As this paper reports:-
A Jewish student from the UK on a visit to the Temple Mount on Wednesday morning was asked to remove his kippa by one of the Waqf officials at the site, who told him that he was not allowed to wear it because he was “in a holy place.” The 20 year-old from London, who studies at the University of Leeds in northern England and is in the country on a student mission, declined to remove the kippa and left the site instead.
I have been involved as an activist campaigning for the fulfillment of rights of Jews as regards the Temple Mount for over four decades. Here I am being removed from the site 41 years ago (I am the one not in police uniform) -
I could understand the fear the Waqf, facing a person who knows - and they know too - the true history of the site. And its expectant future.
What I find difficult enough to comprehend is the total willigness of our liberals, our democrats, our humanists all to tolerate the most immoral attitudes by the Muslim ecclesiastical authorites who seek to demean any expression of religious respect for the site to the extent that Jews, it seems, cannot wear kippot, the tzitziyot fringes canot be displayed outside trousers, Psalters and Bibles cannot be read from and lips cannot move.
The Jew on the Temple Mount is to be stripped of any unique identity as a Jew. He must become a faceless tourist.
This relationship, whether you support or do not ally yourself with the law - the Protection of Holy Places Law of June 27, 1967 which reads, in part, that
The Holy Places shall be protected from desecration and any other violation and from anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings with regard to those places.a. Whosoever desecrates or otherwise violates a Holy Place shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of seven years.b. Whosoever does anything likely to violate the freedom of access of the members of the different religions to the places sacred to them or their feelings with regard to those places shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of five years.
is demeaning of the ''Other'', a concept our post-modernist progressive society holds...sacred.
To accommodate to that paradigm, to permit the discrimination to be practiced under Israeli sovereignty is to reduce the Jew to a non-entity.
That is the real crime.
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