Director of the Temple Institute Rabbi Chaim Richman said the Netanyahu government policies regarding the Temple Mount have led to last week’s UNESCO’s resolution which ignores any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
Calling the resolution “another politically motivated act of revisionist history, obscene even by the standards of this morally bankrupt organization,” Richman announced that “UNESCO’s heinous resolution was not born in a vacuum but is a direct result of Israel’s ambivalent, nebulous policy towards the Temple Mount. We call upon Jews to ascend in purity and with proper halakhic guidance to the Temple Mount and to exercise their right to pray openly at the site from where the Divine Presence never departed, the location of the Holy Temple,” Richman said.
“Judaism was founded over 3500 years ago; Islam dates to the seventh century,” Richman noted, adding, “The resolution flies in the face of both the Bible–a bedrock of civilization, archaeological evidence, and scholarship. It also stands in denial of Islam itself, and the official statements of the ‘Supreme Moslem Council (sic),’ the Muslim Waqf which administers the Temple Mount. In the English-language booklet ‘A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al Sharif’ published by the Waqf in Jerusalem in 1924, it states: ‘Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot according to the universal belief, on which ‘David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings’ (II Samuel 24:25).”
According to Richman, UNESCO’s “perversion of history is not only a deliberate degradation of the Jewish people, but an insult to all people of intelligence – and all people of faith. It is the latest of the United Nations’ calculated moves aimed at denying the Jewish people’s very right to exist. Wiping out a people’s past is the best way to ensure that they have no future. Thus the Muslim Waqf has been systematically destroying tons of archaeological evidence dating from the Second and First Temples – with no protest from UNESCO.”
There is a proper response to UNESCO’s most astonishing expression of anti-Semitism to date, Richmean said, “On the eve of Passover, the Festival of Freedom, we call upon the Israeli government to exercise full sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and grant freedom of religious expression to non-Muslims at the Temple Mount (in accordance with basic human and civil rights enshrined in Israeli law) so that Israel and all of humanity will finally experience true freedom.”
