WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: For our Christian readers: This weekend was the Jewish observance of Tisha B’Av, mourning the destruction of the two Jerusalem Jewish Temples, first by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and then by the Romans in 70 CE. Today, the mainstream Western media, egged on by the Jewish homeland’s delegitimizers, joins in calling Jews residing in historic Jerusalem, where Jews have resided except during periods of foreign invader-expulsion, from the time of King David, Jerusalem “Jewish settlers” in Jerusalem “Jewish settlements.” In this, we should not acquiesce.
A Media Watch Lesson to Draw This Tisha B’Av
“The story is told,” all versions begin, that Napoleon, walking down a Paris street on a summer evening with friends, passed by a building from which cries and lamentations were coming. Inquiring for details, he was told that Jews within were lamenting their Jerusalem Temple’s destruction. Expressing surprise that he had not heard of it happening, he was told the event had occurred seventeen hundred years in the past. All versions end with Napoleon predicting that the Jews would regain their land and holy site.
Thus, Napoleon likely would not have been surprised by the events in June forty-nine years ago when the army of a reborn sovereign homeland Jewish state regained from foreign control Jerusalem’s historic heart, including where the two Jewish Temples had stood successively for a millennium.
I wonder, though, what he would think today of our acquiescence in international and media disparagement and delegitimization of Jewish homeland connection to that Jewish homeland’s Jerusalem core.
From “Temple Mount” to “Al-Aqsa Compound”
Start with the core of the core, the Temple Mount in the Old City.
For a long time, the media used expressions like “known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif” [btw, omitting what Christians call it], but not dominating one name over the other.
Then, in November 2014, YNetNews and Jerusalem journalist/blogger Matthew Kalman reported on a PLO “Media Advisory” titled
“Concern over the use of the inaccurate term ‘Temple Mount’ to refer to Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound in Jerusalem”
The document concluded: “The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is not a disputed territory and all other terms, therefore, are null and void.”
Has this PLO “Media Advisory” borne fruit? At least to some extent in some media quarters.
In July, CAMERA did an analysis, “Mapping Changes in Terminology Used by BBC to Describe the Temple Mount,” which traced BBC usage change in recent years from “known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount” (e.g., 9/29/04) to, e.g., 5/11/14, “Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount.” This treated “Al Aqsa Mosque compound” as the accepted name, with just an exception for Jews.
And CAMERA cited that the exception doesn’t always get stated:
*** “Clashes have broken out between Palestinian youths and Israeli forces at the al Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem.” (BBC, 9/27/15)
*** “Tensions have been particularly high in recent weeks over the long running issue of access to the al Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem” (BBC, 10/1/15)
“East” Jerusalem “Jewish Settlements”
The PLO’s “Media Advisory” left no doubt on just where this “Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound” is:
“Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound is located in East-Jerusalem, an internationally recognized part of the Occupied State of Palestine”
The Palestinian Arabs of the PLO Media Advisory’s “Occupied State of Palestine” have not ruled any part of Jerusalem, not even the never-before existing “East” Jerusalem that invading Jordan seized and ruled for 19 years ending a half-century ago, for one day in history.
That this half-century-ago-ended nineteen-year Jordanian occupation, ousted by a homeland army of homeland Jews, turned today’s Jews from residents of a city in which Jews have been the renewed majority since the mid 1800’s and have lived, except during expulsions by foreign empire invaders, from the time of King David into alien “settlers,” and their neighborhoods into illegitimate “settlements,” which today’s mainstream Western media contemptuously calls them, is disrespect in which we should not acquiesce.
The Jerusalem Jews of the Kingdom of Judah who died in 586 BCE defending the Jews’ First Jerusalem Temple against Babylonians, and the Jerusalem Jews who died in 70 CE defending the Jews’ Second Jerusalem Temple against Rome, both remembered by us this weekend of Tisha B’Av, were not Jerusalem “Jewish settlers.” Nor were the Jerusalem Jews slaughtered by invading Crusaders and by Jerusalem’s other foreign conquerors through the long dark centuries of continuous foreign empire rule between Judaea’s final destruction by Rome and the State of Israel’s rebirth as the land of Israel’s next native state. Nor are today’s Jerusalem Jews.