Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva's Jerusalem Day celebration:
...Jerusalem is also Mount Zion and Moriah Mountain and the Western Wall and "Eternal Israel". We preserve our heart, the heart of our nation.
We will never divide our heart – never. As we believe that our capital is the heart of our nation, it must be united, as the Rabbi just said, it must be connected to the great soul of Eternal Israel, to the Torah and to the intellectual assets created by our Sages throughout the generations.
Marking the 47th Anniversary of the Unification of Jerusalem, May 27, 2014.
And you know where Mount Moriah is.
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Not only is “Temple denial” a recent phenomenon; so is Islam’s interest in the Temple Mount. Muhammad made a point of eliminating pagan sites of worship and of sanctifying only one place: the Kaaba in Mecca. In the 14th century, Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya ruled that sacred Islamic sites are to be found only in the Arabian Peninsula. The Koran does not mention Jerusalem, and Muslim Jerusalemites pray toward Mecca. They do not take off their shoes in the space between the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque.
ReplyDeleteWithout Zionism, there would have been no Muslim sanctification of the Temple Mount and no Arab denial of the existence of the two Jerusalem Temples.
Israelis may still be divided about their reunited city; but their ideological divide is thankfully being narrowed by modern Palestinian mythology.