Religious Public Schools Teach Children to 'Long for the Third Temple'

Researchers fear the mandatory social studies curriculum could drive students to take violent actions to advance the building of the Third Temple.

Several days after the beginning of the new school year, Jerusalem resident Nadav Berman Shifman’s daughter received an agenda from the religious elementary school where she studies. The agenda contains a section at the back with a list of topics including “Love of the Land and the Temple” – a reference to the Temples that stood on Temple Mount in ancient times.

The students are asked to indicate the extent to which they have met the demands detailed in the list, including “Prayer from the bottom of my heart for the Temple to be rebuilt” and “to have the privilege of carrying out [ritual animal] sacrifice there.”

The list was not a private initiative. Its elements are based on the official curriculum of the state religious school system – the public education system that operates alongside the state secular schools and semi-official ultra-Orthodox schools in Jewish areas of the country.

Since the beginning of the school year, it should be noted, Muslim claims that Israel is trying to change the status quo on the Mount, which is now the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, have been the backdrop for a wave of Palestinian violence. Israel denies any effort to change the status quo, which grants only Muslims the right to pray at the site and other religions the right to visit at certain hours.

The curriculum follows years of Education Ministry support for a series of lectures and workshops by the Temple Institute for religious as well as secular students. Last year, the ministry provided some 330,000 shekels ($85,300) for the institute, which provides workshops and lectures for both religious and secular students.

The section dealing with “Love of the Land and the Temple” is part of the social studies curriculum in state religious schools. Development of the curriculum began about seven years ago, an Education Ministry source said, and since then has undergone a number of adjustments. This year, the curriculum – which is geared for grades 1 through 6 – is mandatory as part of the students’ study of faith. There is no direct reference in the set of lessons or elsewhere in the section on “Love of the Land and the Temple” to Al-Aqsa Mosque, which has been such a flashpoint in recent weeks.

More than a month ago, Berman Shifman – a doctoral student in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – wrote to the national elementary school supervisor after reading the lesson materials.

“As far as I know, the Torah commands us to love human beings and the Almighty. It appears that ‘Love of the Land and the Temple’ denies this when it exalts things our forefathers had not imagined and seeks to etch [them] in the consciousness,” he wrote. At press time, he had yet to receive a reply.

In response to Haaretz’s query, the ministry said, “Love of the Land and the Temple” is just one section of a 12-part curriculum that students study over a three-year period. The program was written by social studies professionals from the Religious Education Administration, has been operating in elementary schools for seven years and deals with social topics and values.”

The beginning of the “Love of the Land and the Temple” curriculum states, “It is impossible to talk about the Land of Israel without speaking about the Temple. The Land of Israel and the Temple are attached to one another ... The Temple is at the pinnacle of the aspirations of the Jewish people and humanity as a whole.”

The website for the program includes supplementary educational materials, including “A Tisha B’Av fantasy” written several years ago by Nehemiah Kuperschmidt of the Orthodox educational organization Aish HaTorah. “I have a fantasy about getting together [former Iranian President] Ahmadinejad, [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah, [Palestinian President] Abbas and [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon and taking them on a visit to the new Temple, the Third Temple now being built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” the fantasy reads, “and letting them see the coronation ceremony from there of a new king of Israel. The Vatican is returning the ancient golden menorah and the high priest is rededicating it” – a reference to the claim that the Vatican is holding a golden menorah from the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. Kuperschmidt later imagines “the heads of modern atheism” who, “for the first time in their lives, have the privilege of feeling the supreme power and divine majesty.”

This imagery has a purpose. “We have no Temple and we live in a world in which Israel is threatened from within and without, a world in which the Lord and his Torah are ridiculed,” Kuperschmidt writes, adding, “None of the conflicts from which the Jewish people are currently suffering – the existential threats, disagreements between religious and secular, rising assimilation, confusion and discord – would have bothered us if we had the Temple in our vicinity. When the Temple existed, there was no question as to who had the right to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. No one cast doubt over the existence of the Lord.”

Longing for the Temple

To convey a sense of the loss of the Temple, the workshop proposes that teachers explore the following: “A list of the most major threats, both spiritual and material, facing the Jewish people, and add all your personal difficulties and those of your students. And then think about how each item on the list would be different if we had the Temple right here, right now.”

