By DAVID PFEFFER
This Monday thousands of Jews from all over the world will pack the plaza at the Western Wall of Temple Mount. The last remnant of the Second Temple in Jerusalem absorbs millennia of long-exiled Jewish tears and prayers. Above the Wall, on Israel’s holiest ground, loom the conquering mosques of Islam.Priestly Cohanim, direct descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, will fulfill their duty and bless the assembled masses with the same words spoken by Aaron to the assembled Israelites at Sinai – “May God bless you and keep you, may God shine His face upon you and be gracious unto you, may God turn His countenance unto you and grant you peace.”Though they do not always succeed, hundreds of Israeli security forces will risk their lives to prevent murderous Palestinian attacks during these prayers.Despite Koranic imperative that Jerusalem and Temple Mount belong to the Jews (http://www.templemount.org/quranland.html), Palestinian myth asserts that there is no Jewish history in Jerusalem or at Temple Mount, which they call Al-Aksa.If there never was a Temple, one wonders then just where did Jesus overturn the tables of the money changers.Recently the prestigious international authority entrusted with protecting the world’s precious cultural sites officially accepted the myth – UNESCO no longer refers to Temple Mount as such, replacing it with Al-Aksa, a Muslim holy site alone, thus effectively eradicating this most central piece of three thousand years of Jewish history (http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/UNESCO-says-no-Jewish-history-on-Temple-Mount-Hebron-and-Bethlehem-Integral-part-of-Palestine-451517). Within a few days, a Palestinian blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem, ending a much-needed respite from on-going terror attacks.Is it too much to ask that UNESCO refrain from justifying the killing of Jews? Are Jews still allowed to pray at the Western Wall?Article II of the United Nations’ definition of genocide includes “(a) Killing members of the (targeted) group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide#International_law).Laying ground for genocide includes cultural de-legitimization of the targeted group and the eradication of that group’s history. ISIS is in the habit of destroying archeological evidence of pre-Islamic civilizations – in its own mind, this proves they never existed, that there has always been only Islam. It seems that ISIS and UNESCO have something in common.Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch enumerates eight stages of genocide in which a dominant group stigmatizes and proceeds to eliminate a targeted group (op cit) – here’s a surprise: the dominant group is the Palestinians and the targeted group is the Jews – including classification into “us and them” (occupied and occupiers), symbolization and dehumanization of the targeted group (Jews = descendants of apes and pigs), organization to destroy the target (Hamas tunnels into Israel, Hezbollah’s 100,000 rockets, Iran’s nuclear weapons program), polarization via spreading hatred of the target (Palestinian school curriculum, Abu-Mazen incitement), preparation by separating the target (no Jews allowed in Palestine), extermination (bus bombings, knifings, car rammings, rocket attacks), and denial since the killers do not consider their actions as crime (justification of terrorism as freedom fighting, reverence of Palestinian killers as martyrs).
If “genocide” seems overboard for bus bombs and potentially nuclear-tipped Iranian rockets with “Israel must be wiped off the map” scrawled on their sides, how about the lesser charge of "ethnic cleansing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing)? According to Palestinianism, reincarnated Israel is a foreign occupier and all of Israel is Palestine. Jews are to go back to Europe, to wherever they came from – conveniently ignoring the fact that they came from Israel. And Israel came long, long before Palestine.We live in a fascinating, frightening time – when vast forces collide in the crucible of history, when a new religion (Palestinianism) takes hold and old religions (Christianity, Judaism) give ground, when modern civilization recoils from the onslaught of fanatic medievalism – when all hell breaks loose. At the vanguard against the savagery sits a hated little country as small as New Jersey – Israel, the dirty Jew among nations, blamed for all the world’s ills. Poor Palestine – how can one expect a hopeless people – with no way out of their suppression – to react, other than violently? It never seems to occur to the prestigious authorities of the world that perhaps their own autocracts suppress the nations of Islam.May God bless you and keep you, may God shine His face upon you and be gracious unto you, may God turn His countenance unto you – and grant you peace.