Ramadan in Europe

At Hudson-NY, Soeren Kern gives a rundown of how Europeans are accommodating their Muslim residents on Ramadan, and how their Muslims are demanding more. Excerpts:

In Norway, the Oslo-based Imam Syed Farasat Ali Bukhari told the Norwegian state television channel NRK that any Muslim not fasting during Ramadan should be beheaded. He made the comments shortly after asking the government for permission to open a private Islamic school for 200 pupils in the Ammerud neighbourhood of Oslo. The government subsequently denied his request.

In Spain, where an estimated 95 percent of the country's 1.5 million Muslims are observing Ramadan this year, hundreds of municipal and provincial governments have issued special instructions to help non-Muslims avoid offending Muslims during Ramadan.

Ignoring the advice, a municipal councillor in the Barcelona suburb of Sant Adrià del Besós was attacked by a Muslim mob on August 7 while trying to photograph an illegal mosque in the town.

Meanwhile, a court in Tarragona on August 2 absolved a local imam who had been sentenced to one year in prison for forcing a 31-year-old Moroccan woman to wear a hijab head covering. The imam had threatened to burn down the woman's house for being an "infidel" because she works outside of the home, drives an automobile and has non-Muslim friends. But the Socialist mayor applied political pressure to get the ruling overturned to prevent "a social conflict."

Also, the Taliban issued a statement saying: "Most Islamic battles, like the conquest of Spain, were fought during Ramadan. So, we can conclude that the month of Ramadan has an astonishing place in the history of Islamic jihad."

Also in Germany, the television channel RTL2 launched a special service for Muslim viewers during Ramadan, letting them know when to begin and end the daily fast. "You can theorize all you like about integration, but we wanted to send a clear signal," said Carsten Molings, chief of marketing at the channel.

In Berlin, Özcan Mutlu, a Turkish member of the Berlin House of Representatives, was charged with assault after allegedly starting a fight after a Turkish sausage seller insulted him for ordering a currywurst during Ramadan.

In Sweden, the Social Democrats have called for turning Ramadan into an official Swedish holiday. "Almost all of our public holidays, except for Midsummer and May 1st, have a Christian religious connection. Sweden is today a multicultural society, and it is worth looking at how it can be done," Social Democrat Party secretary Carin Jämtin told the centrist Svenska Dagbladet daily newspaper.

I found these sports-related vignettes especially interesting (I changed the order):

In Germany, the Central Council of Muslims said Islamic professional football players were not obliged to fast during Ramadan, ahead of the regular season that resumed on August 5. "The professional player can make up the fasting days during periods when there is no match and in that way show his respect for God and the holy month of Ramadan," council president Aiman Mazyek said in a statement.

A dispute over the issue in Germany began when the second-division team FSV Frankfurt gave three Muslim players an official warning in October 2009 for fasting during Ramadan and failing to inform their managers. After much debate, Islamic scholars at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo concluded that an exception to the strict Ramadan fasting rules could be made for professional players so their performance would not be compromised.

The 2012 London Olympics have been plunged into controversy by the discovery that the Games will clash with Ramadan. The clash will put Muslim athletes at a disadvantage as they will be expected to fast from sunrise to sunset for the entire duration of the Games. In 2012, Ramadan will take place from July 21 to August 20, while the Olympics run from July 27 to August 12. About 3,000 Muslim competitors are expected to be affected. Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: "They would not have organized this at Christmas. It is equally stupid to organize it at Ramadan. It shows a complete lack of awareness and sensitivity."

Even though this video linked to in the article was not produced during Ramadan, it is worth watching:

Following are excerpts from a statement by London Islamist Abu Waleed, which was aired on the internet.


Abu Waleed: "What is the nightmare on Downing Street? The nightmare on Downing Street, my dear brothers, is when the door of 10 Downing Street is kicked down by one monotheist, and the Caliph walks in and establishes the shari'a....The nightmare on Downing Street, my dear brothers, is when one monotheist pulls a rope, and raises the banner of 'There is no god but Allah' above the Big Ben. The nightmare on Downing Street is when one monotheist flies a helicopter all the way to the top of the Big Ben. He removes those numbers, and replaces them with Arabic numbers. That is the nightmare of Downing Street, my dear brothers.

