December 30, 1973, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia proclaimed on Radio Riyadh
The Jews have no connection whatsoever with Jerusalem and have no sacraments there. They cliam that the Temple of Solomon is there...The Temple of Solomon does not exist in Jerusalem...Therefore the Jews have no connection or right to have any presence in Jerusalem, or any authority there.
Saudi historian Muhammed Hassan Sharab declares that the Quranic Al Aqsa mosque encompasses the entire Temple Mount compound including the Western Wall and that the Temple of Solomon was never located there.
Egyptian archaeologist Abed al-Rahim Rihan Barakat, Director of Antiquities in the Dahab area of Sinai. Barakat asserts:
The legend about the Jewish temple is the greatest historic crime of forgery.
University of Cairo lecturer and one-time TV host Abed al-Tuwab Mustafa claims that there is no basis for the Jewish claim of a holy Temple on Mount Moriah.
Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi, Professor Emeritus at the American University of Beirut theorizes that ancient Israelites never inhabited Palestine and that biblical events occurred, not in Palestine but in southwestern Arabia, between Mecca and Yemen. He expounds upon this theory in a1985 book, The Bible Came from Arabia, basing his claims on the fact that many places in Arabia bear biblical names.
In the U.S., Nadia Abu El Haj, a tenured professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, wrote a book alleging that Israeli archeology is compromised by nationalist political motives to substantiate the nation’s "origin myth." Although she has no archeological expertise herself, she dismisses the vast archeological evidence supporting historical and biblical accounts of the long Jewish presence in Israel as having been manipulated in order to produce evidence for an Israelite connection to the land.
5) Claims that Al Aqsa Mosque was built by Adam
In recent years, differing new claims have arisen as to who built the Al Aqsa mosque. Almost all these claims predate Solomon’s construction of the First Jewish Temple in 954 BCE. But the allegation gaining the most currency among Muslims is that this mosque was built by Adam. Abdullah Marouf, a former Media and Public Relations Officer of the al-Aqsa mosque now runs a Web site devoted to the Al Aqsa mosque providing English readers with the rewritten "history" of the structure:
The first building of al-Aqsa mosque was done by Prophet Adam (PBUH), then it has been renovated and rebuilt many times, one of them was by Prophet Sulayman (Solomon) (PBUH), but his building of al-Aqsa was only a renovation of the mosque, not a first-time building. Therefore, we cannot say that Prophet Sulayman was the one who BUILT al-Aqsa mosque, but we can say that he (PBUH) RENOVATED or REBUILT the mosque.
Western journalists must find it difficult to understand an Arab revisionist history that rejects and denies basic truths accepted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And so they tend to dismiss or ignore it. But understanding Arab denial of Judaism's foundation and therefore Israel's right to exist is essential to understanding the entire Arab-Israeli peace process."
So it would seem that what we have here is a massive stalemate. One that intellects from all sides have opined over for what seems like all of history. Here's another article I just finished reading as well, in which the writer makes his case that The Dome of the Rock is good enough, and that a future Temple should never be built there, and that's that - thanks for coming out.
On the other side, some would argue, "Heck, you have all of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, UAE, etc etc, why can't you just let Israel have this one strip of land?"
But the problem goes much deeper than that. And even the most basic understanding of the Palestinian - Israeli/"Jewish" situation realizes that this is not just a simple matter of land lust. This isn't just any land, this is THE land, the focal point for a handful of World religions (including Islam itself, as noted earlier when qibla [prayer direction] was due East).
Adding to this cluster of love are the ongoing attacks, be they false-flag or not, and the subsequent revenge killings which lead to further attacks, which lead to revenge killings. Tell me you wouldn't be angry if someone from a neighbouring and hostile people killed your parents. Of course you would be angry. And this has been going on for thousands of years, and in cramped land at that.
At this point in your reading you may be expecting me to offer some solutions to this problem. While I may offer my half-penny towards the end, I do so while fully recognizing the minds that have made this their full-time job throughout history, the politician and clergy, special interest and the hopeful mind alike. I realize my place on the totem pole of significance.
You know, there actually already exists a group of people who are dedicated to rebuilding the Israeli Temple on the foundation where The Dome of The Rock currently stands. Click here and see for yourself.
You may be able to imagine, given the information I've already laid out here in this article, that if The Temple Institute were to be even close to successful, all Islam worldwide would go ballistic. Short of a miracle, we'd have a full scale jihad and imam's issuing fatwa's all over the place. It probaby wouldn't be good times, put it that way. But these are the times we live in, and so it stands that as of right now - all of Judaism prays daily for the Temple to be rebuilt, and all of Islam firmly and continuously whispers, "No." Followed by an, "Allah akbarh."
While those who wait for a Messiah continue on waiting for some answer from above, the political and religious leaders, backed by the geo-financing war profiteers and ultra-elite scheme away, pitting one group against another, fomenting crisis (but not too much crisis), and we in the West watch on, half hoping, half helpless.
Part of me wants to repeat something I read a long time ago when I was first faced with this glaring elephant in the room of the Middle East section of Earth dilemna we call 'The Temple Mount Situation', it went something like this...
"If Christians really wanted to see their Messiah and have the end of the World come - they'd start building the Temple. If Jew's really want to see their Maschiach come - build the Temple. If Muslims really want their religion to be proven the only right one when Isa the Islamic Messiah returns - build the Temple. If they're all just in fear of their fate, or if they don't actually believe what they teach - do nothing."
The other part of me knows the consequences of wishing like that, and as I said earlier, I'd sooner remain unopinioned on the matter.
Yet still, the other part in me that desperately wants something to change in the Middle East after all these years of endless conflict will allow for that previous quote about this linchpin of destiny to remain.