Someone Wishes to Deny Me Access

On Sunday, I ascended to the Temple Mount, accompanying a group of American Jews.

At the end, I had the normative photograph snapped:

cropped from this one:

and I added this caption:

I know the backdrop is terrible but that's all there is. At present. 

— ‎at ‎Al aqsa mosque - المسجد الاقصى‎.‎

I've been photographed there many times, as in July 1971

and in 1972:

I also uploaded it to various social media platforms.  Like Twitter.

Daniel Seidemann reacted.  He is quite mainstream-accepted. He is often quoted as a knowledgeable source.

First, the evidence. He reacted so:

and I quickly replied, in two tweets:

& to your face if you adopt that tone:In 638 Arabs conquered Jlm and denied, from 1247 on Jews any rights there.They killed Jews who mistakenly walked in.They riot. Call us "stormers" and "breakers-in".Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty Art. 9 unfulfilled.That is terrible.

And then he continued (and he duplicated it at his TerrestrialJerusalem):

By the way, that "mistakenly walked in" refers to two Jews, one in 1873 and another, Asher Itzkowitz on April 11, 1947 both who were murdered by Muslims in the Temple Mount:

I also, later, added this snap of Article 9 of the Jordan-Israel 1994 unfulfilled Peace Treaty:

And then a Harry Reis jumped in an commented, too

Reis' bio reads: "Dorot Fellow. Frm. Special Assistant to #CEO @ADL_National, Research Associate at @WashInstitute, #proudly @BrownUniversity" and more here.

Daniel then continued, fulminating and tweeting:

You explicltly display contempt for Muslim holy site in the backgound, and implicltly threaten to replace it. You should be denied access.

I came back with

Ah.So when they do that to me (all the time) they, according to you, should be denied administration privilege.I'm reporting you.

and then added,

But I can't quite tell if you are implicitly or explicitly illogical.

What bothers me is not Daniel's political orientation. We've been acquainted, basically friends, for 30 years or so since we debated as a Gush Emunim vs. Peace Now team in the late 1980s, if I am not mistaken. I get over that.

I was taken aback by the blatant twisting of my words, so as to provide Muslims and others with ammunition.  He reminded me of the way the photo montage of the Zionist flag was fashioned as if it was actually atop the Dome of the Rock, which first appeared in 1922 and then was used aggressively in 1929 to foment the murderous riots:

The heads of the Yeshivot in the Old Yishuv also used photomontages showing the Dome of the Rock with the Star of David and flags of Zion superimposed in fundraising appeals to Diaspora Jews. It thus came to be widely believed that a Jewish conspiracy was at work to replace the Muslim holy sites by a rebuilt Jewish Temple. The resulting tensions were exploited by both Palestinian Arab and Jewish nationalists.

An example: 

More here:

For a modern version in the LATimes, see here.

Furthermore, as I noted in my comebacks, I did not suggest taking a tractor to remove the Muslim presence, unlike the Muslim earthworks in 1996 when they used tractors for a few years to empty out the southern are of the Temple Mount to create a third mosque, the Marawani, and to destroy Jewish historical artifacts.  The Sifting Project is still going through the tons of earth and finding wonderful and important evidence of the Second and even First Temples, a reality the Muslims deny.

Haaretz does it all the time. Note the language:

Israeli Activists Celebrate Ancient Sukkot Rite Near Flashpoint Temple Mount.

Whipping up sentiment so as to convince Muslims and reinforce their irrationality of an imminent and, at times, even an official Israel-government sponsored intervention.

However, I do not want to avoid the main point: the fundamental and ongoing Jewish belief in a rebuilt and restored Temple. It is in our texts: the Prophets and the Talmud and the Rabbinic commentaries.  Religious proactive Zionism of Rabbis Kalisher and Alkalai were based on the renewal of sacrifices.  All this is unavoidable and cannot be denied.

But to compare this belief to Muslim-initiated violence against Jews, against the archaeological remains on the Temple Mount, to statements like that of PA head Mahmoud Abbas:

"The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours... and they [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem."

or the previous claim of Yassir Arafat that the Temple wasn't in Jerusalem, that we witness is not only politically nasty, but totally provides the Muslim Arabs with Jewish-justified pretexts to injure Jews, and worse.

They act, with Seidemann's assistance - intended or unintended - with impunity because we Jews have no rights, as he would have it, not even to hope and believe in our tradition and heritage.  The Muslims can degrade us in favor of a winged horse, al-Buraq, but Jews cannot even be proud of real history and a hoped-for future.


P.S.

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