"As you all understand, we, as Muslims, are not those types of coconut-chocolate moderate Muslims – the ones who bow their heads down to the government. Rather, we are the ones who want to work for the sake of Allah, to establish the manifestation of Islam, and make sure that David Cameron comes on his hands and knees, and give us the jizya – yeah, that's right – and cover up all the women and put a niqab on their faces, including Queen Elizabeth and Kate Middleton, the whore, the fornicator."

Read More

Work accident!

From Ma'an:

A member of Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was killed on Wednesday night in an explosion in his Rafah home, southern Gaza.

The body of Ali Nayef, 20, from Yabna refugee camp was taken to Abu Yousef An-Najjar hospital, local witnesses told Ma'an.

The Al Qassam Brigades website calls it an "accident." Usually they say that it was in the course of a "jihad mission" but perhaps the neighbors would be upset if they admit that they are doing chemistry experiments in their own homes.

Despite the accidental nature of his timely demise, he is still regarded as a "martyr."

Read More

Hamas bans film because it shows a woman's hair for 4 seconds

From CBS:


(h/t Shraga)

Read More

Israeli company makes solar panel windows

Israel saving the world, again:

The dream of constructing a net zero-energy building has yet to become a reality, but now an Israeli company has come up with an idea that could make it possible.

The innovative product from Pythagoras Solar can be described as a solar window that combines energy efficiency, power generation and transparency.

The world's first transparent photovoltaic glass unit (PVGU) has been designed to be easily integrated into conventional building design and construction processes. This means that existing office blocks can be retrofitted with the new material instead of energy-seeping glass windows - a process that will pay itself back within five years.

"What we have today - this is what we hear from architects - is very unique," Pythagoras Solar CEO Gonen Fink tells ISRAEL21c. "The high transparency makes for esthetically pleasing building designs.

"There are many companies today doing energy-efficient windows or energy generators using photovoltaics such as skylights, but this is mostly to show you can produce energy from the building's envelope. This is the first time somebody has actually combined the advantages in one product."

Can you imagine the impact if every glass skyscraper replaced their windows with solar panels?

(h/t Mike)

Read More

A twitter thread with Hussein Ibish

Hussein Ibish's writings indicate that he is one of the more moderate Palestinian Arab voices. But his Twitter reaction to my piece on his article about a book on costumes in Palestine was anything but moderate:

This fool @elderofziyon complains before 20s no one called themselves “Palestinians." Who called themselves “Israelis” before 40s? Moronic!

We then had this exchange:

elderofziyon says:
@Ibishblog Apparently, you never heard of the Jewish people.

Ibishblog says:
@elderofziyon Are you deliberately obtuse? Jewish & Arab identities old, but the Israeli & Palestinian identity are both new. At same time.

elderofziyon says:
@Ibishblog You are claiming a centuries-old, specifically Palestinian culture in your article. Are you now backtracking and saying it's Arab?

Ibishblog says:
@elderofziyon You completely misread my article, which clearly says contemporary Palestinian national identity is 20th century phenomenon.
@elderofziyon In fact, I can only think you didn't really read my article carefully at all, or are incapable of reading nuances carefully.

elderofziyon says:
@Ibishblog How did I misread "an ancient and unbroken Palestinian history and culture really does exist."? Is 20th century "ancient"?

Ibishblog says:
@elderofziyon Yes, by pulling that sentence out of it's much broader, more nuanced context, you are misreading everything. Deliberately so.

elderofziyon says:
@Ibishblog Wow.Let's keep it simple:Do you claim there is an"ancient and unbroken Palestinian history and culture"? Not Arab - Palestinian.

Ibishblog says:
@elderofziyon There is an ancient & unbroken Palestinian history & culture, but like Israel's its particularist nationalism is 20th century.

elderofziyon says:
@Ibishblog You are, as you admit, putting a political patina on an artificially, arbitrarily defined South Syria culture after the fact.

Ibish is making a number of fundamental errors, and he seems to be doing it knowingly.

To claim, as he does, that "there is an ancient and unbroken Palestinian history and culture" that predates anyone self-identifying as "Palestinian" is akin to calling pre-Abrahamic culture of Ur "Jewish." Is Canaanite culture "Palestinian?" How about Philistine culture? Or Byzantine?

As I wrote, and as he he did not disprove, the idea that there was a pan-Palestinian Arab culture that somehow fits roughly along the boundaries of Mandate Palestine that were drawn by the British is simply not true. It is a retroactive, modern, political attempt to find commonality among Arabs who did not feel that commonality themselves.

