Let me put it in record.
The status quo was not changed by Israel on the Temple
Mount, despite Palestinian protests.
Since Rosh HaShana (the Jewish
New Year), when the provocations really began, not one Jew set foot inside any
of the mosques on the Temple Mount. Not one Jew or tourist spoke loudly or
started any violent act on the Temple Mount. Not one Jew did any of the
destructive acts on the Temple Mount. Those that were there walked quietly and
respectfully around the large open space that is the huge plateau upon which
the Temple was built.
While they were doing so, they
were accosted by the paid recruits of the northern branch of the Islamic
Movement that has its center in the Israeli Arab town of Um el Fahm and is
headed by a notorious Islamic provocateur named Sheikh Raed Salah in
collaboration with the religious Wakf, the Palestinian Authority and with the
encouragement of Hamas in Gaza. They were shouted at and taunted and had copies
of the Koran pushed in their face.
With the encouragement of the PA
and Hamas, Muslim youths brought rocks, cinder blocks and material to make firebombs
into the Al-Akar mosque.
The question needs to be asked how these weapons of
popular violence were brought onto the Mount and into the mosque. They
certainly did not bring them through the official entrances which are secured
by Israeli guards who are there to maintain law and order.
The only way they
could have got there was with the assistance of the religious Wakf, who controls
the Islamic site, in collaboration with the Islamic Movement and the PA, and
that could only have been by access through the underground excavations that
the Palestinians had burrowed illegally under the Temple Mount several years
ago and to which the Israeli government turned a blind eye.
The Islamic Movement shares the
same radical ideology as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS, but Mahmoud
Abbas was the chief social media inciter.
He made speeches which were
distributed over the internet in which he said “the Jews are coming to
destroy our holy places and defile them with their dirty feet.”
This
inciter in chief followed that up by saying, “Every drop of blood spilled in
Jerusalem is pure blood. Every shahid (martyr) will reach paradise and every
injured person will be rewarded by Allah.”
This was the anti-Semitic
incitement coming from the mouth of Israel’s “moderate” peace partner,
the so-called President of the Palestinian Authority.
Under international pressure
Abbas, after inciting the bloody violence, began calling for restraint.
What is
interesting is that while he was calling for the Arab members of Israel’s
Knesset to lower the tone of their rhetoric, and they had been pretty extreme
in their words and actions, his call was ignored by them when they announced
they intended to go up to the Temple Mount a few days later. Not only did they
defy the Israeli Prime Minister, they also defied the Palestinian leader. While
they sit in Israel’s parliament they are encouraging violence with their words
and deeds. This surely is an act of sedition. One brave Arab mayor, Ali Salim
of Nazareth, demanded that these Arab MKs not come to his town to spread their
incitement. He accused them of “ruining co-existence.”
Hamas in Gaza began calling the
violence the “Al Quds Intifada,” literally the “Jerusalem Intifada.” They
supported the violence by organizing hundreds of Gazans to march on Israel’s border
to breach it and to attack the nearby kibbutzim and villages to kill Jews. The
threat for Israel’s security forces was that Hamas would infiltrate groups of terrorists
into these huge demonstrations to breach the border and carry out the wholesale
slaughter of Israelis.
After three days of effort
resulted in failure, due to the determination of the IDF that resulted in
casualties the media was quick to broadcast intimate details of Palestinian
deaths, something they had been loath to do when Israeli Jews were killed, to
make their story more emotionally edible to their viewers.
The crescendo of hate and
religious emotion, generated by multiple Palestinian sources, spilled over with
deadly violence onto the street and was supported by a media buying into
Palestinian lies by condemning “Israeli provocations.”
Indeed, much of the media
replayed their editorial bent that portrayed Israel as the perennial bad guys
and Palestinians as the innocent bystanders and victims. There was little space
that gave Israelis and Jews the decency and truth they deserve.
Fox News, normally one of the more
balanced news outlets when it comes to Israel, got it completely wrong with a
headline dealing with the Gaza violence, "Israel
security forces shoot and kill 2 Palestinian teenagers at Gaza protest."
To the uninformed, this headline read as if there were
only 2 teenagers protesting and Israeli soldiers brutally killed them for
simply protesting. This bad reporting reflects the poor image that faulty
journalism casts over Israel.
When a 19 year old Palestinian,
incited by repeated lies of Israeli “crimes” against Islamic and
Palestinian holy places, took a knife and went to the Old City of Jerusalem to
murder Jews, he found the Benita-Bennett family walking back from prayers at
the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. His attack resulted in the murder of
Aharon and Rabbi Nehamia Lavi. He also seriously wounded Aharon’s wife, Adele,
and injured their two-year old son. He was killed by security forces before he
could continue his deadly rampage.
But this is how the BBC News
headline put it, “Palestinian shot dead as Jerusalem attack kills two.”
There was total editorial divorce
from the facts and truth of the fatal incident.
The fact that this Palestinian
killed Jews was absent. Jews became an anonymous faceless number killed,
according to the BBC. Some wrongly interpreted their headline as that the
unnamed “two” had enigmatically been killed by the city of Jerusalem.
The truth is that Mahmoud Abbas
is a bankrupt “peace” partner. He has nothing to offer.
Against the background of this
awful truth, it is demanded of Israel that we surrender the Old City and external sections to the will
and control of the Palestinians for this is what they call “east Jerusalem.”
What they are demanding is that Jews must give up everything that justifies our rights for being there,
lending credibility to the Palestinian cause. What is incredible is that there
are Jewish voices that support this notion. A culture of defeatism is being
spread that allows the violent creep of Islam, dressed up in the Palestinian
cause, to take over what is ours.
The message may be promulgated in
political terms but what we are experiencing is nothing less than the
significant march of Islam in the Middle East, and the Jews of Israel are its
last bastion.
Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate on Public Diplomacy at
the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies.
He is also the author of “Fighting Hamas, BDS and
Anti-Semitism.” www.barrysbooks.info
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