Mounting injustice

Editorial

Since 1967, the Muslim world has found it easy to rally opposition against Israel by depicting it as an aggressive force bent on usurping the third-holiest site in Islam.

The threat of the "Judaizing monster" (why can we never hear that term without seeing Woody Allen's mother's face in a cloud over Manhattan?) running rough-shod over Islamic holy sites has been a core unifying image of the anti-Israel movement worldwide, particularly among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims.

So the recent Israeli reparation work to the area that is sacred to Jew and Muslim alike – approved in advance, like Ariel Sharon's "provocative" walk there in 2000, by the Muslim religious authority – has no bearing or impact on any Muslim (or any other) sacred place. It is a simple restoration of a faltering staircase.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, the Israel Antiquities Authority "co-ordinated its salvage dig by the Mughrabi Gate of the Old City with the Islamic Wakf, the Jordanian government and all other relevant authorities before its archeologists began their work this week. Everyone understood that the excavation is being conducted 70 metres away from the Temple Mount and will in no way affect it."

Everyone, that is, except viewers of world media who, fed on images of rioting Palestinians disrupting Jewish prayers, have been led to believe that Israel is cavalierly digging around the ancient foundations of the Muslim holy site.

World media coverage dovetails beautifully with racist predispositions to see Israel as a grasping, destructive, desecrater of sacredness. The world's willingness to accept this sort of defamation with credulity is more stark when the current case is compared with the vandalism to Jewish and Christian holy sites over the past 60 years perpetrated by, or with the passive complicity of, Jordan and, more recently, the Palestinian Authority. For example, nearly complete silence greeted the Palestinian dump trucks that carted away untold relics among tons of ancient artifact-rich earth dislodged in recent years by the Palestinian Authority from Judaism's holiest site and transported to landfill sites. Where was the world's sense of outrage about that?

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