It is also interesting that he did not admit that his quote of Golda Meir was wrong.

But perhaps the biggest lie Ibish is pushing is that modern Israeli nationalism is distinct from Jewish peoplehood. Of course Zionism is a relatively modern concept, as is nationalism altogether, but the Jewish people are a nation and have been identified as such - both from within and from without - for millennia. Jews have been "making aliya" for centuries. The Biblical term for the Jewish people is "the children of Israel." That's what the Koran calls them as well. Christian sources called Jews "Israelites" as recently as the early twentieth century. Ibish, like most Palestinian Arab historical revisionists, tries to make an artificial distinction between Herzlian Zionism and the proto-Zionism of Rabbi Judah HaLevi, the Shelah and the disciples of the Vilna Gaon, all who moved to Israel.

Ibish's attempt to distinguish between modern Zionism and the ancient aspiration of Jews to return to Zion and modern Zionism is, at its root, an attempt to deny Jewish history - something that he railed against in another tweet at the same time ("This negation of each other's histories and narratives is sick and disgusting!")

Denying history is indeed disgusting. Correcting a false narrative is, however, obligatory.

(h/t Noah Pollak for Azure link)

Read More

Tehran names street after Rachel Corrie. Family must be so proud!

From Iran's ABNA:

The Tehran City Council on Tuesday ratified a proposal calling for one of the streets in Tehran to be named after the American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, who is viewed as an icon by many for her resistance against the Zionist regime.

Rachel Aliene Corrie was an American member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and a peace activist who was brutally crushed to death in 2003 when run over by a U.S.-supplied Israeli army bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza.

The proposal to name a street after Corrie was first put forward by ten universities based in Tehran.

According to the ratification, the 27th street in District 6 of the Tehran Municipality will be named after her.

How wonderful! Maybe her parents will go to Iran to thank the regime personally!

There already is a street named after her in Ramallah, pictured here:

The ABNA site also tastefully includes a photo of her - dead.

(h/t Israel Muse)

Read More

Syria accuses Israel of setting forest fires in the Golan

From Syria's SANA agency:

Israeli occupation forces on Monday deliberately set fires to forests in the occupied Syrian Golan that expanded to 4 K.M opposite to the liberated towns of al-Rafid and al-Asha as part of its daily aggressive policy against citizens of the Golan.

"The Israeli occupation forces' deliberate act of setting fires in the Golan aims at destroying the environmental and vital diversity in the area, Governor of Quneitra Hussein Arnous said.

He called on the international legal organizations to assume responsibilities towards the Israeli flagrant violations of setting fires in the occupied Golan or along the cease-fire line.

Firas Samara, Head of fire fighting operations in al-Quneitra underlined that the Israeli forces set fire to the western side of al-Adnaniya and al-Asha towns inside the cease-fire line in the Golan along 4 K.M length which damaged forestry and plants for hundreds of dunums.

They even illustrate the fire:

The only problem is that there is no report from any other source of any fire in the Golan. Not to mention that the reason they give - that Israel just feels like destroying the environment - makes no sense.

One can think of reasons why Syria might want to distract the world with made-up stories of Israeli forest fires, however.

Read More

White House erases "Jerusalem, Israel" from its website

From Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard:

Quick question: According to the State Department, what nation is the city of Jerusalem in? If you answered Israel, you'd be wrong. The State Department just issued the following press release:

QUESTION: What is the State Department’s position regarding American persons born in Jerusalem who wish to have passports issued that indicate their place of birth as Israel?

ANSWER: Current U.S. Government policy is that U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem may not have “Israel” listed in their passports as their place of birth. See the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Manual 7 FAM 1300 Appendix D for further details.

Hmm. You kind of have to wonder why no one thought to inform the White House! When Vice President Biden visited Jerusalem, Israel last year, the White House helpfully provided the following caption: "Vice President Joe Biden laughs with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, Israel, March 9, 2010."

And then the author posted this a little later:

Within two hours of posting, the White House has apparently gone through its website, cleansing any reference to Jerusalem as being in Israel.

The caption now reads: "Vice President Joe Biden laughs with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, March 9, 2010."

Sure enough, according to Google's cache, at least 7 references to "Jerusalem, Israel" have been changed now to show "Jerusalem" alone.

is now:

The only remaining reference to "Jerusalem, Israel" that I can find on the White House site is in this announcement:

This is beyond outrageous.

Go to the White House website contact page and let them know.

