Jerusalem, June 25 - Palestinian religious scholars and military experts alike remain baffled at Israel's continued failure to mount an actual effort to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, despite years of warnings by Palestinian and Arab leaders that such attempts are imminent.
This week marked the 74,554th warning by prominent Muslims that the Jewish State seeks to tear down the historic shrine, along with the 74,554th case in which Israel's manifest military might, disregard for human life, and evil nature, all obvious to those leaders, have somehow proved inadequate to the task of demolishing a building, which the IDF otherwise does with some frequency and in defiance of international opinion.
The experts concede they are at a loss to explain how a country so morally corrupt and convinced of its own superiority would neglect to subject Muslim shrines to the same treatment that Muslims meted out to Jewish synagogues upon conquering the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City in 1948. Mustafa Nenema, a cleric at the mosque, admits he cannot account for the inconsistency in the behavior of the Zionists, to whom Muslim blood is cheap but who apparently can be repeatedly dissuaded from actually destroying the mosque by the presence of Muslims.
"Israel killed dozens of Palestinian Muslims at Al-Aqsa in 1990," said Nenema, referring to an event during the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, when Israeli soldiers and police used lethal force to suppress a violent demonstration at the Temple Mount. "And the immoral Zionist forces continue to kill Palestinians indiscriminately, so I'm not exactly sure what they're waiting for when it comes to Al-Aqsa." He suggested that perhaps Israel was trying to lull the Muslim world into complacency, a strategy that evidently began in 1967 when Israel declined to harm any of the Islamic structures or institutions in the Old City when it would have been least problematic to destroy them, and even granted the Islamic Waqf control over the site of the Temple Mount.
"It's almost as if they don't really want to destroy Al-Aqsa," says Nenema. "And that notion I simply cannot accept."