From Ian:
Dr. Mordechai Kedar: The real al Aqsa Mosque is not in Jerusalem
JPost Editorial: Speaking for history
Dr. Mordechai Kedar: The real al Aqsa Mosque is not in Jerusalem
A well known proverb says "liars need to have good memories." The reasoning is clear: a liar needs to remember his own lies and whom he told them to in order to avoid contradicting himself and revealing his mendacity. This rule applies to important issues as well. Jerusalem, for instance, whose holiness to Sunni Muslims is based on a late and political interpretation of a Koranic verse, while to Shiite Muslims it is only the third holiest city, ranked below Mecca and Medina (today the city of Najaf in southern Iraq).
Early Islamic sources state that the "al Aqsa Mosque" (literal meaning: 'the farther mosque'), mentioned only once in the Koran, was one of two mosques located near Ji'irrana, a village located between Mecca and Taaf in the Arabian Peninsula (now Saudi Arabia.) One of the mosques was called "al-Masjid al-Adna," meaning the "closer mosque" and the other " al-Masjid al-Aqsa", the "farther mosque." When the Koran refers to the al Aqsa mosque while telling the myth of the Prophet Muhammad's night time journey from the "holy mosque" of Mecca to al Aqsa, that is, the "farther mosque," it is referring to the mosque in Ji'irrana.
In 682 C.E., fifty years after Mohammed's death, Abd allah Ibn al-Zubayr, the tough man of Mecca, rebelled against the Umayyads who ruled Damascus and would not allow them to fulfill the Haj in Mecca. Since the Haj pilgrimage is one of the five basic Islamic commandments, they were forced to choose Jerusalem as their alternative for a pilgrimage site. In order to justify choosing Jerusalem, the Umayyads rewrote the story told in the Koran, moving the al Aqsa mosque to Jerusalem, and adding, for good measure, the myth of the night time journey of Mohammed to al Aqsa. This is the reason the Sunnis now consider Jerusalem their third holiest city.
Shia Islam, mercilessly persecuted by the Umayya Caliphate, did not accept the holy Jerusalem canard, which is the reason the second holiest city to Shiites is Najif in Iraq, the burial place of Shiite founder Ali bin Abi Talib. Many of the Shiite elders – Iranian and Hezbollah – only began to call Jerusalem holy after the Khomeni rebellion in 1979 so as to keep the Sunnis from accusing them of being soft on Zionism.
The first lie, in that case, is the spurious claim that the "farther mosque" is in Jerusalem.
JPost Editorial: Speaking for history
Is there a difference between an historian and a Jewish historian? The storm of criticism unleashed last week by the confessions of two academics who virtually renounced their previous identification with Israel suggests that the operative distinction has more to do with an irrational self-loathing than with scholarship.Israel Emerges As A Player On The World Stage
Professors Hasia Diner and Marjorie Feld published an anti-Zionist screed in Haaretz dissociating themselves from a previous identification with Zionism, which has become associated in their understanding with racism, genocide and apartheid, just to cite a few of Israel’s alleged crimes.
Diner begins her anti-Zionist rant with a simple confession: “The Israel I once loved was a naïve delusion.” What a distance she has traveled from the Habonim Zionist movement of her youth to today, as she writes, “I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, ‘We Stand With Israel.’” Diner writes that she could not endorse the Jerusalem Program, because it affirms belief in “the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem as its capital” for the Jewish people. This, she writes, is because it encourages aliya and “the classic negation of the Diaspora and as such the ending of Jewish life outside a homeland in Israel.”
Straying further into the realm of the absurd and nonfactual, she declares, “The death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people.” What deaths of which Jewish communities? Israel, she concludes, is “a place that I abhor visiting, and to which I will contribute no money, whose products I will not buy, nor will I expend my limited but still to me, meaningful, political clout to support it.”
Sovereign Israel cannot choose to absorb Jewish refugees and grant them citizenship, Diner states, because “The Law of Return can no longer look to me as anything other than racism.”
Feld is no better, writing how she learned from non-Jews in “liberal and left organizations in college” who opened her eyes. “I saw that Israel fit neatly into my broader understanding of Western colonialism.... The founding of Israel was the Nakba, the great catastrophe, for Palestinians, with ethnic cleansing, destruction, and no right of return.” She apparently sees no contradiction in the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 creating an Arab and Jewish state which was accepted by the Jewish community and violently rejected by the armies of half a dozen Arab countries.
The emergence of Israel as a small but significant player on the world stage is one of the remarkable developments at the end of the post-Cold War era. The slow economic growth of the United States and Europe has shown the weakness of the status quo powers. The American semi-withdrawal from the Middle East and the British withdrawal from the European Union have opened the door to new powers.
The chaos in the Middle East and the rise of revisionist authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Iran and democratic states like India raise the possibility of a new world order. This would be partly dominated by hardline conservative nationalism, charismatic leadership, slow economic growth, and hostility to the old globalist order.
With eight million people Israel can only play on the fringes of a new global order. But, it has a flourishing economy of $300 billion and nearly $40,000 GDP/capita. Its democratic, liberal politics and growing economy make it able to play both sides of the street.
Its military was rated by the Institute for the Study of War as “pilot to pilot and airframe to airframe” having “the best air force in the world“ and the best army in the Middle East. Israel’s extensive work on air defenses (Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow 2 and soon Arrow 3), carried out with the United States, makes it a serious military power. Its 80-100 atomic bombs put it in a rarified club of nine states in the world. Its intelligence capabilities (Shin Beth and Mossad) are formidable.