(h/t Ron)

Read More

Egypt's granting citizenship to 600 PalArabs highlights Arab hypocrisy

After years of dragging its feet, Egypt finally implemented a 2006 court ruling and allowed 607 Palestinian Arabs with Egyptian mothers to become citizens of Egypt.

Tens of thousands of Gazans have applied for Egyptian citizenship, some paying huge sums to lawyers to help make their case.

In 1959, the Arab League resolution 1547 confirmed earlier resolutions calling on Arab countries to treat Palestinian Arabs well - but recommends that they "retain their Palestinian nationality." Meaning, that Palestinian Arabs should not obtain citizenship in their host countries.

Every time a loophole has emerged in various countries allowing Palestinian Arabs to become citizens, they eagerly flock to take advantage of it.

Yet the world human rights community is silent - or, in the case of Human Rights Watch, complicit - in this gross violation of not only the human rights of Palestinian Arabs, but of their very will to become naturalized in the countries in which they were born.

It is very simple. Palestinian Arabs have shown time and time again that they want to be citizens of their host countries. Their right to a nationality is being categorically denied. But the UN, HRW and other NGOs, instead of fighting for them, are parroting the lies of their so-called leaders that they prefer to remain stateless and part of the "Palestinian nation."

The human rights of millions of people are being systematically denied, and no one is standing up for them. Not only that, but the worst offenders are the very people who claim to be acting on their behalf!

Read More

The Gaza communications blackout

Ma'an reported last night:

Telecommunications in Gaza were severed late Tuesday, cutting off Internet, mobile phones and international landline connections for hours, a Ma'an correspondent reported.

Calls to Gaza were met with error messages or dial tones, and the blackout seemed to affect multiple platforms including regular landline services as well as mobile access including Israeli services.

Meanwhile, residents of Gaza near the border with Israel said army bulldozers were seen operating shortly before communications went offline. An army spokeswoman denied the account.

Tweeters were abuzz with the news, and many assumed that this was a deliberate act on Israel's part as preparation for some genocidal act. Ma'an's comments were typical:

yeah people here expecting big israeli assault on Gaza tonight. an from Gaza but can't state how i access in order not be interrupted by occupation(israeli entity)

israel is getting ready to attack,get ready

And on Twitter:

world focused on #londonriots , no one care about #GazaBlackout , have been for 12+ hour, israeli getting ready to attack

IMEMC darkly hinted that this was in preparation for an attack.

Max Blumenthal went further,asserting that this was a deliberate attack by Israel on Gaza:

Does #J14 have anything to say on Israel's terror attack on Gaza's civilian infrastructure? #GazaBlackout

He then realized he went a teeny bit too far:

Qualification: -alleged- terror attack on Gaza's civilian infrastructure. Still awaiting official gloating.

Alas, his deep knowledge of evil Israeli psychology was again off the mark. The IDF spokesperson tweeted this morning:

Contrary 2inaccurate rumors, IDF has no conectn to #GazaBlackout. last nght #IDF bulldozer didn't dig @ Nahal Oz. #transparency

Indeed, there were no bulldozers cutting cables, no massive invasion of Gaza, no airstrikes, and this morning after 12 hours the communications are slowly being restored - without Israel apparently doing anything to repair it. As usual, the Arab and anti-Israel rumor mill was way off base, not that anyone will admit it.

There can be only a few alternatives to explain this:

• The IDF is lying.
• There was a huge coincidence where landlines, cell phone lines and Internet all went down at the same time (there were some reports of electricity being shut off as well.)
• Hamas has something to do with this.

I don't know if there is a single point of failure in Gaza's telecommunications lines; that information is important in determining whether it was a simple backhoe mistake or not. If there is a single point through which all of Gaza's communications flows, that is an astoundingly bad network architecture (although it is great for Israeli intelligence.) This article in Firas Press, if I am understanding it correctly, seems to say that there are three separate fiber-optic cables going into Gaza and that all of them were down.

I find it most interesting that people automatically assume that Israel is nefariously attempting to wage war under cover in Gaza, yet they cannot conceive that Hamas might be doing a dry run on how easily it can cut off Gaza from the world.

After all, Syria has been cutting the communications of towns that are being attacked, and the Arab world has a rich history of working overtime to censor and restrict freedom of expression. 

So how come practically no one is blaming Hamas?

