WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, known in the West as “the Temple Mount” for millennia, has been subjected to increasingly Jewish connection- delegitimizing name changes by western media in recent years. No site is holier to the Jewish people, so take this as an egregious instance of what we must stand up against.
From “Temple Mount,” Media Caves to “Third Holiest Mosque” for Whole Site – A Study in Scurrilous
The Western Wall, a Herod-built retaining wall of the Mount on which two Jewish Temples successively stood for a thousand years, has never been the Jewish people’s holiest site. That highest holiness adheres to the Temple Mount, site of those First and Second Temples. For long, the Western Wall, long called “the Wailing Wall,” was as close as Jews could come to the Holy of Holies place inside those Temples, and hence the Wall became the holiest place of Jewish prayer. And so it is the delegitimizing of Jewish connection to the Temple Mount that constitutes the gravest assault on Jewish belief.
In recent years, that gravest of assaults has gained steam, not just among Israel’s and Jews’ open enemies, but among that self-proclaimed conveyer of unvarnished news reporting, the mainstream western media. Western media news providers have gone from
[1] printing the Mount’s western and Muslim names in parallel
to
[2] printing the Mount’s Muslim name as the accepted name, with a rustic reference to how the place is known to the Jews
to
[3] printing the Mount’s Muslim name as the name of the site, period
to
[4] imbuing the entire Temple Mount complex with the “third holiest Muslim mosque” status historically associated only with the Al-Aqsa mosque building at the Mount’s southern end.
*** In 2016, the media-fairness-to-Israel championing group CAMERA noted that over the decade from 2004 to 2014 the western media pillar BBC had gone from
[1] “known to Muslims as the Haram-al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount”
to
]2] “Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount.”
*** On July 15, 2017, both Times of Israel and the Philadelphia Inquirer published the same AP photo of two Jewish policemen standing guard before an entrance to the Temple Mount. TOI captioned that photo
“Israel border police officers stand guard at the entrance to the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, Friday, July 14, 2017. (AP/Mahmoud Illean)”
Philadelphia’s Inq captioned that photo
[3] “Israeli Border Police officers stand guard at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem. Mahmoud Illean / AP”
*** On May 23, 2021, Israel reopened the Temple Mount to access by Jews after having closed it to them due to Muslim violence. A May 23 Jerusalem Post article, “Temple Mount Reopens to Jews After Weeks of Clashes and Unrest,” was accompanied by a photo of Jews peacefully walking on the plaza of the Mount, with the Dome of the Rock in the background.
The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t report it that way. On May 24, it headlined
[4] “Mosque Visits Resume; A holy site in Jerusalem reopened to Jewish visitors”
Above this headline, the Inq ran a photo showing Arabs, one at least seemingly throwing a stone, confronting Israeli police two days before on the plaza with the Dome in the background. The Inq captioned this photo
“Palestinians clash with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound Friday. [4] On Sunday, a group of 250 Jews visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.”
“Mosque visits” didn’t “resume”; they’d never been suspended for Muslims. And it wasn’t “mosque visits,” but entire Temple Mount visits, that Israel had suspended temporarily for Jews. And on the Mount’s reopening to them, Jews ascended the Mount, our people’s holiest site, not into a building that’s a religious site of another people’s religion. For the Philadelphia Inquirer to call Jews ascending the Temple Mount their having “visit the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam,” is doing the Inq’s previous calling of what’s been known in the West as “the Temple Mount” for millennia “the Al-Aqsa mosque compound” one better. This time the Inq extended both the name “Al Aqsa mosque” and that mosque’s Muslim “third holiest” status to the entire Temple Mount compound. It would be difficult to conceive of a more delegitimizing delegitimization of a holy site of the Jews.
What We’re Doing and How You’ll be Able To Help Us
I’ve occasionally mentioned in these weekly emails a small group, “Facts On Israel,” with a 501c3 and a website, www.factsonisrael.com, with which I’m involved. Our website’s motto is a saying of our late colleague Lee Bender:
“If you forfeit the language, you forfeit our heritage and history.”
We wrote a book, Lee and I, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z (Amazon). We built a Powerpoint talk, loosely based on the book, “Misleading Media Expressions,” which we gave, Lee said over fifty times, to men’s clubs, sisterhoods, a cigar club (really), and at a ZOA National Convention in The House That Mort Built. Go to our website, select the “Videos” page, and take a look at that “Misleading Media Expressions” Powerpoint talk, recorded by a professional videographer. That will give you an Anti-Israel Media Bias 101 impression of the scope and depth of what we’re up against, of which the media calling our Temple Mount exclusively “the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound” is but one anti-Jewish homeland pejorative in a whole coordinated loaded lexicon. We got positive response a couple weeks back to our #1075, “’West Bank’ – Just One of the Loaded Lexicon’s Jewish Homeland-Delegitimizing Poisoned Pejoratives,” which briefly identified a couple of dozen. We think awakening people’s awareness of the media’s and others’ uniformly anti-Jewish homeland loaded lexicon is important, and that we have some background to do it.
We’ve started constructing a checklist of anti-Israel imbalanced terms lacing Arab-Israeli conflict reporting and public discourse, and a background document in greater depth, which we hope to place in the hands of groups and unaffiliated individuals. When the time comes, we’ll ask you to help us arrange this distribution. Your help and encouragement have kept this email going for a thousand and seventy-seven weeks now. “We’re just getting started.”