Non-Muslim prayer on Temple Mount

Jerusalem court upholds Jewish prayer on Temple Mount

By JEREMY SHARON 3/03/2015 | Jerusalem Post

Security services prohibit non-Muslims from praying or engaging in other forms of worship on the site, claiming such activity triggers Palestinian violence.

Activists hailed what they labeled as an historic victory on Monday, after the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court issued a ruling ostensibly backing claims that Jews be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount.

Activist Yehudah Glick had brought a law suit against the Israel Police for banning him for two years from visiting the site because of video evidence of him praying there.

Glick, who was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt last year by a Palestinian extremist, was banned from the Temple Mount between 2011 and 2013 after he was seen uttering a Jewish prayer at the site in a Channel 10 broadcast.

The security services prohibit non-Muslims from praying or engaging in other forms of worship on the Temple Mount, claiming that such activity inevitably triggers Palestinian violence.

The Supreme Court has previously upheld the theoretical right for Jews to pray at the site, although it has stated that the security services are permitted to take security considerations into account when deciding whether to allow non-Muslim prayer there.

More: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Jerusalem-court-upholds-Jewish-prayer-on-Temple-Mount-392744

We’ll see what happens. Muslims paid no attention to that before, will they now?

Funny how any non-Muslim prayer agitates and offends Muslims. So your freedom of religion triggers their Muslim violence. But we have “phobias”?

Pope Francis recently visited the Temple Mount. I hope he did not engage in any triggering prayer while there. (he probably knew better)

Well, let’s not trigger those sensitive Muslims.

Terrorism 101

Palestinian Incitement, Attacks, Glorification

IPT News
November 18, 2014

The recent spike in Palestinian terrorist attacks targeting Israelis throughout the country occur amid growing incitement to violence and glorification of terrorism emanating from Palestinian Authority and Fatah officials and institutions. Tuesday’s heinous attack on a Jerusalem synagogue was the “direct result” of that campaign, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Within hours, Palestinian social media featured images glorifying the bloody slaughter of Jews while they worshiped.

What follows is a list of recent attacks and examples of the incitement and glorification prominent in Palestinian social media outlets.

Most of the violence has centered in Jerusalem, as Palestinians continue to engage in rock throwing, Molotov cocktail attacks, and rioting in the capital and surrounding neighborhoods. The following section outlines major Palestinian terrorist attacks targeting Israelis in recent weeks.

• November 18, 2014: Two Palestinian terrorists stormed a Jerusalem synagogue armed with a meat cleaver and a gun during morning prayer, killing four Israeli rabbis and seriously injuring at least eight other worshippers. Three victims, Moshe Twersky, Aryeh Kupinsky, and Kalman Levine were dual American-Israeli citizens, and one, Avraham Goldberg, was a British-Israeli national, according to Israeli police.
• November 10, 2014: The IDF discovered an explosive device north of Jerusalem in the West Bank, between the Jewish communities of Psagot and Beit El.
• November 10, 2014: Palestinian terrorists stab Israelis in separate incidents, killing a young woman and a soldier. In the first incident, a Palestinian man stabbed an Israeli soldier, Almog Shilony, in Tel Aviv who later succumbed to his injuries. Police arrested the suspect, 18 year-old Nur al-Din Abu Khashiyeh, from Nablus, who was staying in Israel illegally. Hours later, another Palestinian terrorist attacked Israelis with a knife, killing a young woman, Dalia Lemkus, after stabbing her in the neck and injuring two others at a bus stop in the West Bank community of Alon Shvut. Hamas identified the Alon Shvut attacker as Maher Hamdi al-Ashalmoun from Hebron, who was released previously as a security prisoner. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization later claimed responsibility for the attack.
• November 10, 2014: An Arab-Israeli mob attacked a car with rocks in the town of Taibe and set it on fire. An Arab-Israeli, Majdi Baloum, rescued the victim by pulling him out of his car.
• November 6, 2014: Bullets struck an Israeli police cruiser driving north of Ramallah. There were no reported injures and security personnel searched for the shooter.
• November 5, 2014: A Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into a crowd of Israeli pedestrians in Jerusalem killing a Border Police officer, Jidan Assad, and injuring 14 other people. A 17-year-old student later died of his injuries. The terrorist, Ibrahim al-Acri, a Hamas operative, then crashed into another group of pedestrians and got out of his car and tried to attack more civilians with a metal bar. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, referring to al-Acri as a “martyr” who conducted “a heroic operation.”
• November 5, 2014: A Palestinian driver crashed into a group of IDF soldiers in the West Bank hours after a separate deadly vehicular attack in Jerusalem. One of the soldiers was wounded critically.
• October 29, 2014: A Palestinian man shot American-Israeli Rabbi Yehuda Glick in front of Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Heritage Center. The suspect was killed the following morning after Israeli counter-terrorism forces surrounded his house and were fired upon. Israeli police discovered evidence that the suspected terrorist was involved in the Glick shooting.
• October 22, 2014: A suspected Hamas member crashed his car into a crowd of Israelis exiting the light rail station in Jerusalem, killing a three month-old American-Israeli girl, Chaya Zissel Braun, a woman from Ecuador, Karen Jemima Mosquera, and injuring eight others.

