‘Western Wall was never part of temple’

* Muhammedanism is build on lies and deception. But because Muhammad was ‘the last prophet’ and Islam makes all other religions obsolete, what for do you need temples, churches or synagogues? What for do you need books if you have the Koran? All there really ever was is mosques, and if you keep repeating it long enough you might even get yourself to believe it…

* This is part of the ongoing effort to rewrite history and appropriate the holy sites of Jews and Christians. It gains a principal impetus from the Qur’anic delegitimization of Judaism and Christianity, and presentation of Islam as the true message of the founders of those religions.

By Mike Said JP

The former mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrema Sabri, has made the claim that there never was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall was really part of a mosque.

An aerial view of the Temple Mount and Western Wall.

“There was never a Jewish temple on Al-Aksa [the mosque compound] and there is no proof that there was ever a temple,” he told The Jerusalem Post via a translator. “Because Allah is fair, he would not agree to make Al-Aksa if there were a temple there for others beforehand.”

Sabri rejected Judaism’s claim to the Western Wall as part of the outer wall of the Second Temple.

“The wall is not part of the Jewish temple. It is just the western wall of the mosque,” he said. “There is not a single stone with any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews.”

* If Sabri could read perhaps he would know that every stone in Jerusalem has ‘Israel’ written all over it.

Asked if Jews would ever be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount under Muslim control, he replied: “It is not the Temple Mount, you must say Al-Aksa. And no Jews have the right to pray at the mosque. It was always only a mosque – all 144 dunams, the entire area. No Jewish prayer. If the Jews want real peace, they must not do anything to try to pray on Al-Aksa. Everyone knows that.”

“Zionism tries to trick the Jews claiming that this was part of a Jewish temple, but they dug there and they found nothing,” Sabri added.

Archeologists overseeing Islamic infrastructure work on the Mount announced this week that they had unveiled a sealed archeological level dating back to the First Temple period.

The First Temple was built by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE, and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was built 70 years later, enlarged during the first century BCE by Herod, and destroyed by the Romans in the year 70.

The Dome of the Rock and Al-Aksa Mosque were constructed on the Temple Mount site in the late seventh century. (?)

The controversial issue of the holy sites is expected to come up during negotiations ahead of a US-sponsored summit on the Middle East in Annapolis later this year.

Palestinian leaders, most notably the late Yasser Arafat, have consistently denied Jewish claims to the Mount.

*Arafart quote: “We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. . . . We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.”

* “Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.”

* “I kill for the sake of my cause; wouldn’t I lie for it?”
- Yasser Arafat

Sabri made the comments in an interview with the Post’s Friday supplement, In Jerusalem, for a cover story on how religious leaders view the capital.

Fitzgerald: Temple? What Temple?

This is perfectly consonant with the Islamic worldview. The earth belongs to Allah and His Messenger Muhammad — which means, in human terms, those who are the Believers in Allah and that Messenger. Everyone else must either convert, be killed, or in some cases be permitted to live, but only in a condition of permanent humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, as “dhimmis.”

Nothing else has value. Nothing else is of interest. And since everyone since time began — a nice bit of backdating — is in the Muslim view born a Muslim, but for one reason or another falls away (talk about a bad environment!) — every claim by those of other faiths are meaningless.

Sometimes you smash the Bamiyan Buddhas, when you can finally get the right dynamite, after a thousand years of smashing Buddhist stupas, and Hindu temples, all over Asia. Sometimes you turn a church, or many churches, into foundations for mosques (see the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus), or turn the whole thing, merely by adding minarets, into a mosque (see the Hagia Sophia), taking care to break off all the crosses and vandalizing any pictures that depict persons. Sometimes you simply deny the claim altogether, as in the case of the Temple Mount.

This statement is not a strange one. It is one that almost every single “Palestinian” and for that matter, if asked, hundreds of millions of Muslims, would agree with. It is the “Palestinians” who own the Land of Israel. It is they who were always there, since time immemorial, tilling the soil. Nothing about Israel has anything to do with Jews or with Christians. It is a Muslim land. It became, of course, a Muslim “land” when Muslims conquered it, and let it fall into ruin and desolation — but it was still a Muslim “land” no matter how indifferent Muslims were to it, except as a place important, as a holy land, to Jews and to Christians, who therefore must be denied any claim to it, or any right to live in it, or even to visit it without strict permission of their Muslim masters.

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