Most people in the world today would take umbrage with the concept of the ancient land of Canaan being Israel’s “Promised Land.” Promised by whom? they whine. You could say, “By God,” but then it becomes an issue of who your God is. In point of fact, Muslims think it’s their promised land, even though Allah is not actually on record as giving the land to them. One commentator has offered a million dollar prize to the first person who can find a specific mention of Jerusalem in the Qur’an, and his money is quite safe. Columnist Moshe Kohn notes, tongue in cheek, that references to Jerusalem and Zion appear just as frequently in the Qur’an “as they do in the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, the Taoist Tao-Te Ching, the Buddhist Dhamapada and the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta,” which is to say, they don’t. Allah’s supposed revelation to Muhammad doesn’t mention Israel’s holy city at all, except for a few cryptic and esoteric references that devotees interpret to mean Jerusalem. It’s true that the holy city was Muhammad’s qibla—the direction he bowed in prayer—for a short time when he was trying to convince the Jews of Yathrib (Medina) that he was their Messiah. But then he changed tactics, attacked and plundered the local Jews, and changed his qibla to Mecca—the center of pagan worship from which he had fled. So why does dar al-Islam consider Jerusalem, and specifically the temple mount, to be so central to their “religion?” (Did I say religion? Actually, judged solely on its scriptures, Islam is actually a militant political doctrine—it’s no more or less religious than the Ku Klux Klan or Hitler’s Nazis.) Why do the “Palestinians” insist that Jerusalem must be the capital city of their nation? In December, 2001, I was in Jerusalem doing research for a book, and my co-author and I had the opportunity to interview eight or ten bona fide blood-on-their-hands terrorists (first a group from Fatah and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, and later with a group comprised of al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Hamas members). And we asked them that very question. They replied that their prophet, Muhammad, flew to the temple (which wasn’t there at the time), and thence to heaven, on his epic “night’s journey,” on a magical flying jackass called a buraq. And that somehow made the land their possession, they said. (By that logic, I’d assume Charles Lindberg’s fans own Paris.) Let’s be honest, here. Muhammad was in Mecca at the time. His wife (Umm, daughter of Abu Talib) reported that he never left his bed that night—it was just a dream. This all just serves to prove one thing, I guess: you can’t get to heaven from Mecca. Closer to the truth (not to mention sanity) is their claim to the land by right of conquest: Islamic jihad raiders (nothing “religious” about them) seized Jerusalem by force of arms about five years after Muhammad’s death. But since the Ottoman Caliphate lost the land to the British and their allies as a result of World War I, the “right of conquest” argument won’t fly, at least not in the Arabs’ favor. In fact, if “ownership by right of conquest” is a valid concept, then the Israelis should still be in undisputed possession of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and half of Lebanon. And the “West Bank” would not be considered “occupied” territory—it would be part of Israel. Period. The Arabs can’t have it both ways.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 13:53:24 +0000
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