Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 26, 2015

To Muslims, the Mufti was a jihadist

The Mufti with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood

Amid the new spotlight on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husayni, few are looking to see how his fellow Muslims besides Palestinians view him.

The answer? The Mufti was a pioneer of modern jihad.

A biography written about him by Hosni Adham Jarrar in 1987 was entitled "Haj Amin al-Husseini / Pioneer and Champion of the cause of Jihad."

A book review from 2004, when a new edition was published, says "The Mujahid was one of the few in Palestine and the Arab and Islamic countries who knew the Jews for what they are." It also emphasizes that the Mufti's speeches were always using the terminology of Jihad against the Jews and later the British.

The Muslim Brotherhood Wiki also has an entry for the Mufti as a seminal modern jihadist. It says that "carried the banner of holy jihad against the Jewish usurpers." It details his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, especially when he fled to Cairo in 1946.

Another online biography emphasizes the jihadist nature of the Mufti, saying that he was explicit in using Jihadist terminology when raising funds to fight the Jews, creating "an extensive campaign across Egypt to collect donations for the Mujahideen of Palestine under the name "Push Pounds to Palestine."

The Mufti was the one person to integrate Nazism with modern Jihadism, the effects of which we are all witnessing today.

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From The Guardian:

Binyamin Netanyahu has said he hopes an agreement to maintain the status quo on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem will reduce tensions that have triggered serious violence in recent weeks, but Palestinian leaders quickly dismissed a plan to install security cameras in the al-Aqsa mosque.

The Israeli prime minister told cabinet colleagues on Sunday that a statement agreed with the US and Jordan affirmed that there would be no changes to longstanding rules about access for Jews to the ever sensitive religious compound – al-Haram al-Sharif for Muslims and Har HaBayit for Jews – in occupied East Jerusalem.
...
Riyad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, told the Voice of Palestine that the plan was a trap, because Israel would use video footage to arrest Muslim worshippers it claims are inciting against it.

Reuters' reporting of Maliki's words was similar.

But the PA's Foreign Minister said much more than that.

A statement from his office railed against "allegations of the existence of the right of Jews in Al-Aqsa Mosque" and said that by Netanyahu allowing Jews to visit, without praying, it "confirms his determination to enforce a temporal partition of Al-Aqsa Mosque...in its commitment to have constant visits by non-Muslims to the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which means clearly the continuation of the extremist Jewish groups daily visits to the mosque."

Nabil Shaath, member of the Central Committee of the Fatah, also said that any solution must not allow "Jewish extremists and settlers" from visiting the site, meaning it must be free of Jews altogether.

According to the PA government, the "status quo" for the Temple Mount means the status of the area under Jordanian occupation. It is pure racism not to allow Jews to visit simply because they are Jews.

But the media will not mention that. They will mention that Palestinian Arab leaders are against cameras, but they will never say that they are against Jews, even when they say that explicitly in Arabic.

PA security forces explicitly allow firebombing, stoning and stabbing Jews

From the NYT:

Here in El-Bireh and at other frequent flash points, Palestinian forces no longer try to prevent protesters from heading toward Israeli checkpoints and watchtowers. Instead, plainclothes officers just watch for instigators and weapons beyond stones and firebombs.

Uniformed troops take positions on nearby hills, where they can observe developments and spot potential gunmen while remaining unseen by the crowds.

“We are not standing at the D.C.O. checkpoint to spy on our people and write their names down,” said one intelligence officer, referring to the checkpoint on the outskirts of El-Bireh, where protests have raged throughout the month. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing government protocol.

He said the forces were under orders to ensure that protesters did not open fire at soldiers, because it would prompt a harsher response.

Mahmoud Abbas, purported peacemaker, believes that his people can stab and stone and firebomb Israelis, but they mustn't start shooting soldiers.

When they allow people to approach checkpoints, that means that they know that stabbings will occur. In fact, one reason that the stabbings at checkpoints has increased seems to be this decision. Which means that the PA made a decision to allow their own people to be killed, to stoke more rage.

And the reason isn't because of any morality or ethics,but simply because he knows that Israel would respond more forcefully to shootings and that would threaten him personally.

Here's the latest "peaceful" image from Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Facebook page, with the hashtag "Jerusalem Wrath."

Abbas isn't trying to calm things down. He's trying to be seen as a leader of an intifada without major consequences.