Kuperschmidt’s ideas are almost directly translated in the lesson dedicated to “Longing for the Temple,” and include “Bringing together the reality of the revelation of the Lord through miracles connected to the Temple.”

'Brainwashing, not education'

“I’m afraid that this heavy emphasis on a yearning for the Temple and concrete study of the work of the Temple could spur rather good students to think about other practical actions,” says Ariel Picard, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “It’s enough for one student to decide that it’s worth blowing up mosques to advance the building of the [Third] Temple. The Jewish Underground’s plan to blow up the Temple Mount mosques still exists in the collective memory of religious Zionism,” he says, referring to the Jewish militant group from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose leaders were jailed for their terrorist activities.

“When you tell students that the Temple menorah is not an abstract matter, or say we need to deal with Jewish law related to the red heifer [used in ancient Temple animal sacrifices], that’s a stage that lays the ground for passion for the Temple. We don’t need to explicitly say we need to ‘cast out abomination’ on the Temple Mount, but the Religious Education Administration, whether consciously or not, is trying to create a view among students that we are on the verge of redemption.”

Aviezer Weiss is a former principal of the religious Zeitlin High School in Tel Aviv and ex-head of the Givat Washington Academic College of Education, Upper Galilee, who defines himself as politically right-wing. His criticism of the “Love of the Land and the Temple” material is primarily from an educational perspective. “The program follows one very clear ideological direction: that we need to quickly build the Temple so the Jewish people will be ‘the best’ in the world. That’s brainwashing, not education,” he says.

The curriculum, says Weiss, places the Temple Mount at the center of things, as a dream that can be fulfilled – even though it is, he says, a crazy fantasy. “We cannot implant such ideas into children and also don’t need to speak about crowning a king, animal sacrifices or the miracles that occurred at the Temple. Judaism is a religion of discourse and study, not of ritual and miracles. The view expressed in the curriculum is mistaken, could encourage paganism and is particularly serious in a democratic country.”

Weiss sees the program as a turning point. State religious schools always used to discuss the Temple, he notes, but “the change is where it is placed, of priorities. Until now, they didn’t place the Temple at the center of the educational program, didn’t stress its importance as being equal to that of the Land of Israel. This is a new and dangerous direction. There are things that are much more important to devote our educational energy to. The Temple has no moral influence. A moral society is a prerequisite for the Temple, and that needs to be the educational emphasis.”

Like Weiss, Berman Shifman is critical of the direction the religious schools’ program is taking. “As a person who thinks that one of the main attributes of Judaism – at least in some of its reasonable versions – is the education to be a [good] person and to deal with ‘tikkun olam’ [repairing the world’], the program incites the students in another direction. The Temple has become a hammer. There is an attempt here to take us back to the previous stage of Jewish tradition, the Temple stage, which was based on relating to blood, race and sanctity that resides in particular places. Not everyone in religious Zionism thinks this way, but there is a certain section, perhaps even a small one, that is seeking to expand its influence by a creeping erosion of the status quo.”

‘No violent expression’

In contrast to Picard and Weiss, who are worried that concrete study about the Temple will spur no less real efforts to get rid of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Tomer Persico, another research fellow at the Hartman Institute, is less concerned. He sees the program as “an educational expression for small children of rather basic religious beliefs in Jewish tradition. There is no violent expression here toward the Temple Mount mosques.” The curriculum, he says, is seemingly a reflection of discourse about the Temple Mount and the Temple, “which is currently much more popular in religious Zionism than it was 20, or even 10, years ago.” Persico believes there are bigger problems, such as “teaching kindergarten children about the Holocaust.”

The Temple Institute is an educational outgrowth of the controversial institute, which was founded in 1987 by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel. A Religious Education Administration website recommends that teachers use videos produced by the midrasha as social studies material.

The institute – which benefits from staffing provided by women doing civilian service instead of enlisting in the army – organizes lectures, conferences, presentations and workshops about the Temple. The group provides activities for kindergarten kids and older schoolchildren around the country, as well as an exhibition in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem.

