With each passing day, more and more right-wing extremist settlers and Israelis insist on entering the Aqsa Mosque Compound. They walk the grounds, try to conduct Jewish prayers and always do so under the protection of the Israeli army and police. Muslims meanwhile either bite the bullet and hope the unnatural visits end quickly or, more often than not, they protest....I wasn't aware that a religion that is, according to its own calendar, 1,434 years old, has "thousands of years of history and religious significance." I also wasn't aware that the many Jewish sources about the religious importance of the Temple site that pre-date Islam are actually political. I guess because the rabbis really knew that some guy named Mohammed would say that he flew a winged horse to "the farthest mosque" which would be interpreted a century later as being the third holiest site in (Sunni) Islam.
The fact of the matter is that Israel’s official narrative – that this is the exact place where the second temple was built and where the third one will eventually be reconstructed, has become a given for so many. The premise is that Jews have every right to enter and pray in Al Aqsa because the temples came first and this is ostensibly the holiest site in Judaism. The thousands of years of history and religious significance for Muslims around the world are made completely irrelevant not to mention that the Israeli narrative can always trump anyone else’s, especially the Palestinians. The seemingly religious aspect of the argument is actually entirely political at its core.
Miftah dismisses thousands of years of Jewish practice, Jewish prayers, Jewish legal texts and the Torah itself - all of which predate Mohammed's birth. And it claims that the Jewish ties to the site are - get this - political!
Miftah, a supposedly progressive and liberal NGO, is saying explicitly that Jews do not have the right to pray at their unquestioned holiest spot. But Muslims, who have stolen numerous Christian and Jewish holy places, should have complete and exclusive rights to places they usurped. Muslim rights to stolen holy sites, according to Miftah, are paramount; Jewish and Christian rights to these sites are non-existent.
It would be an understatement to call this article hypocritical.
Once again, Miftah's interest in the truth is nonexistent. Now we see that they publish screeds that are highly offensive to Judaism as well.
Let's make this clear:
- Questioning the Jewish right to even visit, let alone pray at, the holiest site in Judaism is unspeakably offensive.
- Questioning well-established facts of Jewish history in order to push a much later claim on that spot is nothing less than an insult to Judaism and to generations of Jews who have cried over the destruction of the Temples.
- To imply that Muslims playing soccer is a more appropriate use of the Temple Mount than Jews respectfully visiting is sickening.
- To demand Muslim exclusivity over that site is bigotry, pure and simple.
A Western-funded NGO must be judged by the standards of the West and the standards of truth and accuracy and fairness it claims to adhere to itself, not the lowest common denominator in the Arab world.
Yet Miftah still get funded by clueless European NGOs.