Let me put it on the record.
The status quo was not changed by Israel on the Temple Mount, despite Palestinian protests.
Since Rosh HaShana (the Jewish New Year), when the provocations really began, not one Jew set foot inside any of the mosques on the Temple Mount. Not one Jew or tourist spoke loudly or started any violent act on the Temple Mount. Not one Jew did any of the destructive acts on the Temple Mount. Those that were there walked quietly and respectfully around the large open space that is the huge plateau upon which the Temple was built.
While they were doing so, they were accosted by the paid recruits of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement that has its center in the Israeli Arab town of Um el Fahm and is headed by a notorious Islamic provocateur named Sheikh Raed Salah, in collaboration with the religious Wakf, the Palestinian Authority and with the encouragement of Hamas in Gaza. They were shouted at and taunted and had copies of the Koran pushed in their face.
With the encouragement of the PA and Hamas, Muslim youths brought rocks, cinder blocks and material to make firebombs in the Al-Akar mosque. The question needs to be asked how these weapons of popular violence were brought onto the Mount and into the mosque.
The only way they could have got there was with the assistance of the religious Wakf, who controls the Islamic site, in collaboration with the Islamic Movement and the PA, and that could only have been by access through the underground excavations that the Palestinians had burrowed illegally under the Temple Mount several years ago and to which the Israeli government turned a blind eye.
The Islamic Movement shares the same radical ideology as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS, but Mahmoud Abbas was the chief social media inciter.
He made speeches which were distributed over the internet in which he said “the Jews are coming to destroy our holy places and defile them with their dirty feet.” This inciter in chief followed that up by saying, “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood. Every shahid (martyr) will reach paradise and every injured person will be rewarded by Allah.”
This was the anti-Semitic incitement coming from the mouth of Israel’s “moderate” peace partner, the so-called President of the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas in Gaza began calling the violence the “Al Quds Intifada,” literally the “Jerusalem Intifada.” They supported the violence by organizing hundreds of Gazans to march on Israel’s border to breach it and to attack the nearby kibbutzim and villages to kill Jews. The threat for Israel’s security forces was that Hamas would infiltrate groups of terrorists into these huge demonstrations to breach the border and carry out the wholesale slaughter of Israelis.
After three days of effort resulted in failure, due to the determination of the IDF that resulted in casualties the media was quick to broadcast intimate details of Palestinian deaths, something they had been loathe to do when Israeli Jews were killed, to make their story more emotionally appealing to their viewers.
The crescendo of hate and religious emotion, generated by multiple Palestinian sources, spilled over with deadly violence onto the street and was supported by a media buying into Palestinian lies by condemning “Israeli provocations.”
Indeed, much of the media replayed their editorial bent that portrayed Israel as the perennial bad guys and Palestinians as the innocent bystanders and victims. There was little space that gave Israelis and Jews the decency and truth they deserve.
Fox News, normally one of the more balanced news outlets when it comes to Israel, got it completely wrong with a headline dealing with the Gaza violence, “Israel security forces shoot and kill 2 Palestinian teenagers at Gaza protest.”
To the uninformed, this headline read as if there were only 2 teenagers protesting and Israeli soldiers brutally killed them for simply protesting. This bad reporting reflects the poor image that faulty journalism casts over Israel.
When a 19-year-old Palestinian, incited by repeated lies of Israeli “crimes” against Islamic and Palestinian holy places, took a knife and went to the Old City of Jerusalem to murder Jews, he found the Benita-Bennett family walking back from prayers at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. His attack resulted in the murder of Aharon and Rabbi Nehamia Lavi. He also seriously wounded Aharon’s wife, Adele, and injured their two-year old son. He was killed by security forces before he could continue his deadly rampage.
But this is how the BBC News headline put it, “Palestinian shot dead as Jerusalem attack kills two.”
There was total editorial divorce from the facts and truth of the fatal incident.
The fact that this Palestinian killed Jews was absent. Jews became an anonymous faceless number killed, according to the BBC. Some wrongly interpreted their headline as that the unnamed “two” had enigmatically been killed by the city of Jerusalem.
Against the background of this awful truth, it is demanded of Israel that we surrender this place to the will and control of the Palestinians for this is what they call “east Jerusalem.”
What they are demanding is that we Jews must give up everything that justifies our rights for being there, lending credibility to the Palestinian cause. What is incredible is that there are Jewish voices that support this notion. A culture of defeatism is being spread that allows the violent creep of Islam, dressed up in the Palestinian cause, to take over what is ours.
The message may be promulgated in political terms but what we are experiencing is nothing less than the significant march of Islam in the Middle East, and the Jews of Israel are its last bastion.
Thousands of Israeli soldiers and border police fanned out across major cities and security forces began to erect checkpoints to close off Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem on Wednesday to stem a wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis.
Military officials say the use of hundreds of Israeli soldiers along highways and in residential areas is the first such deployment in more than a decade, since the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in the early 2000s.
Israeli troops are regularly deployed in the West Bank, in Golan Heights and along the Gaza perimeter fence, but not in the heart of Israeli cities.
Israel also began calling up 1,400 Border Police reservists who serve under police command.
Israel also began calling up 1,400 Border Police reservists who serve under police command.
Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists warned that strict closures, if fully implemented, would represent a violation of international law and collective punishment against a population for the acts of a violent few.
On Wednesday afternoon at the Damascus Gate into Jerusalem’s Old City, police said they shot and killed a Palestinian, dressed in military-style camouflage and carrying a folding knife, who lunged at an Israeli Border Police officer who had stopped him for a spot identification check. No Israelis were injured.
Later at rush hour, a 24-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem stabbed a 71-year-old woman boarding a bus at Jerusalem’s busy central bus station, police said. The bus driver quickly closed the door behind the victim; the assailant ran and was shot and killed by a special-forces police officer at the station.
Many of the recent attackers have come from Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which is why Israeli authorities say they want the closures.
Muslim and Jewish residents of Jerusalem said they were afraid to venture out Wednesday.
Eight Israelis have been killed and dozens injured in the past two weeks. More than 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis, including the fatalities in Wednesday’s attacks.
Netanyahu visited a Border Police base in Jerusalem on Wednesday night. Speaking about the knife assaults, which he compared to suicide attacks, the prime minister told the troops: “I cannot tell you how long this will continue. There are people here who are willing to die.”
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