Issues that are simply hinted at or played down in the official ministry curriculum appear to receive explicit attention from Rabbi Ariel. “There is a religious commandment to go up to the Mount at all times,” he told the Ma’anei Haheshua newsletter several years ago. “Before you ask a bright student what he thinks about going up to the Mount, ask him what the distinguished rabbi’s view is regarding the fact that, this morning, the eternal sacrifice has not been carried out at the Temple.” Less abstractly, in an interview with Makor Rishon newspaper last July, Rabbi Ariel said his organization has four high priests, including rabbis who have purchased the appropriate priestly garments and “are prepared to carry out animal sacrifice on the Temple Mount even before the Temple is built.”

Rabbi Ariel has never hidden his views or actions. At one time he ran in the second spot on the slate of slain Rabbi Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach party. He also called on soldiers to disobey orders in the course of the Israeli evacuation of Sinai. He was also suspected of involvement in a plan to take control of the Temple Mount, which is under the day-to-day administration of the Waqf (Muslim religious trust), and had been investigated on suspicion of incitement and sedition. It’s hard to believe that students sent to lectures under the auspices of the Temple Institute’s midrasha are told the full political complexities surrounding Temple Mount.

The institute has received some 1.4 million shekels in Education Ministry funding over the past five years, according to Finance Ministry figures, while the Culture and Sports Ministry has provided a further 814,000 shekels in additional funding to another affiliate of the Temple Institute.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.683333?v=B4B03F9DC018685FCA9D4E96CB9F6A80

Well done Haaretz, yet again showing the truth.

Once again anti-Jewish violence ignited in Jerusalem has spread beyond into Israel. This present spate of violence is part of the long-term campaign of Palestinians for change in the “status quo” on the Temple Mount. Their goal is to insure Jews visiting there feel sufficiently intimidated so that they no longer come and this will then mean a victory for the latest Palestinian intifada or the local jihad. It might be said of this recent upsurge in violence that “it has been forever thus,” but this would be incorrect as the history of Muslim rule over Jerusalem and Jewish presence in and around the Temple Mount is complex and checkered. Before we recount this history, let us point out that the latest throwing of rocks, knife stabbings, and murders by Palestinians of Jews, especially in the vicinity of the Temple Mount, are not simply acts of “spontaneous rage” against Israeli “occupiers.” It is has been strategically organized and orchestrated in the hope that it will inspire copycat actions. One of the key organizations involved in perpetrating this violence is called the “Murabitoun.”

The Israeli General Security organization (the Shin Bet) explains these Temple Mount Palestinian activists receive about US $1,000 a month for their “spontaneous” actions. The money comes from Hamas out of funds it receives from international Islamist donors. The young men and women activists spend time in the Al-Aqsa Mosque ostensibly studying the Quran and praying, while in fact they are on the lookout for Jewish presence on the Temple Mount. When Jews wearing skull caps or with any other item signifying their Jewishness appear, the Palestinian activists sound the alert. Groups of women activists in black veils wearing niqabs follow the visitors chanting threateningly “Allahu Akbar.” Denial of Jewish rights on the Temple Mount is also being pushed by the Palestinian Authority with support of a number of Arab states at the UNESCO in Paris. They allege that the Western Wall where Jews have gathered for centuries past to pray are in danger of being destroyed by Israel. Apart from the absurdity of this allegation, it is made by those who failed miserably to prevent ISIL jihadists destroying ancient monuments in Iraq and Syria, or the Taliban’s destruction of the giant statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

The Palestinian leadership has incited publicly their people to “spill blood.” Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestinian Authority, declared on television, “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah.” Such chilling incitement to kill reaches back to the years immediately after the First World War, when the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, appointed by the British, made a career out of calling for jihad against the Jews culminating in his embrace of Hitler.
When Abbas calls to “spill blood,” or Jamal Zahalka, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset, declares, “I will personally expel every Jew who comes to the Temple Mount in a provocative manner,” they are following the odious footsteps of Haj Amin Al-Husseini. Their anti-Jew hatred not surprisingly is encouraged by King Abdullah II, the West’s favourite royal pretender whose family the British imported from Hejaz in Arabia and enthroned as unelected rulers over the largely Palestinian people and country of Jordan, illegally carved out of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in the early 1920s. Abdullah shamelessly announced recently that only Muslims should be allowed on the grounds of the Temple Mount.