Fatah group celebrates every stabbing

While the world continues to believe Mahmoud Abbas is trying to stop the violence, his Fatah group continues to incite and celebrate.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade - Nidal Brigades are ecstatic every time they hear about a stabbing.

The stabbing attack on a Jew who was moderately wounded in Ariel on Sunday is called a "heroic operation."

A similar attack in Gush Etzion on Sunday is being followed closely.

They especially like to find photos of Jewish blood.

Then again, the site also refers to Kalashnikov as an example of "modern Palestinian heritage."

Perhaps they can insist that UNESCO recognizes their heritage of Kalashnikovs.

Antisemitic cartoon - and Al Aqsa incitement - from UNRWA teacher

From the Facebook page of UNRWA teacher Lubna Habrumman:

The Arab world is worshipping Western money while the stereotypical Jew steals the Dome of the Rock.

John V. Whitbeck is a lawyer who has advised the PLO. He is openly anti-Zionist, and is on the record as believing that 9/11 was an "inside job." He also has said that Jews in Israel should be encouraged to move to other countries so Arabs can take over.

Naturally, Arab media outlets love an American-born supposed international law expert. (So does France24, where he is a frequent guest.)

He writes for Ma'an:

This comfortable situation for Jewish Israelis, with the occupation being essentially free of costs and even inconvenience, must change. It could change either through nonviolent economic and political pressure sustained by the Western world or through violent insecurity sustained by the occupied Palestinian people.

European states could apply meaningful and intensifying economic sanctions to Israel until it complies with international law and relevant UN resolutions and withdraws fully from occupied Palestine. Simultaneously, European states could apply strict visa regulations to all Israelis, requiring those seeking to visit Europe to provide clear documentary evidence that they neither live nor work in occupied Palestine.

In light of the years that the European Union has spent agonizing over even properly labeling the produce of illegal settlements sold in Europe, there can be scant optimism that European politicians will soon see it as in their personal interests to play such a principled and constructive nonviolent role.

Unfortunately, that leaves only violent insecurity. While one cannot advocate violence against civilians, one can nevertheless hope that such violence as does occur is limited in nature and produces constructive results. The current low-tech, knives-and-screwdrivers violence, producing a great deal of fear and anxiety but relatively few Jewish Israeli fatalities, may be the most effective and lowest-cost form of violence capable of producing the essential change in Jewish Israeli perceptions of their own interests.

If seemingly random and unpredictable attacks on Jewish Israelis were to continue for a significant period of time, they just might cause a critical mass of Jewish Israelis to conclude that perpetual occupation and oppression are not, in fact, the best of all possible worlds for them and that the quality of their lives would be enhanced by ending the occupation and permitting the Palestinian people to enjoy the same freedom and human dignity – whether in two states or in one – that Jewish Israelis demand for themselves.

Yes, this international lawyer has just written his official justification for terrorism. But only the type of terrorism that he approves, that gets the proper results.

You have to break a few eggs, or kill a few Jews, to make a really delicious omelet.

Whitbeck doesn't think it is worth mentioning that many of the attacks are happening within the Green Line. He doesn't seem to think that perhaps the wave of attacks is forcing Israelis to re-evaluate whether Palestinian Arabs could ever be a peace partner, and is pushing them to the right.

Which means, in Whitbeck's bizarre worldview, if Israelis are too stubborn to give in to terror as he demands, then the terror will have to be ratcheted up, and up again, until they realize that they must do the right thing that the murderers want them to do. Because "occupation" is a far worse evil than murdering lots and lots of Jews.

Whitbeck is a truly disgusting person.

10/25 Links: Greasing the wheels of hate; 'Pro-Israel' J Street says Jews not indigenous to Israel'

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Unwanted guest

The decision by South Africa’s ruling ANC Party to host a Hamas delegation last week should have aroused shock and dismay among countries truly committed to achieving a more peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians than is currently the case. Instead, the silence was deafening.
South African President Jacob Zuma chose to meet with Khaled Mashaal, the leader of the Gaza-based terrorist organization that openly declares its intention to establish an Islamic state upon the ruins of the State of Israel.
As Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in a letter to Zuma, “This meeting serves to legitimize Hamas, an unabashed terrorist organization, whose ultimate goal is the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state through the violent destruction of the State of Israel.” Indeed, during the current wave of Palestinian violence in Israel, Hamas has called for an escalation of attacks against Israelis, including reportedly suicide bombings, and has publicly cheered terrorist attacks that have killed and wounded Israeli civilians.
“The reception of Hamas by the leader of South Africa and its ruling party gives official legitimacy to this terrorist, pro-violence, anti-peace, anti-Semitic organization,” the ADL said.
“This meeting will likely be seen as an act of hostility towards Israel, and create significant discomfort and apprehension among South Africa’s Jewish community.”

