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"Know Your Palestine" Quiz , open to all the international community.

Oscar73

Oscar73

Israel

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July 22, 2017

t’s time to end the propaganda myth that Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims.

The Muslim fixation and clamor on Jerusalem is actually a very recent historical development, a product of political conflict, not historical truth.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran and Muslims face Mecca in prayer.

In the seventh century, the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counter-weight and hajj pilgrimage alternative to Mecca, where their political rivals were. This is when the important Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and, later, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE), were intentionally built on the site of the destroyed biblical Jewish temples –– a time-honored practice to physically signal the predominance of Islam.

However, references in the Quran and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the ‘farthest mosque’ couldn’t mean Jerusalem because the Quran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place. And it couldn’t have been a reference to the Al-Aqsa (‘Furtherest’) Mosque, for the simple reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

With the demise of the Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”

It did, however, become a majority Jewish city during the nineteenth century. The 1907 Baedekers Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims and 7,000 Christians.

So little did Jerusalem mean to the Ottomans that, during the First World War, they abandoned it to the British without a fight and even contemplated entirely destroying the city before pulling out.

Only upon the Arab confrontation with Zionism in the twentieth century did Jerusalem become a passionate Islamic issue. 

It was the Haj Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a vociferous anti-Semite and later Nazi collaborator, who expended enormous energy to focus Islamic attention on Jerusalem. 

Seeking to foment a Muslim war on Palestine’s Jews, he fabricated a tradition that the wall to which Muhammad was held to have tethered his steed Buraq was not the southern or eastern walls, as Muslims had asserted for centuries, but the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site but for the Temple Mount itself, turning the site into a flashpoint.

The massive Arab assault on Jews across British Palestine in 1929, in which 133 Jews were murdered and hundreds more maimed, was triggered by orchestrated, false rumors that Jews had attacked, or were intending to attack, the mosques atop the Temple Mount. 

trangely, even under the Mufti, the Temple Mount was still recognized by Muslims as the site 

of the biblical Jewish temples. Thus, the Jerusalem muslim supreme Council’s publication, ‘A Brief Guide to the Haram Al-Sharif’, states of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount on p. 4 that “Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.” (After 1954, all such references to the biblical temples were excised from this publication).

During Jordan’s illegal occupation and annexation of the eastern half of Jerusalem (1948-67) Amman remained Jordan’s country’s capital, not Jerusalem, which became a backwater. Infrastructure, like water, electricity and sewerage, were scanty or non-existent. No Arab ruler, other than Jordan’s kings, ever visited. As Israeli elder statesman Abba Eban quipped, “the secular delights of Beirut held more attraction.” 

Significantly, neither the PLO’s National Charter nor the Fatah Constitution, the latter drafted during Jordanian rule, even mention Jerusalem, let alone call for its establishment as a Palestinian capital.

Today, however, Palestinian Authority (PA) officials issue flat-earth denials that Jerusalem was the site of the Jewish temples, or indeed that there is any Jewish connection to the city. 

Muhammad Hussein, the PA Mufti, sneers at the Jews’ “alleged Temple” and insists that “Palestinians have an exclusive right … which they share with no one” to the Temple Mount. Sheikh Tayseer Al-Tamimi, the former Chief Justice of the PA’s Religious Court, insists, “I don’t know of any Jewish holy sites in [Jerusalem]” and dismisses Jewish claims as “fictitious Jewish history.”

Today, the  PA uses Jerusalem as a propaganda instrument, at once inciting violence and orchestrating anti-Israel campaigns. 

In 1996, Yasser Arafat uses Israel’s opening of an archeological tunnel near the Mount to incite riots on the basis of the lie that the tunnel threatened the stability of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Twenty-five Israeli soldiers and a hundred Palestinian rioters were killed in the ensuing violence.

In 2015, Mahmoud Abbas urged violence over Jews visiting Temple Mount, borrowing from Haj Amin’s playbook fabricated claims of Jewish assaults on the mosques to instigate it. Over 30 Israelis were murdered and over two hundred Palestinians, the vast majority terrorists or rioters, were killed in subsequent attacks and clashes.

June 22, 2017

Sweden in denial

Swedish police chief presents new report which finds an increase in the country's 'vulnerable' areas, where police fear to tread.

Jihad Watch quotes Emma Löfgren of The Local who reports “5,000 criminals in Sweden’s vulnerable areas" where police fear to tread.

Sweden’s national police chief has presented a new report about the country’s problem areas, increasing the number of districts classified as "vulnerable" or "especially vulnerable".

The report follows another high-profile report from 2015 which listed 53 so-called "vulnerable" areas, including 15 considered "especially vulnerable".

In the new report, 61 areas are now on the list, of which 23 are considered especially vulnerable, 6 are risk areas (areas that are at high risk of becoming especially vulnerable) and 32 are vulnerable.

Portions of the report were revealed last week, but the full version was presented today.

The term “no-go zone” famously caught on in some international media back in 2015 after it was used by a Swedish newspaper columnist to label these areas, but it has been strongly rejected by police and emergency services themselves.

The police definition describes these districts as "socio-economically vulnerable areas" with a generally high crime rate. In an "especially vulnerable" area there are also often "parallel societal structures, religious extremism", and police regularly have to adapt their methods to the volatile situation. Residents also often do not report crimes, either out of fear of retaliation or because they think it will not lead to justice.

11:25 PM Jun 28 2017

martinjam1987
United States

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June 5, 2016


As soon as Israel declared its independence in 1948, the tiny Jewish country was attacked en mass by its Arab neighbors. Jordan illegally occupied east Jerusalem and the Old City. Israeli forces made a concerted attempt to dislodge them, but were unable to do so. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War Jerusalem was left divided between Israel and Jordan. The Old City and East Jerusalem continued to be illegally occupied by Jordan, and the Jewish residents, some who's families had lived there for over 1000 years, were forced out. For the first time in millennium Jerusalem was uninhabited by Jews.

For the next 19 years under Jordanian occupation, synagogues were demolished and the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was plundered for its tombstones, which were used as paving stones and building materials. Jews were unable to visit Jewish holy sites and the Kotel (Western Wall) was used as a garbage dump.

On June 5, 1967, after receiving many threats of annihilation from the surrounding Arab countries, Israel made a preemptive strike which resulted in the complete collapse of the Arab forces.

On June 7, 1967 (28 Iyar 5727), Israel liberated the Old City of Jerusalem, the Golan heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and Judea and Samaria (Shomron).

On May 12, 1968, the Israeli government proclaimed a new holiday—Jerusalem Day— to be celebrated on the 28th of Iyar, the Hebrew date on which the divided city of Jerusalem was reunified one. On March 23, 1998, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Day Law, making the day a national holiday.

One of the themes of Jerusalem Day, based on a verse from the Book of Psalms, "Built-up Jerusalem is like a city that was joined together" (Psalm 122:3).