There is, however, another history of Muslim rulers over Jerusalem. It is contrary to Al-Husseini’s jihad against the Jews that became embedded in the politics espoused by Palestinians over the past century. Though this history has been deliberately obscured by advocates of political Islam or Islamism in recent years, it is all the more necessary today to hold Palestinians accountable for shredding their own Muslim tradition that holds the promise of religious coexistence and mutual respect among Christians, Jews and Muslims. When the first Arab armies conquered Palestine, or the land of Israel, in 637, Jews stood witness. Muslim and non-Muslim sources recount the surrender of Jerusalem by the Byzantine Patriarch Sophronious to Umar, the second of the righteous Caliph of Muslims and a close companion of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. There were Jews in the company of Umar when he visited the Temple Mount and ordered the removal of filth accumulated on the site.


Jews were granted permission by Umar to live in Jerusalem and pray on the Temple Mount. They were allowed to build a synagogue there. Even after the completion of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque by the Umayyad caliphs based in Damascus, the 10th century Jewish writer Solomon ben Jeroham (a Karaite) recorded that Jews prayed on the Temple Mount. Umar’s conduct on taking control of Jerusalem from the Byzantines set the righteous precedent for Muslims to follow. When Muslim rulers behaved differently their conduct spoke ill of them, as happened with the Fatimid ruler Caliph Hakim in Cairo. Hakim turned malevolent against Christian and Jews, and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009 (for which Jews were falsely blamed and victimized by a recurrent wave of anti-Semitism in Europe).

There were the Crusades, and Jews were massacred in Jerusalem by the Crusaders. But Christian rulers of the Crusader Kingdom during the 12th century became mindful of the local traditions and Jews were allowed to pray on the Temple Mount. After Saladin reconquered Jerusalem in 1187, he restored Jewish rights following Umar’s precedent. When Ottoman Turks took control of Jerusalem in the 16th century they imposed a ban on Jews worshipping on the Temple Mount. However, they strictly enforced the right of Jews to pray at the Western Wall of the Temple, what is now known as the “Wailing Wall.” Access to the Temple Mount for non-Muslims (including Jews) was relaxed at the request of the British at the end of the Crimean war in 1856. Some six decades later General Allenby, at the head of the British army, triumphantly entered Jerusalem in November 1917, and Britain’s rule over Palestine under the League of Nation’s Mandate inaugurated a new era for Jews in their ancestral homeland after nearly 2,000 years.

For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina. But for Jews, Jerusalem is the first and only holy city, since it was made the capital of ancient Israel by King David. Yet contrary to public opinion (in and outside of the Muslim world) Muslim authorities have generally tolerated Jews praying on the Temple Mount. The theological and historical evidence over time support this simple fact. The Muslim connection to Jerusalem rests upon the reference made in the Quran of the Prophet’s night journey “from the Sacred Mosque to the distant Mosque whose precincts We have blessed, that We may show him some of Our Signs” (17:11). Muhammad’s miraculous heavenly journey from King David’s city, referred in Arabic simply as al Quds (the Holiness), confirmed his lineage in the fraternity of prophets reaching back through Moses and Abraham to Adam.

Muhammad had prayed at first by turning his face in the direction (qiblah) of Jerusalem. After his flight to Medina from Mecca he received guidance, as the Quran states, to “turn towards the Holy Mosque” (2:144) in prayer. Since then Muslims have followed their prophet. From an Islamic point of view, it might be said, the revelation instructing the Prophet to pray in the direction of Mecca was a sign for him and his followers not to contest Jews with unlawful claims or deny their rights in Jerusalem. Until 1967 no scholar in or outside of the Muslim world doubted that underneath the Temple Mount could be found the site and remains of the Jewish Temple of Solomon, Ezra and Nehemiah, and of Herod the Great within whose Temple Jesus of Nazareth prayed and preached. Even Haj Amin al-Husseini published in 1925 a brochure, titled “Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, Jerusalem” (the Arabic expression for the Temple Mount), in which is stated, “The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.”

