Islamic leader seeks support of Arab and Muslim world against project. Wiesenthal dean calls opposition political.
By ETGAR LEFKOVITStolerance 224.88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimksi )
Construction resumed Thursday on Jerusalem's Museum of Tolerance, and Islamic leaders called on the Arab and Muslim world to enlist in an effort to stop the construction at the site which partially covers an ancient Muslim cemetery.
The buzz of activity came just one day after the Supreme Court approved the central Jerusalem site of the $250 million museum, which is being built by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, over the opposition of Islamic groups, ending a nearly three-year legal battle.
"We will mobilize in the Arab and Muslim world so that it puts pressure to halt the project," said Islamic Movement leader Sheikh Raed Salah at an east Jerusalem press conference.
Islamic Movement spokesman Zahi Nujidat said Thursday that the group was calling on all Arabs who have family members buried at the site to continue to frequent the cemetery, and urged all Muslims not to cooperate in the planned reburial of the human remains discovered there.
The several-hundred-year-old bones in question were found on 12 percent of the planned museum site.
Mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Mohammed Hussein called the court ruling a "grave decision" which harms the Muslim holy sites, and said it was difficult to believe the project's promoters would want to build a Museum of Tolerance "whose construction constitutes an act of aggression."
But the dean and founder of the Wiesenthal Center rejected the Islamic condemnations as the voice of extremism. "The opposition to the move is not motivated by religious concerns but is a political attempt at a land grab by Islamic fundamentalists, who are in cooperation with Hamas, in the center of west Jerusalem," said Rabbi Marvin Hier in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.
He agreed that the managers of a Museum of Tolerance should be held to a higher standard, but said that it was "preposterous and hypocritical" to be held to a higher standard than the Muslims themselves, noting that the site was used as a parking lot for the last 45 years.
"They parked their cars there for 45 years," he said. "We didn't hear the Islamic groups complaining then." He added that throughout the Arab world, including in the Palestinian territories, there has been extensive building on abandoned cemetery sites.
The unanimous court ruling noted that no objections had been lodged back in 1960 when the city put a parking lot over a small section of the graveyard, and that for the past half a century the site has been in public use.
It said that an alternative proposal presented by planners - including reburial of the bones or covering up the old graves - were "satisfactory" in trying to find the correct balance between religious attitudes for respecting the dead and the legal requirements.
According to the court's decision, construction can resume immediately at the site, except for the small section where the human remains were found.
The court gave project managers 60 days to agree with the state-run Israel Antiquities Authority on a method of either removing any human remains for reburial or installing a barrier between the building's foundations and the ground below, which would prevent graves from being disturbed in the area.
The Wiesenthal Center had previously offered to pay for the burial of the bones that were found in the area, or to cover it before building but these very proposals were rejected by the Islamic group opposed to the construction at the site.
if(catID != 151){
var cont = `Take Israel home with the new Jerusalem Post Store