'Pro-Israel' J Street says Jews not indigenous to Israel'

It would seem to be a fairly basic principle for a pro-Israel organization to accept: that the Jewish people is an indigenous nation to the Land of Israel.
Not so for J Street and several other self-defined "liberal Zionist" organizations.
At the World Zionist Congress last week, a proposal entitled “Recognition of the Jewish People as Indigenous to the Land of Israel” was proposed by LAVI, a relatively small but active group of newcomers to the World Zionist Organization's legislative body.
While it seemed to be stating the obvious, the authors of the bill emphasized that expressing the principle of Jewish indigenous status in such clear terms was necessary to "answer... the core anti-Israel accusation that Jews are foreign colonialists in the country and instead affirms that the Jewish people have indigenous rights to live in their ancestral home."
But instead of receiving the unanimous support one might expect, the proposal faced dogged and determined opposition from J Street and other liberal factions - much to the incredulity of its supporters.
Making the opposition all the more bizarre was the fact that the bill clearly expressed that it does not necessarily "does not negate the indigenous status of any other people."

Bibi’s critics must not commit ‘Mufti denial’

Those who claim that Bibi singled out the Mufti from among hundreds of Nazi fellow-travellers and antisemites to ‘delegitimise’ the Palestinian cause ‘for political gain’ are engaging in ‘Mufti denial’.
How many antisemites went as far as the Mufti and recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to his three SS Bosnian Muslim divisions? They committed crimes so unspeakable that Yugoslavia demanded that the Mufti be indicted at the Nuremberg trials. According to Dr. Yosef Sharvit, the Mufti was even considered a greater Nazi criminal than Adolf Eichmann.
The failure of the Allies to bring the Mufti to trial meant that the Arab world was never de-nazified. Instead, 2,000 Nazi war criminals were given shelter in the Arab world, there to take antisemitism to stratospheric heights.
Antisemitism is not a by-product of the Arab-Israeli conflict: it has deep ideological roots. The Mufti’s alliance with the Nazis and with the German-funded Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, was not a mere matter of anti-colonial expediency. Their legacy of religious bigotry is still with us today, in the beheadings committed by Da’esh in Iraq and in the stabbings on Israel’s streets.
Some good may come out of the current controversy: more people may be moved to focus on the Mufti’s hugely significant role, a role that academia and the media have hitherto been inclined to ignore or downplay.

I feel reasonably certain that there is not a single individual on the planet today under more intense political pressure than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If the guy blinks in the rain he gets smacked around from people throughout the world for not doing it correctly. I have never seen such persistent malice directed toward a western-style political figure. I am not even sure that Richard Nixon received this kind of unending abuse... even at the hands of Hunter S. Thompson. And, the thing of it is, what terrible crimes can you really lay at the guy's feet?

The man started no wars. Even last summer's strangely named Operation Protective Edge was a response to thousands of rocket attacks into southern Israel that went on for years without international complaint. His older brother, Yoni, was the lead in the elite Israeli army commando unit Sayeret Matkal that stormed Entebbi, Uganda, saving all those kidnapped people, and the only Israeli to have died in that operation. This makes Benjamin Netanyahu the younger brother not only of an Israeli national hero, but of a Jewish national hero, as well.

Now there is hysteria because he had the audacity to suggest that it was the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem that convinced Hitler to slaughter the Jews.

The fact of the matter is that that the Mufti was all in favor of slaughtering the Jews in the Middle East to the very last man, woman, and child, unless they were willing to submit to Muslim rule, perhaps even then.

University of Maryland historian, Jeffrey Herf, has some words:

In his now famous comments at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20th, Netanyahu claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of expulsion to one of extermination.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],’” continued the prime minister. “‘So what should I do with them?’ He [Hitler] asked,” according to Netanyahu. “He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.’”

In the Knesset in 2012, the Prime Minister asserted that Husseini “was one of the leading architects of the Final Solution,” and that “he, more than anybody else, convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final Solution, and not let the Jews leave [Europe]. Because, God forbid, they would come here. Rather that they would be annihilated, burned, there.”