It is now deliberately forgotten that when Jordan ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem from 1948 until June 1967, the armistice agreement with Israel was violated and Jews were denied both entrance to the Temple Mount and praying at the Western Wall. Only after the IDF secured the whole Temple Mount in the six-day war of June 1967 did the Chief Rabbi of Israel blow the Shofar there, and conduct the first organized Jewish prayers since before the time of Ottoman rule.The Temple Mount was, however, returned by Israeli authorities to the local Muslim administrators of the Waqf (religious endowment). This was an unprecedented act of religious goodwill by Jewish leaders when Israel could have installed her own administrators to safeguard with equanimity the rights of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Jerusalem. But instead of reciprocating goodwill, the Waqf administrators and Palestinians leaders have taken their cue from A-Husseini to perpetrate jihad against the Jews.

The solution to the contrived “problem” of Jews praying on the Temple Mount is simple. It is to recall Umar’s precedent, and insist Palestinians abide by it. United States President Barack Obama could remind Palestinians of this tradition, since he boasts of his knowledge of Islam and Muslim history. He could invite King Abdullah of Jordan to join him in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Netanyahu and demand an end to violence in al-Quds with freedom of worship on the Temple Mount. This would be an act of some audacity, and a fitting end to his presidency that began with the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace awarded to him.
National Post

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large. Salim Mansur teaches at Western University in London, Ont.




http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/clarfield-mansur-then-and-now-in-jerusalem

What has that got to do with children NOW being taught the above?

Everything, because a claim by this media based on one school is hardly incitement compared to the constant lies the PA, the Mosques ect promote in reards to the temple mount, but then you are not very good with facts are you Stassi.

According to a hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.A.S), "One drop of faithful Muslim blood is more valuable than the entire Kaaba." However, as far as the Palestinian national religious leadership is concerned, the words are meaningless. In their unclean hands and with their perverted agenda, Muslim blood has become a political pawn in the game of "attack the Jews."vThe recent bloodshed in the Palestinian territory and inside Israel, particularly Jerusalem, based on the claim that "Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger" -- and the fatal stabbings of Jews by knife-wielding Palestinians -- are cruel examples of how Hamas and the Islamic Movement's clerics distort the words of Allah (S.W.A.T.) and the Prophet, and present Islam as a hideous religion bent on murder and paganism. They seem to care more about the stones of Al-Aqsa mosque than about the lives of faithful Muslims.

Under cover of the slogan "Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger," the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas and PLO leaders, as well as Israeli Arab Knesset members and the Islamic Movement in Israel, send innocent young Palestinians to murder Jews at a time when we all know perfectly well that Al-Aqsa mosque is not danger. Ironically -- I am ashamed to admit it -- thanks to the Israel Police, Al-Aqsa is the safest mosque in the Middle East.
We all remember how, during the war last summer, the Hamas leadership gave the order to fire rockets at Jerusalem. They might easily have hit Al-Aqsa mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Hamas nevertheless ordered the rockets to be fired. And we all see how our brother Arabs and Muslims blow up mosques and churches full of worshippers throughout the Middle East, while the Israel security forces safeguard Al-Aqsa and the churches in Jerusalem. Not only that, but, unlike the rule of Jordan before 1967, the Israelis allow freedom of worship for followers of all religions at all the holy sites throughout the country, especially in Jerusalem.

The hypocrisy and politicization of Islam has led our sheikhs deliberately to misinterpret verses in the Qur'an, and in that way we disrespect the words of Allah. There are clerics who present Islam as a hideous religion bent on murder and paganism, and who care more about the stones of Al-Aqsa mosque than about the lives of faithful Muslims.

Palestinian Arab young men with masks, inside Al-Aqsa Mosque (some wearing shoes), stockpile rocks to use for throwing at Jews who visit the Temple Mount, September 27, 2015.

The Qur'an tells us the Jews are the chosen people and the inheritors of the land, so why do our religious leaders deny it and refuse to admit that the Qur'an does not name or even hint at "Palestine" or "Palestinians?" The Qur'an promises the Children of Israel that they will return to the land of Israel from the four corners of the earth, so we should have greeted their return, especially during the first half of the last century, as living proof of the words of Allah and the realization of the prophecies of Muhammad. Instead, we fight the Jews, which means we fight the wishes of Allah while killing our own children and denying the miracle of the return of the Jews to their country. Our feeble claim is that they are not the Children of Israel because those spoken of in the Qur'an do not exist. How can we expect any intelligent person to believe that?
[*]
If the Jews had come after the ravages of the Second World War -- starving refugees, weak, alone, frightened -- without divine intervention, they would not have been able to overcome the Arab armies that attacked them after the declaration of the State of Israel and during the wars after that. Their victory was proof that Allah was on their side. By denying it, we turn Muhammad into a liar (Allah forbid!) and say he was not a true prophet, and that the Qur'an's prediction of the return of the Jews was not the word of Allah.