Read More

The Islamic Jihad Cripple Corps

From YNet:

According to the Islamic Jihad's website, the military wing recently held maneuvers in which veteran members of the Jihad who had been injured over the years in battles with Israeli forces had a starring role.

The maneuvers included sights not usually seen on the battlefield, one-legged men carrying Kalashnikov rifles or RPG launchers while leaning on crutches or sitting in wheelchairs.

The Islamic Jihad has puffed up its position against Hamas as the group spearheading the struggle against Israel. The organization has gone all out on a PR campaign to glorify its fighters in the Gaza Strip – the height of the campaign is their latest exhibition maneuver.

"Bombing us and leaving us amputees will not stop the Jihad," the military wing's website quoted one militant, Abu Abdallah who lost both his legs in clashes near Khan Yunis. "We will continue to fight even when our bodies are torn to pieces."

In all seriousness, this really means that they will try to send disabled people through checkpoints and so forth with bomb belts.

Making life for truly sick people who need to be treated in Israel that much more arduous. And giving a propaganda victory to the anti-Israel crowd.

Read More

Costumes, Ibish and Golda Meir

Hussein Ibish writes about a new book that describes the clothing styles that Arabs in Palestine used throughout the centuries, and he finds it terrifically important.

First, let's talk about the costumes:

Munayyer’s important new book demonstrates a number of very salient points with serious implications about the present and future for the Palestinian people. First, it shows that traditional and folkloric Palestinian costumes are distinctive from other Levantine ones. Within Palestinian society, in various areas and villages, the costumes have their own particular features, handed down largely from mother to daughter, over decades and indeed centuries. But there is still a distinctive Palestinian style, strongly connected to other Levantine traditional dress, with forms and patterns all their own.

I do not have the book, so I cannot say with certainty whether this is true or not. I can say that there were a few styles of clothing within Palestine; Wikipedia divides them up into northern Palestine, central Palestine, the coastal plane and the Bedouin. In order to prove that there was a distinctive "Palestinian" style one must prove that all of these styles had more commonality when compared to other Levantine clothing styles. Moreover, the similarities must be of the same amount that one would find similarities in the costumes of different areas of Syria or Arabia or Egypt.

To do this would require someone who is objective to look at the similarities and differences between costumes throughout history in the Middle East and find commonalities among the Palestinian Arab costumes that are provably different from the others. If they were fundamentally regional, they prove nothing.

To put it another way, it would be deceptive to say that the existence of jazz or creole cuisine or blue jeans proves that there is a distinctive American culture. These all started off as examples of regional culture, not national culture; they became "American" as they spread throughout the US.

If Palestinian Arab costumes remained regional, that is not evidence of a Palestinian national identity. It is simply evidence that different regions in the Levant had different cultural symbols. If the northern Palestinian costumes have more in common with the Lebanese costumes than with the coastal costumes, then the truth is  the opposite of what Ibish is claiming.

But, as Ibish shows, Palestinian Arabs have been thirsting to prove that they had a distinctive culture for hundreds or thousands of years, and therefore it is - pretty much by his admission - impossible for such a work to be written without a political subtext:

[D]ocumenting that history and those traditions is not only a vital project of collective memory and an important academic task in itself, it is also a quintessentially political act. It is, above all, an act of passionate, dedicated and deeply meaningful resistance to the continued efforts at the negation of Palestinian identity and history.

This is Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness, at its finest. Beyond bluster, slogans and canned rhetoric, Munayyer’s volume has something deeply serious and meaningful to say about both the origins and the future of Palestinian national identity.

I've been spending a bit of time looking for specific Palestinian Arab culture, and every claim I've come across so far has been either Levantine - like falafel or the debka - or very specific to a town (like the soaps that Nablus was known for.)

By the way, Jewish women of Palestine also had their own distinctive clothing, especially Sephardic women. Would their dress be considered "Palestinian"? Does this book even research how the Jewish women of Palestine dressed? The inclusion or omission of that community would tell a lot about how objective the book it.

Ibish also makes a common mistake as he, like many Palestinian Arabs, like to misquote Golda Meir:

The days are long gone when Golda Meir’s infamous remark about the Palestinians is still taken seriously in the West. The onetime Israeli prime minister stated that “[t]here is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” Yet there remains a hard-core contingent among Israelis and pro-Israel Westerners who persist in denying Palestinians their identity, history and heritage.

