Daniel Pipes has provided an important service in publishing his current article on the religious standing of Jerusalem for Muslims. He notes that through fourteen centuries,
"Muslims focused on the city when it served their needs and ignored it when it did not. This contrast was especially obvious during the past century. British rule over the city, 1917-48, galvanized a passion for Jerusalem that had been absent during the four hundred years of Ottoman control. Throughout the Jordanian control of the walled city, 1948-67, however, Arabs largely ignored it. . . Muslim interest in the city revived only with the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967. Jerusalem then became the focal point of Arab politics, serving to unify fractious elements. . . .
Particularly amazing to me has been the Muslim denial of Jewish historical roots related to Jerusalem. As Pipes says,
By 1990, the Islamic focus on Jerusalem reached such surreal intensity that Palestinians evolved from celebrating Jerusalem to denying the city’s sacred and historical importance to Jews. The Palestinian establishment – scholars, clerics, and politicians – promoted this unlikely claim by constructing a revisionist edifice made up in equal parts of fabrication, falsehood, fiction, and fraud. It erases all Jewish connections to the Land of Israel, replacing them with a specious Palestinian-Arab connection.
I am stunned and left speechless at this brazen attempt to rewrite history. It makes one gag that anyone can have anything but scorn and contempt for such blaring fraud. Pipes goes on:
Palestinians now claim that Canaanites built Solomon’s Temple, that the ancient Hebrews were Bedouin tribesmen, the Bible came from Arabia, the Jewish Temple “was in Nablus or perhaps Bethlehem” . . . Palestinian Media Watch sums up this process: By turning Canaanites and Israelites into Arabs and the Judaism of ancient Israel into Islam, the Palestinian Authority “takes authentic Jewish history, documented by thousands of years of continuous literature, and crosses out the word ‘Jewish’ and replaces it with the word ‘Arab’.”
The political implication is clear: Jews lack any rights to Jerusalem. As a street banner puts it: “Jerusalem is Arab.” Jews are unwelcome.
Read the whole article and ask what kind of respect should be accorded such criminal intellectual dishonesty.