Attempts to goad Palestinians into a new intifada quickly evolved from the more routine mayhem (Molotov cocktails and rock throwing) to a more aggressive approach recently termed ‘car intifada.’ Art posted on Twitter urges more attacks be carried out. Among the examples:

More: http://www.investigativeproject.org/4658/palestinian-incitement-attacks-glorification

These are the people Obama claims want peace. Abbas sends a letter to a terrorist’s family commending the perpetrator as a martyr. Obama draws a moral equivalence with that mentality? Notice Abbas has not gone out in a blaze of martyrdom himself.

What a way to spend the valuable resource of their youth.

Tensions over Jerusalem sacred site heats up

Jews Challenge Rules to Claim Heart of Jerusalem

By JODI RUDOREN — New York Times
Published: September 21, 2013

JERUSALEM — Small groups of Jews are increasingly ascending the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, a sacred site controlled for centuries by Muslims, who see the visits as a provocation that could undermine the fragile peace talks started this summer.

For decades the Israelis drawn to the site were mainly a fringe of hard-core zealots, but now more mainstream Jews are lining up to enter, as a widening group of Israeli politicians and rabbis challenge the longstanding rules constraining Jewish access and conduct. Brides go on their wedding days, synagogue and religious-school groups make regular outings, and many surreptitiously skirt the ban on non-Muslim prayer, like a Russian immigrant who daily recites the morning liturgy in his mind, as he did decades ago in the Soviet Union.

Palestinian leaders say the new activity has created the worst tension in memory around the landmark Al Aksa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, and have called on Muslims to defend the site from “incursions.” A spate of stone-throwing clashes erupted this month: on Wednesday, three Muslims were arrested and an Israeli police officer wounded in the face. And on Friday thousands of Arab citizens of Israel rallied in the north, warning that Al Aksa is in danger.

“We reject these religious visits,” Sheik Ekrima Sa’eed Sabri, who oversees Muslim affairs in Jerusalem, said in an interview. “Our duty is to warn,” he added. “If they want to make peace in this region, they should stay away from Al Aksa.”

The 37-acre site is perhaps the most religiously contested place on earth. Jews revere it as the home of the First and Second Temples more than 2,000 years ago. For Muslims, who call the site the Noble Sanctuary, it is the world’s third holiest spot, from which Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. More than 300,000 foreign tourists also flock there annually, many of them Christians drawn to the ruins of the temple Jesus attended.

Politically, the competing claims to the area are the nut around which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict revolves, the symbolic heart of each side’s religious and historical attachment to Jerusalem that has made its governance one of the thorniest issues in peace negotiations.

Israel captured the site along with the rest of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, with a general declaring dramatically, “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” But the government immediately returned control to the Muslim authorities, and ever since, a de facto accommodation has prevailed in which Muslims worship at Al Aksa above and Jews at the Western Wall below, a remnant of the retaining wall around the ancient Second Temple. […/]

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