I have not yet found the original quote, which was supposedly written in The Sunday Times in 1969, but Wikiquote writes it this way:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

There is nothing inaccurate about this quote. Certainly Ibish would be hard pressed to find that ordinary Arabs who lived in Palestine self-identified as "Palestinians" before 1920, and even more hard-pressed to find anyone who described themselves that way before Zionism existed. Today, arguably, there is a Palestinian Arab people who gained this identity because of their common misery at the hands of their Arab brethren, but Meir was referring to the Arabs of Palestine before Zionism.

In short, the attempts by Palestinian Arabs to construct a culture retroactively smacks of desperation. No one is arguing that there were no Arabs who lived in Palestine or even that some of them had distinctive dress or cuisine. The idea that there was a pan-Palestinian Arab culture that somehow fits roughly along the boundaries of Mandate Palestine that were drawn by the British is simply not true.

Deep down, Ibish knows this as well, just as he knows that the attempts to find such a culture are not based on finding the truth nearly as much as they are purely political.

Read More

Two more concentration camp restaurants

Last month, the Sahara restaurant opened on the Gaza coast.

So once again I feel compelled to share with you some of the wrenching photos:

It isn't far from another prison restaurant, the Gaza Lighthouse Restaurant and Cafe, which also has a Facebook page.

But it is difficult to look at so much suffering at once.

Read More

Photos of Jews "storming" and "desecrating" the "Aqsa Mosque"

From Palestine Times:

For the second consecutive day, Israeli occupation forces allowed Zionist to storm and desecrate the Aqsa Mosque...

There is a state of turmoil and tension in the squares of Al Aqsa Mosque after the Israeli police allowed extremist Jewish groups for the second consecutive day to desecrate the area and perform biblical and talmudic prayers on the occasion of the so-called 'memory of the destruction of the Temple', which occurred today. This raised public anger and indignation.

If you want to see the scenes of violence and mayhem, just go over to Palestine Today where they have a photo essay showing the entire desecration in gory detail:

Perhaps they would have been less offensive if they played soccer instead.

Read More

Iranian news: "No evidence of historic Jews in Jerusalem" (updated)

The always fascinating Iranian news agency IRNA reports:

Renowned Zionist archeologist Israel Wanklestein claimed Monday despite Israel’s claims there is absolutely no historic proof for presence of Jews in Jerusalem (occupied Holy Qods) in the past.

According to IRNA Audiovisual Monitoring Service, the Qods-Press News Agency which has quoted the Israeli archeologist has further reiterated:

Wankelstein who is considered as the father of archeology in occupied Palestine further stressed that the Jewish archeologists have thus far presented no historic proof for some stories quoted in the Old Testament on deportation of the Jews from the city, and their wandering in Sinai Desert, or victory of Joshua the son of Nunn in war against the Canaanites.

The Jewish archeologist focusing on Solomon’s Temple issue, said, “There is absolutely no historic proof over the existence of that temple where Israel says it is located.”

They are referring to Israel Finkelstein, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist who is known to be critical about the accuracy of Biblical history.

The story they are quoting comes from Middle East Monitor (MEMO), a UK-based Islamist-oriented news site. MEMO, in turn, claims that they got this information from an interview Finkelstein gave to The Jerusalem Post.

I cannot find any such interview in the Jerusalem Post.

However, I found an article about an interview with Finkelstein from last year in Biblical Archaeology Review. According to that article, Finkelstein - despite his skepticism - admits that Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem.


Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a stone was found with an engraved image of a menorah, along with a sword and scabbard that belonged to a Roman soldier.

And then there's this.

UPDATE:
Finkelstein, skepticism and all, writes pretty much the opposite of what Iran claims in this piece in The Forward:

Contrary to Palestinian claims, there is a scholarly consensus that the Temple Mount was indeed the location of the two Temples. Orthodox Jewish and Muslim sensitivities, however, have prevented modern archaeological work on the Temple Mount, which for the past 1,300 years has been the site of two Islamic holy places, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Archaeological attention has therefore been diverted to the ridge to its south, where remains dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages were detected as early as the mid-19th century.

From the outset of modern exploration, the City of David produced exciting discoveries. Truly thrilling finds include the Siloam Inscription, a late-8th-century BCE Hebrew inscription that commemorates the hewing of a water tunnel under the ridge. Other important recent discoveries are the Pool of Siloam, dating from the Roman period, and the monumental street that connected it with the Temple Mount — places that were frequented by thousands during the three pilgrimage festivals each year.

Read More