Jews in the Holy Land. What Jews?

Original article here.

Welcome to the Holy Land: Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi in Hebron, Bilal Ibn Ribah mosque in Bethlehem and Al-Burak Wall...


Israel's  decision some time ago, to include the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb in a plan to preserve its heritage and religious sites, was met by a predictable reaction from  the Arab (and Islamic) world and once again showed the real essence of the "Arab-Israeli conflict" which is a Jihad by Arabs against the Jews.


Conflict resolution works only if the parties recognize each other's right to exist. Absent that, a conflict  is irresolvable. The key questions of borders, the status of Jerusalem, and refugees are difficult, but could be resolved if Arabs recognized the right of Jews to live in their land.

Arabs do not recognize it. Their policy, strategy, and ideology are directed to disconnect the Jews from the Land of Israel, first virtually, and then physically, to expunge the Jews from the history of the Holy Land. They claim, without batting an eye, that Jews have no relics, no holy sites, and no past in Eretz Yisrael. In other words, they do not belong to this land and have no right to exist on it at all.


This genocidal approach is a hallmark of Islam. Power and possession are key to it. This approach extends to all other faiths and cultures as well. The idea is to strip away others of their spiritual and national base to achieve total physical domination.


Orientalist Koenraad Elst in Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam writes: "In all the lands it conquered, Islam replaced indigenous places of worship with mosques. In Iran, there are no Zoroastrians or Manichean shrines. In Central Asia, there are no Buddhist temples left. In India (except where Islam penetrated late) there are practically no Hindu temples that have survived the Muslim period (over 10,000 destroyed). But there are thousands of mosques built on the foundations of Hindu temples ." Todays the same policy is being carried out towards Israel  and is abetted by the West's  ignorance, hypocrisy and spinelessness.


Jerusalem has never been a holy Muslim place. Statements about the city being "the third holy place of Islam" only began to appear in the 1930's. First they were made by Jerusalem's Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini,  a Nazi collaborator, who attempted to stir up religious fanaticism among the apathetic local population. Al-Husseini worked vigorously to raise Jerusalem's status as an Islamic holy center. He renovated the mosques that had fallen into complete disrepair on the Temple Mount while conducting an unceasing campaign against the imminent Jewish "threat" to Muslim holy sites.


Earlier on though, Arab historians referred to Jerusalem and especially the Temple Mount, as the Jewish holy site only. In the 13th century the Arab geographer Yakut wrote: " Mecca is holy to Moslems and Jerusalem to the Jews". On the Temple Mount "triumphant soldiers of Islam" acted in the same way as they had everywhere else: they destroyed the local holy sites and replaced them with their own. When Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem, there was only one holy site on the Temple Mount at that time: a Byzantine Church. Caliph Abd El Malik built here the Dome of the Rock that is still incorrectly called the "Omar Mosque". 20 years later his son, Abd El-Wahd, reconstructed the church and converted it into the Al-Aqsa mosque.


Historian M. Lehmann wrote: "Mohammed instituted a strict prohibition against facing Jerusalem in prayer, a practice that had been tolerated only briefly in order to lure Jews to convert to Islam. When that failed, Mohammed put an abrupt stop to it on February 12, 624. Jerusalem simply never held any sanctity for the Moslems themselves, only for the Jews."


Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran once! The myth of Jerusalem being "the third holiest place in Islam" began to spread quickly after 1967. Muhammad is believed by all Muslims to have ascended into heaven alive at the site of the Dome of the Rock. Earlier this legend was not considered to be basic in Muslim mythology. Rabbi Yosef Katz wrote that the present Arabian name of Jerusalem, "el-KuDS," is an abbreviation for another Arabic name used for Jerusalem until the last century, "bet el-maKDeS".  The name "BeT el-MaKDeS" is a translation of the Aramaic and Hebrew "BeiT ha-MiKDaSH," i.e.  "The Holy Temple."


Jerusalem became a holy city of Islam thanks to Haj Amin Al-Husseini. In 1947 the Saudis published a "Fatwa" (a religious ruling) calling for "rescuing the Temple Mount from the Jews." After 1967 Yassir Arafat used this slogan to transform the conflict with Israel into a religious war. Today Arabs  deny that there ever was a Temple here or any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. What's more, the existence of the Jews, as a religious and ethnic community is also denied. The PA Mufti, Ikrima Sabri said that there was no such thing as the Western Wall. He claimed that it was a "part of the walls of the Al Aqsa mosque" called "Al Burak Wall."


For decades the Jerusalem Waqf has been destroying unique Jewish antiquities on the Temple Mount under different pretexts. Thousands of tons of dirt full of artifacts have been carted away and dumped. 


As regards Me'arat HaMachpela and Rachel's Tomb, Gen. 23 tells us that Abraham purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs to bury his wife Sarah. Gen. 35, 19 describes that Rachel "died and was buried on the road to Efrat which is Bethlehem."


It had happened about two thousand years before Islam appeared. Now we learn that Me'arat HaMachpela and Rachel's Tomb have always belonged to Arabs. According to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas the Israeli decision is a "serious provocation that may lead to religious war." The USA, EU and UN have urged Israel to exercise restraint. We also learn that both sites have no connection to the Jews. One of them is named the Sanctuary of Abraham (Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi), and the second Bilal Ibn Ribah mosque. Incidentally, Bilal Ibn Ribah mosque was built by the Muslims only a thousand years ago.