Jeffrey Herf is an important historian of Nazi Germany and he denies that the Mufti convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews rather than deport them.

Herf is one of the prominent scholars, along with Matthias Küntzel and Paul Berman, among a few others, that is analyzing the connection between Nazi ideology and the rise of Islamic Jihadism in the twentieth-century via organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their little off-spring such as Hamas and the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL). What he suggests is that Netanyahu overreached in an effort to "push back against efforts to diminish Husseini’s role as a collaborator and ideological soulmate with Nazi Germany."

As far as I am concerned, good for Netanyahu. It was the Mufti who screamed for Jewish blood in the 1920s for "defiling" al-Aqsa, just as the filthy-footed dictator Abbas does today.

Herf assures us that "while (the Mufti) agreed with Hitler about fundamental ideological issues, he was in no position to have a major influence on decision-making about German policy toward the Jews in Europe."

Nonetheless, Mohammed Effendi Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti, was important to Hitler's plans in carrying out the Final Solution in the Land of Israel and throughout the Middle East. Hitler's intention was to hand the baton over to Husseini once the Axis powers defeated the Allies in the Middle East.

In his self-defense Netanyahu said this:

My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called ‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.

Netanyahu is correct.

This is not a war over land rights. This is not even a war wherein both sides desire to fight one another. The Jews do not want this fight and are willing to share the tiny Jewish homeland. The Jews in Israel are far more interested in creating computer software, medical technology, good food, unnecessary litigation, and Natalie Portmans, than they are in trying to stave off violently-crazed, Koranically-obsessed Arabs.

Herf notes:

The lies that Mahmoud Abbas and others have told in recent weeks about Israel’s supposed desire to somehow infringe on the rights of Muslims to pray at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies that are now at least 75 years old.

It goes on and on and on and on.

Mahmoud Abbas tells Israeli-Arabs - as Arafat did before him and as the Mufti did before him - that Jews want to conquer Al-Aqsa... which is, frankly, looking more and more like a perfectly dandy idea, if you ask me. In the 1920s, as they have done every decade, they draw the knives against old Jewish women and 13 year old Jewish boys on bicycles. One of the Mufti's major contributions toward the persecution and murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, aside from encouraging the British exclusion of Jews from "Palestine" with the White Paper of 1939, was his war time radio broadcasts in Arabic throughout the Middle East, calling on his fellow Arabs to launch themselves upon head-chopping sprees against their Jewish neighbors.

As Caroline Glick notes in an article for the Jerusalem Post entitled, Crazy like a fox:

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

Glick also speculates that Netanyahu's gaffe may have been anything but:

Due to his “gaffe,” every Western media outlet reported on Husseini’s actions. Some even mentioned that in his PhD dissertation, current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said the Holocaust was both a myth and a joint Zionist-Nazi project. For most Westerners, this is the first they’ve heard of the fact that the Palestinian’s George Washington was a Nazi war criminal.

Like I said, crazy as a fox.

Whatever Netanyahu's intentions, people must be made to understand that the roots of the Palestinian National Movement are fascistic, violently anti-Semitic, and deeply influenced not only by Koranically-based hatred toward Jews, but also by forms of early-mid twentieth-century anti-Jewish racism of the type that the Nazis excelled at and spread into the Arab world.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Arafat's uncle and the father of Palestinian-Arab nationalism, may not have convinced Hitler to undertake the Holocaust in Europe, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and hoped to import not Jews, but the Holocaust, itself, into the Middle East.

If the Palestinian-Arabs had gotten their way during World War II there would be very few Jews left in this world. There are, in fact, very few Jews left in the world as it is, mainly due to Muslim and European racist efforts to trim Jewish numbers over the course of many centuries.

There are somewhere around thirteen to fourteen million Jewish souls worldwide, today. If the Mufti had his way there would be none of us left and this is the "George Washington", as Glick puts it, of the Palestinian National Movement.

The man was a racist and a murderer and his followers were Nazis.

Whatever Netanyahu may have gotten wrong, he certainly has that right.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Fatah English message exact opposite of Arabic (poster)

Hypocrisy from Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party:

Source for English
Source for Arabic plus this
Arabic text: "Jerusalem's rage" #Jerusalem's rage
Fatah - Palestinian National Liberation Movement
The Commission of Mobilization and Organization

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

Some crude propaganda from the official Facebook page of Fatah (detail):

To illustrate "Israel," they choose Bibi, Yehuda Glick - who was nearly assassinated for demanding Jews have equal rights on the Temple Mount - and three generic Orthodox Jews.

