Soccer Dad: The temple dodge

February 14, 2007

The temple dodge

In Temple Mount Truths, Honest Reporting complains (with justification)

Why is the media taking Arab propaganda at face value encouraging incitement to violence?

Currently the Arab/Muslim world is raising a hue and cry about Israeli threats to the Muslim holy places on the Temple Mount. These phony charges are calculated to raise tensions and put pressure on Israel. Caroline Glick (cited by Honest Reporting) observes in the Jerusalem Post:

the Israel Antiquities Authority coordinated its salvage dig by the Mughrabi Gate of the Old City with the Islamic Wakf, the Jordanian government and all other relevant authorities before its archeologists began their work this week. Everyone understood that the excavation is being conducted 70 meters away from the Temple Mount and will in no way affect it.

An aggravating factor in the media's failure to scrutinize Arab/Muslim claims is that we've been here before. At least 3 times.

(In additon to treating Arab/Muslim claims uncritically, the media usually minimizes or ignores Israeli claims. Meryl Yourish has more.)

In October 1990, during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, a group called the Temple Mount Faithful said that they would lay a cornerstone for the third Temple. The Israel government forbade the group to ascend the Temple Mount and asked the Wakf (Muslim religious trust) to defuse the situation. Instead

... suddenly, violent and threatening calls were sounded over the loudspeakers "Allahu Akbar" [God is Great], "Ahad" [Holy War], "Itbah Al-Yahud" [Slaughter the Jews]). Immediately afterwards, enormous amounts of rocks, construction materials and metal objects were thrown at Israeli policemen who were present at the site. Many in the incited, rioting mob threw stones and metal objects from a very short range, and some even wielded knives. The actions of the rioters, and certainly the inciters, constituted a threat to the lives of the police, the thousands of worshippers at the Western Wall and to themselves. This was a serious criminal offense committed by masses who were incited by preachers over loudspeakers, and this is what led to the tragic chain of events.

(Source: Summary of a Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events on Temple Mount on 8 October 1990, 26 October 1990 h/t In Context for finding this document and referring it to me.)

In contrast to the official Israeli version the Palestinians claimed that the violence started when the Border Police started attacking the crowd and that the violence against the police and the Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall was not premeditated. Yet the presence of the crowds and the availability of objects to throw suggest very strongly that the violence that day was indeed planned.

(Accounts in American newspapers were scrupulous in claiming that the riots were spontaneous. Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote in stories on October 14, 1990 "THE BATTLE AT TEMPLE MOUNT
NEITHER PALESTINIAN NOR ISRAELI VERSION TELLS FULL STORY"

Still, the available evidence suggests that what happened was a kind of spontaneous explosion between a crowd impassioned with religious and national feeling and a police force that felt overwhelmed. No one intended violence, or shooting, on such a scale, but as the conflict broke out, both sides lost control.

. An article by Diehl on October 27, takes issue with the official Israeli government report.)

During the riot approximately twenty Palestinians were killed and 140 more injured. The diplomatic fallout to the violence was that Israel was condemned by the UN Security Council. President Bush, more interested in keeping together his anti-Iraq coalition than in defending an ally, had the United States support the condemnation.

It also, at least temporarily, redirected attention in the Middle East away from Saddam Hussein who was occupying Kuwait and allowed him to wear the mantle of Muslim defender of Jerusalem.

In September 1996 after the Israeli government opened the Hashmonean tunnel just outside the Temple Mount leading to riots and the first sustained confronations between Israeli forces and Palestinian "police" in the post-Oslo period. Nadav Shragai, writing then, as now, about the conflict over the Temple Mount and its history, in Seeds of Calamity

That is more or less what is also happening now, before our very eyes. Since the events of 1929 [the widespread Arab rioting], the mosques on the Temple Mount ceased to serve as a place of worship and a purely religious symbol, and became one of the main national symbols of the struggle against Zionism. Behind the scenes, it may perhaps be possible to reach understandings with the Waqf, but it is difficult to do this when the issue is the Temple Mount.
In 1988, Israel tried for the first time to open an exit from the Hasmonean Tunnel on to Oneima Street, adjacent to the Temple Mount. What occurred then in the city and in the West Bank greatly resembles what has happened now, even though Waqf officials were invited to visit the tunnels before the opening was cut, toured them, and even examined the maps of the Israeli engineers. The attempt to coordinate the opening operation with Waqf officials failed this time, too, even though the Waqf had been offered the compensation of permission to open an additional gate to Solomon's Stables and the possibility of holding religious services in them.

The Waqf will always raise difficulties over excavations in the area of the Temple Mount; if the question depended on it, the Southern Wall and the Western Wall along its entire length would never have been uncovered -- and the Moslem heritage of Jerusalem, disclosed in these digs, would still be buried in the depths of the earth.

The allegations about upsetting the foundations of the mosques are utter nonsense: the Hasmonean aqueduct was hewn out of the rock thousands of years ago, and only now has been re-exposed. The work of removing sewage water and mud from this tunnel could not upset the foundation of anything, especially as the route of the tunnel does not pass under the Temple Mount perimeter, but west of it.

In contrast to similar events in the Temple Mount vicinity in the past, the wave of rioting this time was organized by the people of the Palestinian Authority. A senior police officer said this week "it was easier to do business with Jordan in the Temple Mount zone." On Tuesday, Yasser Arafat declared in Gaza: "Our blood is cheap in the face of the issue for which we are gathered here." On Palestinian Radio, a listener said the time had come "to slaughter all the Jews [and] to appoint a Caliph for Palestine." This went on without anyone participating in the program -- Waqf leaders and members of the Palestinian Legislative Council from the Jerusalem electoral district -- protesting.

The diplomatic fallout of these riots was to bring about American pressure on newly elected Prime Minister Netanayhu leading to the Hebron Accords in January 1997.

Then in September 2000, the "Aqsa Intifada" started supposedly as a spontaneous reaction to opposition leader Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount but as Dennis Ross wrote (h/t It's Almost Supernatural

Ironically, there was an incident on the 27th, the day before the visit. But this involved the killing of an Israeli soldier in an ambush in Gaza, an event the Israelis claim marked the real beginning of the Intifada. On the 28th, when Sharon went to the Haram [Temple Mount], everything was quiet. All hell was to break loose on the 29th.

But on the 28th, the last day of our discussions, no one on either delegation acted if this was a potentially catastrophic development. No one even raised it, even though Sharon - given the 7 hour time difference-had already completed his visit to the Haram before we began our last day's discussions.

(I wrote more about this here.)

The violence in 2000 was designed to draw attention away from Arafat's refusal to come to terms with Ehud Barak two months earlier at Camp David and to bring pressure on Israel to increase its offer to Arafat.

Though there are superficial differences among the four incidents, the general thrust remains the same. If an Arab or Muslim leader has a goal, he will use the conflict over the Temple Mount divert international attention from his ambitions and rally the Muslim world around him. Ahmadinejad is using the cover of the phony charges now to increase his saber rattling and divert attention from his nuclear program and his foreign adventures in Lebanona nd Iraq. As it did before, the world just tut tuts at the chutzpah of the Jews.

Blogdigger tags: Israel, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Temple Mount, Wakf.