Denial of the existence of the Temple of the Jews on the Temple Mount is the height of Muslim hypocrisy and a distortion of both Jewish and Muslim history. We forget that, according to our historians, when the Second Caliph, Omar bin al-Khatab, conquered Jerusalem, he and his advisor Caab al-Akhbar (a Jew who converted to Islam) both affirmed that the location of the Temple of the Jews had been on the Temple Mount, next to today's Al-Aqsa mosque. When we Palestinians deny that the Jews are the descendants of the Children of Israel in order to deny Allah's promise to give them the blessed land, we turn ourselves into the descendants of the Canaanite and Jebusite who lived in the land of Israel at the time of Moses, may he rest in peace. He and Joshua bin Nun conquered the land and killed them, down to the last one. They were infidels whose deaths were ordered by Allah. Our attempt to claim them as our forefathers, and therefore as assets, is shamefully nothing but stupidity.

We know that some of those who live in our villages are Jews who converted to Islam after the Muslim conquests beginning in the 7^th century, and most of us are the descendants of foreign workers who came to British Mandate of Palestine from the various Arab countries in the wake of the Zionist enterprise. By trying to trace our "ancestry" to the Canaanites, we lie to ourselves and demonstrate our silliness and self-deception to the world. And when we try to claim that Jesus was a Palestinian, we make ourselves an international laughing stock. In that way we return to the days of the jahiliyya, the time before Islam, when we buried our female babies alive in the sand lest they become whores. Today we sacrifice both our sons and daughters on the altar of empty slogan -- lies such as "Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger," in the vain, blasphemous notion that omnipotent, omniscient Allah needs us to die as shaheeds [martyrs] for his sake. Muhammad's hadith says one drop of Muslim blood is more valuable than the Kaaba in Mecca, so the same must be true for the stones of Al-Aqsa, which is less holy to Islam than the Kaaba. The attempt by Hamas and the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel to incite another intifada based on the nonsense that "Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger" has two objectives: one is to fire up a religious war of Muslim against Jew, like ISIS; the other is the Qatar-funded Muslim Brotherhood's desire to create public unrest that will lead to the overthrow of the Palestinian Authority.

The Islamists have also been stupid in their timing, creating an unnecessary and unreal crisis at a time when the entire Arab world is engaged in destroying itself, as Shi'ites kill Sunnis and Sunnis kill Shi'ites, creating millions upon millions of refugees to top off the hundreds of thousands of Arabs killed during the so-called Arab Spring. The people of the Middle East do not have the time to deal with the useless fabrications of Sheikh Ra'ed Salah, leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the Palestinian Authority's upper echelons have been blind to Hamas's cunning plots to end Fatah's hold on the West Bank. What happened to the PA in Gaza when Hamas took over in 2006-2007 will happen again in the West Bank; Mahmoud Abbas and his crew will be thrown off the highest buildings in Ramallah or executed with a bullet to the back of the head. If in fact Hamas does take over the West Bank, our lives will become nightmares because like the Gazans, we will have to obey the orders of the Hamas Islamic Emirate. Then the dream of a Palestinian state will evaporate forever -- because a terrorist Islamic emirate, a twin to the one in the Gaza Strip, will be universally unacceptable.

As for the Jews, once again we have played into their hands. They again destroy the houses of killers who are too stupid to understand anything beyond the incitement and hatred they absorb from the mosques, the Palestinian media and the social networks. By following ISIS, all they are doing with their knives is cutting the future Palestinian state to shreds. The time has come for us to realize that using knives (shibrie) against the Jews will not yield us even a sliver of land (shiber), and we have to change our strategy. We need to talk to the Israelis and get our Palestinian state by peaceful means. They will give it to us: they have offered to do so many times already -- otherwise we will not get it at all.

Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle East.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6756/Muslim-blood-aqsa

And?

How easy was that for me to shut up the terrorist supporting scum.