Tel-Chai Nation

According to two writers, a sad case of politics combined with Islamofascism have led to this:

King Abdullah of Jordan has announced that his country is ready for a confrontation if there is any change in the status quo in the holy places.

This statement highlights even more Israel’s lack of governance in the holiest place for the Jewish People, the Temple Mount, and even more than that, the lack of interest that the majority of the Israeli public and media have in the Temple Mount.

The average Israeli citizen celebrates the Jewish holidays faithfully, circumcises his male children and makes a bar mitzvah for them and on the other hand, is not so aware of how central the Temple Mount is in Judaism.

This Jewish site is absent from the Israeli public’s awareness due to political and media-related reasons. The Temple Mount is considered a dangerous place, a center of fanaticism and a trouble spot and therefore it is preferable to stay away from it. The best thing to do is not to relate to it at all, if possible. The reasons often quoted are religious, ideological and political, and they have been around for a long time.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, it was very difficult for Judaism to adapt itself to religious life without a temple and now it finds it hard to rid itself of the traditions that have been formed since then. The Zionist ideology was ruled by the socialist movements for whom religion was no more than an opiate for the masses. The fear of the reaction of the Muslim world concludes this list of concerns.

On the issue of socialism, that's something very appalling about past history of community "representatives". I think there was a socialist named Martin Buber working as a would-be advocate for Israel, and honestly, that he would adhere to a repellent ideology that's led to only so many tragedies of its own is disgusting. As is the media's own approach to the Temple Mount issue:

Why, therefore, do Israeli media ignore the place where the Temple once stood? One can see that the media’s disregard is due to two factors: The topic of the Temple Mount is considered to be outmoded, unfashionable and reactionary, leading to such tragedies as religious wars, and the fear that if Jews do anything on the Temple Mount, the entire Muslim world will unite against little Israel.

Advocating cowardice and refusing by that same twisted logic to condemn advocators of violence is another offensive direction.

Now here's another op-ed by yet another two writers on the same issue, and they point to a certain Haredi rabbi who said some damaging things in the past. Here's what he said this time:

A recent article penned by Rabbi Avi Shafran at Religious News Service contains errors of fact and interpretation regarding prayer on the Temple Mount that we find disturbing or at least inaccurate.

In particular, Rabbi Shafran writes that according to “Israeli law, non-Muslims may go up to the Temple Mount to visit, but not to pray or conduct rites.”

There is no such law. Jews are free to pray on the Temple Mount per Israeli Civil Law, upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court. The Court does allow the Israel Police to limit freedom to worship if it might cause a “disturbance of public order” but, in practice, Jews are free to pray quietly and use a prayer book on their smartphones.

Rabbi Shafran claims that “religious reasons” for prohibiting prayer on the Mount are “complex.” He states, “To enter such a holy place, Jewish law requires any Jewish man or woman who has had contact with or been under the same roof as a deceased person to undergo a purification ritual that involves, among other things, a perfectly red heifer that has never been worked in any way.”

This is inaccurate. Most of the Temple Mount complex does indeed have a purification procedure that is required before entry, but it is not the procedure that requires the ashes of the red heifer.

Shafran has a history of acting as an apologist for Haredi extremism as well, so this looks like something just around the corner for him. It's not hard to guess ultra-Orthodox like him are also guilty of disdaining their own Jewish heritage symbolized by the Temple Mount. Melanie Phillips made a vital point who the party to be offended by is, following the visit public security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made to the site in the past week:

In any sane universe, this is simply unhinged. Ben-Gvir was fully entitled to be there. He did nothing out of the ordinary. Other Israeli Jews, including government ministers, regularly visit the site.

The people actually responsible for inciting violence over the Temple Mount are the Palestinian Arabs. Since the 1920s, they have been provoking fanatical religious hysteria and the murder of Israelis with the wickedly false claim that the Jews were either storming or planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Similar claims were made in 2022 when Palestinian Arabs turned Al-Aqsa into an ammunition store from where they hurled rocks down at Jews praying at the Western Wall and attacked Jews making their way there.

The reason is that, as the site of the Jewish Temple that was the focus of Jewish religious life in ancient Israel until it was destroyed in 70 CE, the Temple Mount stands at the very center of the Jews’ unique entitlement to Jerusalem and the land.

That’s why the Palestinians have tried to destroy the archaeological evidence that has been dug up at the site over the years. They attempt to wipe the Jews out of their own history in the land—centuries before the first Arabs or Muslims invaded it—in order to support the laughably bogus claim that the Palestinian Arabs were its indigenous people.

Yet this use of the Temple Mount for incitement, violence and religious supersessionism draws no condemnation from the Western left. They do not acknowledge that this aggression, which strikes against Judaism itself, is the real cause of the Middle East conflict.

Instead, the Biden administration condemned the Ben-Gvir excursion as an “unacceptable” and “unilateral” action that “undercut the historic status quo.” Not only was this untrue, but the status quo, which Israel has upheld, is itself unacceptable.

Correct. And Ben-Gvir and company did the right thing to attend the Temple Mount, and not even bend to the Haredi cowards who opposed his visit. Indeed, what they did is part and parcel of the problem with cowardice, something the aforementioned Shafran's also been specializing in for goodness knows how long. Such phony "representatives" cannot be allowed to represent Judaism in any way, shape or form. Much like the left they otherwise have something in common with, they're just as bad for Israel.

This whole subject should make clear the Temple Mount has to be made part of public awareness again, and additionally to make clear that to exclude anybody from it on the basis of race and sex is equally unacceptable.

Labels: anti-semitism, dhimmitude, haredi corruption, islam, Israel, Israeli Arabs, Jerusalem, jihad, jordan, Judaism, Knesset, Moonbattery, political corruption, United States