Sometimes a nation needs those who hate it so it can look in the mirror and see its own true face. The UNESCO decision in response to a Palestinian Authority initiative to stop using the term “Temple Mount” and from now on refer to the holiest side in Judaism as “Al-Aqsa mosque” is such a reminder. UNESCO is forcing us to review what we’ve forgotten:

In 1967, the Jewish state made a colossal, almost unthinkable concession. It left its holiest place in the hands of a rival religion, Islam, for which it is only the third-holiest place in the world. The state forfeited the right of Jews to pray on the Mount.

The Muslims never knew how to thank the Jews for that pathetic concession. They attacked Jews who visited the Mount, damaged antiquities, and destroyed the Jewish relics that remained there. They built two underground mosques, and for years have been spreading the modern-day blood libel that “Al-Aqsa is in danger.”

Thanks to that fiction, tensions on the Mount have flared repeatedly. For years, terrorists have set out in the name of the libel to murder Jews. In the face of this Muslim offensive, Israel has retreated from the Temple Mount step by step, and UNESCO is blind to all of this.

The Jewish people’s connection to the Temple Mount cannot be proved, just as it cannot be proved that the sun shines in the day and not at night. Nevertheless, there are a few relevant facts that Israel can use to show how ridiculous the hypocritical UN body’s lies are: for hundreds of years, Muslim scholars themselves wrote in their own religious and historical texts that Solomon’s Temple — which Muslims today refer to as “Al-Mazoum” (the imagined or false) — was located on the Temple Mount.

The Muslim nonsense that holds that Al-Aqsa [the Temple Mount] was built by the first human being or was located in either Yemen or Nablus, contradict its identification as the site of King Solomon’s Temple made by figures such as Jerusalem-based Muslim historians like Al-Muqaddasi or Aref al-Aref, Iranian scholar Al-Mastoufi, the poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and the Muslim preacher Abu Bakhar al-Wasati for hundreds of years.

What’s more, in the time of Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was a partner of Adolf Hitler’s and who was responsible for the 1929 riots, the Waqf published a visitor’s guide to the Temple Mount that read, “The site’s identification with the Solomonic Temple is beyond all doubt.”

The Temple’s existence is supported by various archeological discoveries made at and around the Teple Mount, such as a fragment of a Second Temple-era Greek inscription found near the Lion’s Gate, or the corner where trumpets were blown to herald the start of Shabbat and holidays, unearthed at excavations at the compound’s southern wall. And, of course, there is the Bible, the Mishneh, the Talmud, and a wealth of Jewish and other historical sources that show that the Temple stood on the Temple Mount.

But UNESCO has never been interested in such minor matters. Anyone who is capable of turning Rachel’s Tomb into the “Balal Ibn Rabbah Mosque” can erase the Temple Mount from its language, too.

Maybe it’s time for us to delete the word UNESCO from our lexicon, recall our ambassador and stop hosting its “learned” researchers in our country.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=15843

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