UNESCO
has joined forces with Islamic State. The fundamentalists now have a
new weapon: resolutions passed by servile international bodies.
An
earlier delay and the opposition of UNESCO’s chief, Irina Bokova, had
raised hopes that this act of jihadist, barbaric, unjust, and, frankly,
arrogant supremacism might be voted down. It was not. Now a new lie was
given the sanction of the world’s largest and most unaccountable body
whose reason for being is to preserve significant sites, not to
bowdlerize them.
Lies by UNESCO to rewrite history, erasing all
traces of Judaism and Christianity to favour a jihadist Islamic fancy,
were already under way in 2015. UNESCO fraudulently renamed two ancient
Biblical Jewish sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, as
Islamic sites. Historically, Islam did not even exist until the seventh century.
This is the history of Islam, how it takes over — with both hard jihad (violence) and soft jihad (usurping history, migration [hijrah],
political and cultural infiltration), and intimidation (soft jihad with
the threat of hard jihad underneath it). What is even more saddening is
that often, as with this vote, it is done with the West’s cooperation
and voluntary submission.
Before the United Nations, with its
authoritarian, anti-democratic voting blocs, finishes eradicating
Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, as it is clearly trying to do, it
is high time for Western democracies to run, not walk, away, before
further harm comes to them too, as it surely promises to do.
UNESCO
last August planned to vote on the historical status of Jerusalem’s
Temple Mount and its associated Western Wall. Back then, this author
stated that UNESCO’s plan
was to deny any Jewish link to this most central of all Jewish holy
sites, to trash a history going back thousands of years, and to claim
the Mount and the Wall as Islamic sites.
Islam believes that it is eternal and had therefore preceded
the other two great monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, even though
it was only to become visible to the world through Mohammad in the
seventh century AD, but entitled to elbow out the two older religions.
Lies
by UNESCO to rewrite history, erasing all traces of Judaism and
Christianity to favour a jihadist Islamic fancy, were already under way
in 2015. UNESCO fraudulently renamed two ancient Biblical Jewish sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs — abracadabra — Islamic sites.
Historically, Islam did not even exist until the seventh century.
This is the history of Islam, how it takes over — with both hard jihad (violence) and soft jihad (usurping history, migration [hijrah],
political and cultural infiltration), and intimidation (soft jihad with
the threat of hard jihad underneath it). What is even more saddening is
that often, as with this vote, it is done with the West’s cooperation
and voluntary submission.
The Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron is
now, according to this deeply compromised body, supposedly the “Ibrahimi
Mosque,” and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem is supposedly the “Bilal ibn
Rabah Mosque,” even though it never could have been a mosque. As the saying goes, “calling a cat a pig does not make it one.”
Now a new lie has been given the
sanction of the world’s largest and most unaccountable body, whose
reason for being is to preserve significant sites, not to bowdlerize
them.
On October 13, the news
was broadcast that UNESCO had passed a majority vote endorsing this
rape of archaeological and Biblical history. On the following Tuesday,
the resolution was endorsed
by the body’s executive board. If your majority, however, consists of
members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (the OIC, a bloc
consisting of 56 Islamic states plus “Palestine”, and possibly the
largest bloc at the UN), a fraudulent result such as this should
probably not come as a surprise.
An earlier delay and the
opposition of UNESCO’s chief, Irina Bokova, had raised hopes that this
act of jihadist, barbaric, unjust, and, frankly, arrogant supremacism
might be voted down. It was not. Following the vote, Bokova issued a
powerful statement condemning it, saying, among other things:
“The
heritage of Jerusalem is indivisible, and each of its communities has a
right to the explicit recognition of their history and relationship
with the city. To deny, conceal or erase any of the Jewish, Christian or
Muslim traditions undermines the integrity of the site, and runs
counter to the reasons that justified its inscription on the UNESCO
World Heritage list.
“Nowhere more than in Jerusalem do Jewish,
Christian and Muslim heritage and traditions share space and interweave
to the point that they support each other. These cultural and spiritual
traditions build on texts and references, known by all, that are an
intrinsic part of the identities and history of peoples.”
