Great UN News

The news (thanks IMRA):-

Arab League discusses filing UN complaint on Al-Aqsa violations

CAIRO (Ma'an - Palestinian news agency) -- The Arab League permanent representatives' emergency session discussed on Wednesday the possibility of filing a complaint to the UN Security Council regarding recent Israeli attacks on the Al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem. The discussion comes amid a controversial Israeli Knesset discussion about extending Israeli sovereignty over the compound, which is holy to both Muslims and Jews but as part of the 1994 peace agreement with Jordan is under Jordanian custodianship.

Finally we can explain

a) the Temple Mount is indeed holy and sacred to Judaism

b) that it was there prior to the Arab invasion, conquest and occupation of the Land of Israel and under Jewish rule *

c) that the treay refers to Islamic sites and that should be limited to buildings such as mosques but not the entire enclosed precincts

d) that "custodianship" is like administration but not sovereignty

e) that playing soccer there is a no-no

f) that threats to scrap that peace treaty are extremist fundamentalism and faith-based fanaticsm

g) that the term "custodianship" doesn't appear in the treaty but this does: "the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem"

h) that this also appears: "Each Party will provide freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance...The Parties will act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions, with the aim of working towards religious understanding, moral commitment, freedom of religious worship, and tolerance and peace."


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*

The Islamic connection to Jerusalem is older than the Jewish. The Palestinian "minister" of religious endowments asserts that Jerusalem has "always" been under Muslim sovereignty. Likewise, Ghada Talhami, a polemicist, asserts that "There are other holy cities in Islam, but Jerusalem holds a special place in the hearts and minds of Muslims because its fate has always been intertwined with theirs." Always? Jerusalem's founding antedated Islam by about two millennia, so how can that be? Ibrahim Hooper of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations explains this anachronism: "the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem does not begin with the prophet Muhammad, it begins with the prophets Abraham, David, Solomon and Jesus, who are also prophets in Islam." In other words, the central figures of Judaism and Christianity were really proto-Muslims. This accounts for the Palestinian man-in-the-street declaring that "Jerusalem was Arab from the day of creation." There has even been some scholarship, from 'Ayn Shams University in Egypt, alleging to show that Al-Aqsa Mosque predates the Jewish antiquities in Jerusalem – by no less than two thousand years.

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