As always, the minority of haredim are used to represent Israelis. Because, despite their protests that they have nothing against Jews, their entire hatred for Israel is based on the fact that they hate Jews. Nothing has changed in over 100 years,

The funny part is that their own photos of their heroes on the same Facebook page resemble the ISIS member pictured here a lot more than any Jews do.

Like this:

And this image supporting stabbing Jews:

And this:

The Sunday Times (UK) and IBT report on @UNRWA hate and incitement

The pressure is mounting on UNRWA and Chris Gunness to be more open about their big incitement and antisemitism problem.

From The Sunday Times (UK, paywalled):

A UN agency that runs schools and social services for Palestinians is facing calls to sack employees using social media to celebrate attacks on Israelis.

Facebook posts by UN staff have included photographs showing blood- drenched knives held by Palestinian men and women in keffiyeh scarves, throwing stones at Israel’s defence forces.

Almost two dozen UN employees have been exposed for publishing their support for a recent bout of stabbing attacks by Palestinians that targeted Israelis.

UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog, has called on the body, United Nations relief and works agency (Unrwa), to dismiss those who have posted the hate-filled messages.

Hillel Neuer, the director of UN Watch, said incitement to hatred, particularly by teachers, would only contribute to violence in the Middle East. He called on the UN to demonstrate that it would not turn a blind eye to racism among its staff.

“Governments that fund Unrwa would not tolerate this behaviour,” he said. “We have submitted screen shots of postings by 22 individuals, including by teachers, advocating the stabbing of Jews, and we don’t know what action is being taken against them.”

The UN conceded last week that some of those on its payroll had faced disciplinary action for violating the organisation’s rules on social media.

However, it also added that more than 90 “imposter Facebook pages” had been wrongly attributed to its staff by critics.

There are no figures for the number of staff involved in disciplinary action or the type of punishments meted out.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for Unwra, said one account identified by Neuer was attributed to a school in Syria that no longer existed and the former staff were no longer on the UN payroll.

“The school in question, because of the war, had long ceased to be an Unrwa school. It was that specific story that I called out as false,” Gunness told The Sunday Times.

“I am in no way defending staff who are found . . . to have violated neutrality rules. We are taking these allegations seriously and staff who are found to violate UN neutrality will be reprimanded.”

A total of 10 Israelis have been murdered in stabbing attacks and 49 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, including 27 said to be attackers. One suspected attacker was shot dead yesterday by the Israeli military at a Jerusalem checkpoint.

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, met Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II yesterday as part of attempts to defuse the crisis.

Kerry secured backing for new rules on access to the Temple Mount, the holy site for Muslims and Jews at the heart of the crisis.

US congressional sources said the State Department had cut $80m (£52m) from its $370m economic grant to the Palestinian Authority to send a message that incitement could not be condoned.

The International Business Times also reported on the story.

I have been wondering why there are supposedly so many "imposter pages." Why are so many people supposedly pretending to be UNRWA teachers?

Here's someone I identified as an UNRWA teacher last month, Jordanian Emad Sbeihat. He posted pro-terror photos and an antisemitic cartoon.

Now, his Facebook page no longer identifies him as associated with UNRWA. No job is listed now.

However, his posts indicate that he still works at UNRWA. He recently linked to an UNRWA memo about school canteen, for example, and to posts from an UNRWA school in Jordan that he probably works for. He has posted announcements to protest the potential delay of UNRWA school year last August. And he has photos from within classrooms.

All while he posts "God curse the Jews and Zionists."

All evidence points to Sbeihat still working for UNRWA, but being forced to hide it on his Facebook "About" page. And he does not seem to be the only one.

Meaning that UNRWA is still trying to sweep the problem under the rug.

(h/t UK Media Watch)

International law prohibits banning Jewish worship on the Temple Mount

TOI reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday restated a pledge to retain intact the custom of not permitting non-Muslim prayer on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which has been at the center of a recent spike in unrest.

“Israel reaffirms its commitment to upholding unchanged the status quo of the Temple Mount, in word and in practice,” he said in a statement.

The compound, which houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, was the site of two ancient Jewish temples and is sacred to both Jews and Muslims. It was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War.

“Israel will continue to enforce its longstanding policy: Muslims pray on the Temple Mount; non-Muslims visit the Temple Mount,” he said, following up on comments earlier by US Secretary of State John Kerry after meetings in Amman with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Kerry said Israel had agreed on steps to calm tensions over the flashpoint site, including 24-hour security cameras, an idea not specified in Netanyahu’s statement.