Now
the Christian and Jewish worlds will have to deal with the resolution’s
ramifications, the first of which is that all democracies would be wise
immediately to abandon the United Nations, or at the very least to stop
funding it, before further harm comes to them too, as it surely
promises to do.
The
resolution was first proposed to UNESCO by seven Muslim states
(Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and Sudan on behalf of
the Palestinian Authority — all OIC groupies — in October 2015. Any
reputable body empowered to protect ancient religious sites would have
rejected it out of hand and given those responsible a dusty answer.
UNESCO’s
parent body, the United Nations, has over many years increasingly shown
itself as untransparent, unaccountable and thoroughly disreputable —
from its $100 billion, never-prosecuted, oil-for-food embezzlement scandal exposed in 2004, to “Peacekeepers” who demand sex from children in exchange for food; to its incessant, fabricated persecution of one member state, Israel, while giving unlimited passes to the most ostentatious violators of human rights in other nations.
Before
the UN, with its authoritarian, anti-democratic voting blocs, finishes
eradicating Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, as it is clearly
trying to do, it is high time for Western democracies to run, not walk,
away.
Of UNESCO’s 195 member states, 35 are fully Islamic nations,
another 21 are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and
four are OIC observer states. That makes 60 who represent a bloc
favourable to Muslim-inspired resolutions, yet UNESCO’s Board consists
of only 58 members. That board approved Resolution 19 with 33 votes in
favour, six against and 17 abstentions. Ghana and Turkmenistan were
absent altogether. Only six countries voted against the resolution — the
US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania and Estonia.
Revealingly, France, Spain, Sweden, Russia and Slovenia were among those
who supported it. It is not hard to identify the source of the majority
vote.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the move as another “absurd” UN resolution:
“UNESCO
ignores the unique Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, the site of
two temples for 1,000 years, and the place to which Jews prayed for
thousands of years… The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history
and proving that there is no low to which it will not reach.”
Jewish patience in the Holy Land is being tested to the limit.
UNESCO’s
vote is just the latest example of Muslim supremacism as expressed in
the demolition, re-definition, or outright expropriation of the places
of worship, shrines, and other buildings linked to other faiths —
invariably faiths that have long preceded Islam itself, including
Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Judaism and Christianity. The process
began in the year 630, two years before the prophet Muhammad’s death,
when his forces conquered his hometown of Mecca. During a brief stay
there, before returning to Medina, he ordered all of the 360 idols in
the Ka’aba, and all those in private homes, to be destroyed. The Ka’aba itself, long a centre of pagan worship, was transformed overnight into the most important building of the Islamic faith, the Qibla or the spot towards which Muslims still turn in prayer five times a day. It sits at the heart of the Masjid al-Haram, the most important mosque in the Muslim world.[1]
Early
Muslims did more than expropriate the building for their own purposes.
They created a legend to justify their possession of the site.[2]
But
the Qur’an and subsequent Muslim tradition are not content to
re-establish history, bringing Abraham out of the Land of Canaan as far
down as the Arabian Peninsula. They transform Abraham himself. According
to the Qur’an (3:67): “Abraham was neither a Jew (yahudian) nor a Christian (nasranian), but was rather a pure worshipper of God (hanifan), a Muslim….”
This
forms part of a broader enterprise. In Islamic doctrine, all true,
monotheist religion has, from the beginning, been only Islam. Thus, Adam
was the first Muslim and the first prophet. Abraham was a Muslim and a
prophet. Moses was a Muslim and a prophet. Noah was a Muslim and a
prophet. Jesus was a Muslim and a prophet. In the beginning, everyone
was a Muslim and all land belonged to Islam. In the Qur’an, we read:
“Say,
‘We believe in God, and in that which was sent down to us, and in that
which was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes,
and in what Moses and Jesus were given, and in what the prophets were
given form their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and
unto Him we submit.”
That last phrase reads nahnu lahu muslimun. It can be read generically, meaning “those who submit themselves to God”; or specifically to mean “We are Muslims.”
The
belief that all true religions involve submission to God and that, in
this sense, all true religion may be defined as “Islam” (literally
“submission”), may be taken as a unifying, comprehensive declaration of a
universal truth, without prejudice to anyone except “idolaters” such as
Hindus and Buddhists.
