Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The dig damage continues: Policeman Assaulted Trying to Stop Illegal Temple Mount Dig
Officials of the Moslem Waqf (religious body) on the Temple Mount are digging there illegally, likely destroying precious artifacts from as early as the First Temple period. So say eyewitnesses and representatives of the Committee for the Prevention of the Destruction of Temple Mount Antiquities.
Gideon Charlap, a top Jerusalem architect and Temple Mount expert, told Arutz-7 what he saw when he visited the Temple Mount on Tuesday: "The Arabs there are digging a deep north-to-south trench, up to a meter [1.1 yards] deep. It is being dug in the area that served during Holy Temple times as the Ezrat Nashim [the area known as the Women's Courtyard, though it was not reserved only for women -ed.]. The trench passes through three east-to-west walls, according to my calculations - walls that probably served as separations for the Temple's offices and the like. This means that the destruction is tremendous..."
"At one point during the digging," Charlap continued, "a policeman - apparently a Druze - tried to stop the work from going on, and actually entered the cabin of the tractor. A struggle ensued, and when the Arabs finally pushed him out, he actually stood in the trench and physically blocked the rest of the work!"
Charlap said that at that point, the chief officer of the Temple Mount police station, Shai Alali, arrived on the scene. "But instead of stopping the lawbreakers," Charlap related with incredulity, "he tried to 'calm down' the policeman!"
Charlap said he was unable to see how the story developed from there, "because our allotted time was over." Jews are permitted onto the site - Judaism's most sacred anywhere in the world - only four or fewer hours a day...
BBC also has a report worth reading: Israeli anger over holy site work
The BBC report predictably focuses on the religious aspects -- "Jews believe X, Muslims believe Y..." But so what? I am not religious, but one does not need to practice to be outraged by this sort of thing. First is the issue of respect -- if Muslims deserve to have their religious sensibilities respected, then surely Jews deserve the same so long as they are legitimate beliefs not concocted on the spot for political purposes.
Further, the religious aspect is secondary (to me) to the historical aspect, the respect for antiquity, for knowledge of the past. The world was rightfully outraged over the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas because they were a part of humanity's birthright. Imagine a fiend taking a backhoe to the Parthenon, the Coliseum, Stonehenge, Machu Pichu..or worse, some similar sites not yet uncovered and documented. Imagine a razor-blade to a long-lost cache of Rembrandts. Of course, this concern carries its own, non-conventionally religious value system, as none of these things have any intrinsic value beyond their raw materials, but this an abstract I'll cop to. Objects of religious veneration shouldn't lose their value amongst the agnostic simply because they are venerated by the religious.
From Uri Avnery ( http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery02132007.html )
We can only hope that the waqf treats the complaints of Israeli archeologists and Zionist racists with all the contempt they deserve.
As for the importance of the Temple in Jewish religion, Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin identifies it as the abode of the spirit of idolatry.
Here is the evolution of Christianity, Islam and Judaism after the Roman period destruction of the 2nd Temple.
First Constantinian Christianity crystallizes in the 4th century, followed in the 7th-8th century by Islam, which is an evolved form of Jamesian Christian Judaism. Only around the 10th century through the efforts or because of the efforts of Saadyah Gaon, his colleagues and his enemies do medieval Rabbinic and Karaitic Judaisms crystallize. Before that time period using the name "Jews" for the adherents of the non-Christian currents that developed out of Judean-Samarian Temple religion is incorrect. Saadyah Gaon does not use the terms Jews in this way. He uses meyahedim/muwahhiduna and calls the religion yihud/tawhid. (Those h’s are hets.) It almost sounds like Muhammad ibn Abdi-l-Wahhab.
In short modern Rabbinic and modern Karaite Judaism have far less connection to the Jerusalame Temple than either Islam or Christianity.
What utter hog wash by an open anti-Semite. Sadia Gaon was a Jewish community leader aside from being a philosopher and RABBI.
Jewish always = Yehud, just as Yehud evelved from Hebrew. A tradition UNBROKEN by anti-Semite turd burglars, who have tried again and again to brand us everything under the sun but what we are... an indigenous people of the Levant with a moral claim to our homeland.
Careful scholars distinguish between Israelite, Judahite, Judean and Jew, and the ancestors of modern ethnic Ashkenazim were only just beginning to practice various forms of Judaism when Medieval Rabbinic and Karaite Judaism first began to crystallize.
A common Palestinian origin for all groups that adhered to the Judean Samarian Temple religion was unlikely in Hasmonean times, and the Hasmoneans seem to have created or encouraged the pilgrimage festivals as a way to create a unified consciousness as an easy way to raise money once the Hasmoneans as priests managed to consolidate both religious and also political authority in their own hands.
Careful Nazis make distinctions where there arent any... like Jews being 50% human, likewise Mr. "Joachim Martillo".
Fact is no relevant history of Ashkenazim contradict the STANDARD model mentioned above. What History doesn't mention , and modern genetic testing does (for one voiding that idiotic Kazar hypothesis) is show distinct and un arguable line of decent. Bringing in the Karaites is further strawman hogwash since they are repatriated in great numbers (majority) into the Israeli polity, just like all Mizrachim. And the Samaritan Temple cult continues today. I wish the Samaritans had the capability to reverse the ethnic cleansing of Samaria, to reverse more of a thousand years of dhimitude and humiliation at the hands of the Arab occupiers.