The prime minister did confirm, however, that there would be “increased coordination between the Israeli authorities and the Jordanian Waqf, including to ensure that visitors and worshipers demonstrate restraint and respect for the sanctity of the area, and all this in accordance with the respective responsibilities of the Israelis authorities and the Jordanian Waqf.”

Tensions over Al-Aqsa have sparked a recent wave of violence that has seen knife and gun terror attacks by Palestinians against Israelis along with daily clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces.

Israel has repeatedly denied persistent Palestinian allegations to the effect that it seeks to change the arrangements at the site in order to allow Jews to pray there.

Bibi's' declaration to stop Jews from praying on the Temple Mount may be against international law.

It is time to expand a previous article of mine where I describe how international law supports Jewish worship on the Temple Mount - a point that you will never hear from "human rights" NGOs.

As far as I can tell, not only do Jews have the right to visit and to pray on the Temple Mount, but if they wanted to build a synagogue there I cannot find anything in international law that wouldn't support them wholeheartedly.

The overriding consideration in international law is the right to be treated equally, and barring Jews from the Temple Mount is about as discriminatory as possible.

Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says:

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

In addition, Article 20 seems to prohibit the insults and incitement that Muslims engage in towards Jews on the Temple Mount:

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Moreover, the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief is filled with articles that would prohibit banning Jews from the Temple Mount:

No one shall be subject to discrimination by any State, institution, group of persons, or person on grounds of religion or other beliefs.

For the purposes of the present Declaration, the expression "intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief" means any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on religion or belief and having as its purpose or as its effect nullification or impairment of the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms on an equal basis.

Discrimination between human beings on grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human dignity and a disavowal of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and shall be condemned as a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enunciated in detail in the International Covenants on Human Rights, and as an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations between nations.

All States shall take effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social and cultural life.

All States shall make all efforts to enact or rescind legislation where necessary to prohibit any such discrimination, and to take all appropriate measures to combat intolerance on the grounds of religion or other beliefs in this matter.

From these articles it appears that Israel is obligated to allow Jews to visit and pray there, and to protect them from those who want to take away their rights.

Here is where the codification of bloacking Jewish religious rights on the Temple Mount runs afoul of this Declaration:

All States shall take effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social and cultural life.

All States shall make all efforts to enact or rescind legislation where necessary to prohibit any such discrimination, and to take all appropriate measures to combat intolerance on the grounds of religion or other beliefs in this matter.

Blocking Jews from worshiping in their holiest place while allowing Muslims to do so is discrimination by any definition.

It is true that this same declaration says:

Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

But this clause is referring to cases where the practitioners of the religion are the ones who are a danger to others, not when the others are so intolerant that they threaten violence. To invoke this paragraph to deny Jews' rights to the Temple Mount (which I suspect human rights organizations would do if pressed) would make the rest of that declaration a mockery. It would give veto power by any religious group over the rights of any other religious group by simply threatening violence.

Perhaps one can try to argue that limiting non-Muslim worship on the Temple Mount is similar to not allowing non-Christian worship in Christian holy places or prohibiting non-Jewish worship in synagogues. But that argument does not apply where the site itself has inherent sanctity for the group that wishes to worship.

In this case, one could argue that it is even worse, because the entire reason that Muslims consider this a holy spot is a derivative of the Jewish temples that were there first. But no one is seriously demanding that Muslims be banned from their mosques on the Temple Mount, just that Jews be given equal rights.

You remember equal rights, don't you? This isn't only a legal issue, but a moral one as well. Denying the rights of one party because of the threats of violence of another party is not something to celebrate. It is capitulation to blackmail.

In summary, not only is it outrageous to deny Jewish worship on the Temple Mount for Jews who wish to pray there, it is against the principles of international law, basic freedom of worship and equal rights that would be defended in every other circumstance and for every other religion.

Maintaining the "status quo" when the status quo is discriminatory is not a virtue. It is a travesty, and it gives justification and incentive for violence against those who fight for their religious rights. Those who are demanding equal rights are invariably described as extremists or worse.

Of course, we will never hear Human Rights Watch or Amnesty or the UN dare to defend the Jewish right to worship on the Temple Mount. Because Jews who want to do so are not considered to be worthy of protection by international law.