But
this generalization was soon forgotten when Muslims found themselves in
competition with the followers of other faiths: Jews in Medina,
Christians throughout the Byzantine empire, or Zoroastrians in Iran.
Muhammad had originally preached his religion as one in harmony with the
views of the “People of the Book,” the Jews and Christians who had been
sent their own scriptures by God. But not long after his taking control
of Medina, he turned on the city’s three important Jewish tribes,
expelling two, then attacking the third, the Banu Qurayza, beheading all
the men and teenage males and taking the women and children as slaves.
From here on, the Qur’an is rife with condemnations of the Jews as a
people and of Christians as corrupters of scripture: “O believers, do
not take Jews and Christians as your friends” (Qur’an 5:51)
Once
Muslim armies went out to conquer Persia, Turkey, Greece, the Levant,
all of North Africa, the Balkans, Hungary, Poland and then conquered
Portugal, Andalusia in Southern Spain and other Christian territories,
all sense of an identity with the People of the Book as, in a sense,
fellow Muslims, went out the window, to be replaced by a sense of them
as dhimmi or subjected people, the preservation of whose lives and property were contingent on the payment of a protection tax (the jizya) and on agreeing to live as humiliated denizens under special laws of subjugation in lands ruled by Islamic caliphates.
One
consequence of this unequal relationship were countless rules,
including special, marked clothing that predated the compulsory yellow
Star of David that Jews were forced to wear during Hitler’s Third Reich,
and that churches and synagogues could not be founded, repaired,
rebuilt or given prominence in competition with mosques; and there could
be no audible summons to Jewish or Christian prayers.
More than
that, the occupation and transformation of lands of earlier religions —
Persia, Turkey, Greece, all of North Africa and much of Eastern Europe —
proceeded apace during unstoppable Islamic conquests. In Jerusalem, two
structures were erected on the Temple Mount (giving rise to the claim
for UNESCO’s recognition): the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Masjid al-Aqsa, “the Farthest Mosque”, although no one has a clue where that might have been; very possibly in Arabia) and the Qubbat al-Sakhra,
or Dome of the Rock, constructed on the alleged site of Abraham’s
aborted sacrifice, no longer of Isaac but now Ishmael, the progenitor of
the Arabs. Both were built within the first century of Islam.
There
is no need here to list all the churches converted to mosques during
succeeding centuries. Most notable are the Hagia Sophia churches of the
Christian Byzantine empire in Constantinople, Eregli, Nicaea, and
Trebizond, refashioned as mosques after the Ottoman conquest of 1453.[3]
Today, the Islamic State has destroyed or converted churches, shrines, and other monuments (including Muslim sites) in Iraq and Syria.
Similar
devastation took place under the various Islamic states in India, with
something like 2000 Hindu temples destroyed to make way for mosques and
other Muslim structures, while a similar fate befell others.
This
extraordinary level of fanaticism is not unique to Islam (one only has
to think of Oliver Cromwell and his puritans in England), but it has
been far more extensive and has continued for many more centuries.
It is a totalitarian puritanism. Today’s resolution against the Jewish faith must be put in this context.
Today,
the Mecca and Medina of the first and second centuries of the Islamic
faith have been all but wrecked, not by the Islamic State or any other
radical entity, but by the Wahhabi Saudi government. In the past two
decades, major historical sites in Mecca and Medina, all related to the
lifetime of the Islamic Prophet Mohammad and shortly after, have been
destroyed or disfigured to the point where neither city is recognizable
save for the Ka’ba and the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the
Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. And the two major mosques are themselves
much expanded modern constructions.[4]
UNESCO
has put Jewish sites with Muslim names into Muslim hands, in the heart
of Israel’s capital, to try slowly to destroy the Jewish state. UNESCO
is not fooling anyone.
It may not be long before Christian holy
places and churches in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth will also be
handed over on a plate to placate the forces of Islam, fearful of what
they may do not just in the Middle East, but in Europe, North America
and Europe, happy to have someone finally try to eliminate those
supposedly pesky Jews. All Judeo-Christian countries would be wise to
pull out of the UN, or at least cease funding it — before it is too late
for them, too.
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