President’s Message JERUSALEM WAS NEVER HOLY TO MUSLIMS 3 MORTON A. KLEIN National President, Zionist Organization of America It’s time to end the propaganda myth that Jerusalem is holy to Muslims. Jerusalem was the capital of the Jewish nation under King David and other Jewish kings for hundreds of years. The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 stated: “In 1996, the State of Israel will celebrate the 3,000th anniversary of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem since King David’s entry.” Jerusalem was never the capital of any other nation. After the Arab conquest of Israel in 716 CE, the Arabs made Ramla their capital—not Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the Jewish people’s holiest city. Jerusalem’s Old City (in the eastern portion of Jerusalem, the real Jerusalem) contains the millennia old Jewish quarter and Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount where the First and Second Jewish Temples stood, long before the birth of Islam. And eastern Jerusalem also contains the world’s oldest (3,000 years old) and largest Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. (Eastern Jerusalem is the real Jerusalem throughout Biblical and human history; western Jerusalem was built in recent years.) Jerusalem is mentioned almost 700 times in the Torah, the Jewish holy books. Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran—not even once. Throughout the millennia, Jews always pray for Jerusalem 20 times each day, remember Jerusalem in holiday and wedding ceremonies, and pray facing Jerusalem. By contrast, Muslims pray facing Mecca. There are no Muslim prayers for Jerusalem. Muslims make their pilgrimages to Mecca; while Jewish pilgrimages are to Jerusalem. One of the five pillars of Islam (the five obligatory fundamental Muslim practices) is the “Hajj” pilgrimage to the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The Torah commands the Jewish people to make pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem three times each year, on Judaism’s three pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot). Jews have lived in Jerusalem throughout the millennia. Since at least the mid-1800s, the majority of the people living in Jerusalem have been Jews. Theodore Herzl wrote in his diary about his arrival in Jerusalem on the evening of October 31, 1898: “The streets were alive with Jews sauntering in the moonlight.” The 1907 prestigious Baedeker Travel Guide reported that at that time, Jerusalem had 40,000 Jews; 13,000 Christians and 7,000 Muslims. In an attempt to create an Islamic religious connection to Jerusalem, Muslims point to Koran and hadith passages referring to Muhammad’s dream (not an actual event) of journeying to heaven on his steed Buraq from “Al Aqsa”—the “farthest mosque.” However, the “farthest mosque” could not possibly have meant Jerusalem because the Koran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place, and Jerusalem was a central crossroads in the Middle East— not a “farthest” place. Moreover, Jerusalem’s eventual “Al Aqsa Mosque” was built long after the Koran and the Hadith were written. The mosque was named “Al Aqsa” after the fact, to create a myth about the location of Muhammad’s dream. During Muhammad’s day, Jerusalem was ruled by Byzantine Christians, and a Byzantine Christian church stood on the Temple Mount. So little did Jerusalem mean to the Muslim Ottomans that, during the First World War, they abandoned it to the British without a fight and even contemplated destroying the city entirely before leaving it.
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