Provocative Incitements

To the historically and culturally illiterate nitwits at this rag, praying at the most important site in Judaism is the equivalent of punctuating 'my heart goes out to you' with a straight-armed salute at a celebratory rally.

Unmentioned in this article, yesterday saw Jews worldwide marking Tisha B'Av, a solemn festival of mourning which commemorates the destruction of both the first and second Temples...and the ruins of the latter would be where, exactly?

There's a bit more to this 'provocative incitement' than a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammed. Maybe now would be the time for one of those periodic reminders of how the Al-Aqsa mosque got there in the first place...

For it was plonked on top of Judaism’s most holy site, deliberately, not because the location was somehow especially sacred for Muslims, but as an act of calculated colonialist trespass and affront, a 'provocative incitement' no less, along the lines of what the Spanish elected to do to the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán/Mexico City and elsewhere. (Sure enough today one often sees individuals dressed as 'Aztecs' conducting rituals around the Catholic Cathedral which could best be described as non-canonical.)

Whilst besieging Jerusalem, Caliph Omar conceived the plan of demolishing the christian holiest of holies, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and building his triumphal mosque at that sacred location.

But the church survived, for the time being being at least — one of the Caliph's successors was less given to the path of compromise — as the Patriarch of now conquered Jerusalem, a wily Greek, 'persuaded' Omar that what he really wanted to do was humiliate the Jews, not the Christians.

All this is recorded historical fact.

I know that the Guardian doesn't seem to be much interested in facts any more, but anything else you might have picked up about this 'controversial' site and the origins and sacred significance of the structure on top are part of a mythological morass of self-serving fantasies that the Arabs and their all-encompassing political-religious ideology have woven around their presence in Jerusalem.

Should Jews be wont to cause offence by praying at this spot, good on them. It's what Guardian lefties often refer to as 'resistance'.

And, in theory at least, a variety of such in which no real hurt is done, except to feelings — it's just religious idiots doing what religious idiots do, and if some of these idiots choose to adopt a posture of intemperate, vindictive umbrage, that would be revealing, wouldn't it?