- Mary Elizabeth Hansen
Recently, the well-respected Arab-American journalist, Joseph Farah, wrote a column on the historical revisionism occurring in regards to the origins of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The culprits are high-ranking members of the Palestinian Authority. Their claims are absurd.
Farah quoted from an interview given by the Palestinian Authority Mufti, Ikrima Sabri, to a German newspaper. "There is not (even) the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history." This is not the first time that the Mufti has made this ridiculous claim. And, he has cohorts making the same claim. Yassar Arafat is supposed to have made similar statements. Accordingly and incredibly, a number of Western newspapers have acquiesced to this make-believe history and now refer to the Temple Mount as the "alleged" site of the first and second Jewish temples.
This blatant and outrageous attempt to rewrite history is not new in the dhimmi world. The Christian Copts of Egypt have had their history, language, and culture denied and suppressed for centuries by the Arab-Muslim majority whose ancestors invaded Coptic Egypt centuries ago. The once proud and flourishing Nubian Christian culture has been decimated by the Arab-Islamic invaders and their descendents in what is now the Sudan. Armenia has struggled for centuries to preserve its history, culture and language from decimation by the Muslim Turks. Modern day Turkey, the supposed model for Islamic democracy, works hardest to suppress and deny any official acknowledgement about its role in the Armenian genocide of 1915. The tiny Christian remnant living in Turkey exist as dhimmis in the city of Islamic Istanbul, once the capital of the Christian world, Constantinople.
Some of these changes and losses of history and geography are regrettable permanent. Some are not. The Palestinian Authority should not be allowed to blatantly rewrite history in front of the whole world, with major newspapers aiding and abetting them. Jerusalem, the city of David and Solomon, has always been and continues to be the cornerstone of Jewish history. Of course, Jerusalem also has enormous historical significance for Christians too. If the history of the Saturday people, the Jews, can be erased by repeated denials and lies, so can the history of the Sunday people, the Christians.
Denial of the true history of Jerusalem brings to mind a dangerous parallel, the denial of the Holocaust. Neither denial should be tolerated by a civilized world. Toleration of these lies only encourages more deceptions and revisions of history. In turn, this can result in some very evil consequences.