More grotesque news. At a time when Israel has declared two sites in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to be Jewish heritage sites, showing that it has no sign of creating any kind of viable Palestinian state, grim tidings from Haaretz: A rabbi declares that work is going to begin on the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance atop a historic Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, despite international protest of the desecration.
Since the Supreme Court’s unanimous green light in late December for the project to go ahead, preparatory work has started and we are now down to bedrock, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based international Jewish human rights organization named for the late Nazi hunter.
…"But we’re hoping in the next couple of months to begin construction," Cooper said. ..After the Supreme Court rejected their 2008 appeal to stop construction of the museum, Palestinian and international human rights activists petitioned the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva last month to try to block the museum…
The Simon Wiesenthal Center contends that the museum is being constructed on a parking lot that no Muslims objected to building in 1960.
Cooper said that three days after the petition to the UN was filed, a blogger unearthed a Nov. 22, 1945 article in the Palestine Post related to the Mamilla cemetery.
Much to our utter amazement it talked about an announcement by the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine to dig up a good part of the cemetery and build factories, a hotel and university, not on what would be our piece but on the actual cemetery, he said.
Notice that the good rabbi claims that there were "no Muslims" objecting to the parking lot in 1960. Right; Muslims in the new state of Israel had many fewer civil rights than they do even today. As Rick Congress has noted here, the 1945 article about Mamilla being destined to be business center–Nonsense, Mamilla was then on a British antiquities list.
[Martin] Hier [of Simon Wiesenthal Center] says that a "Supreme Muslim Council" had approved building on top of the Mamilla Cemetery. However, this Supreme Muslim Council (appointed by the British Mandate authorities) had no Muslim clerics among it and there also was no Mufti in office. Only a Mufti would have had the religious authority to approve building on the Mamilla Cemetery. It is part of the historical record that the last Supreme Muslim Council headed by a Mufti was dissolved by the British Mandate Authority in 1937.
The 1945, non-clerical, British-appointed Supreme Muslim Council did not have the authority to issue a religious fatwa (or ruling) that would have had the power to make any big changes in the status quo.
Add in the Simon Wiesenthal’s revamped new website, and the main court of battle looks to be shifting from petition signing (the forces of tolerance have gotten 4000 signatures) and the UN Human Rights Council, to the Public Relations Campaign. Well the effort to stop the desecration is not going away, and no amount of PR is going to make this thing kosher.
From two letters to Haaretz on the construction:
I don’t understand why Wiesenthal Center wants to build a cynically named "Museum of Tolerance" at an ancient cemetery site. This makes no sense to me. This is a frontal assault on everyone who respects the deceased, independent of religious faiths. This doesn’t make sense at all. I just found out that the Reform Rabbis’ Organization in US is against this too…
All the new Jewish historical sites being consecretated in west bank–tomb of ruth, etc, but this doesn’t go for Mamilla.
Just substitute the words “new settlement blocks” for “Museum of Tolerance” and you have a pretty good idea of how the Biden-settlement imbroglio will work out.
This is exactly the kind of “tolerance” that one would expect from an “international Jewish (sic!) human rights organization”. Reminds me of the settlers’ answer to B’tselem – B’tzedek, described at its founding as an “organisation for the human rights of Jews”.
This shows how Israel is either totally oblivious to world opinion, or it’s deliberately giving a big “Fuck You” to the rest of the world.
It’s the latter, as far as I’m concerned. The behavior of Israelis vis-a-vis the Durban conferences bear that out.
Check out this old article from HuffPo:
link to huffingtonpost.com
I hope the silver lining to this continuing deceitful misbehavior is a wake-up call to American Jews to the reality that Israel hasn’t turned out the way many had hoped, and that the ‘traditional narrative’ that they have been taught contains quite a few discrepancies.
Not to be the perpetual cynic but I’m not exactly holding my breath on that regard.
Israel lives in a dream that the world fails to understand.
The cemetery desecration is a good example of the lack of values we share as nations. Joe Biden should not speak for the US population when he says we have the same values, but it probably sounds patriotic if you’re a Zionist. They’ll pour concrete footings where bodies have rested for thousands of years? Sound right. Perhaps they’ll awaken spirit of Saladin during their excavation. Hillary should stand up at the AIPAC conference next week and proclaim that this is a felony carried out by Zionists. This is probably one the factors that will lead to another intifada.
Wiesenthal is a proven exaggerator/liar, but it’s no surprise that the Center is carrying on his great tradition of disinformation. Can’t the White House set up an anti-Hasbara task force, to legally charge agencies with misleading information? Isn’t the core of all the Mid-East troubles actually stemming from media cover-ups for the past 50 years? This endless propaganda and mis-information is the root cause of the problem.
Maybe we need to form groups of minutemen to rush around at night and nail up
the real news in broadsheets on every tree and fence around?
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In the print media the Simon Wiesenthal Center has recently presented evidence (in the form of a story from the Palestine Post of 1945) that the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem was planning a business center on the site of the Mamilla Cemetary in 1945. The Palestine Post (precursor to the Jerusalem Post) was violently Labor-Zionist in its politics, and by 1945 was not the best source for anything going on within the Palestinian community, nor the best advocate for its interests. Furthermore, the remnants of Muslim leadership at that time were only those approved by the British, who were guaranteed not to criticize the Brits nor interfere with their imperial interests.
Finally, the nominal head of the Muslim Council at that time was the notorious Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, who although out of the country in 1945 was still technically the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; and who, besides being one of the most loathsome anti-Semites of the 20th century, was also an enthusiastic propagandist for Hitler and the Nazis. (Besides making untold numbers of propaganda broadcasts for Hitler, Al-Husaybi was also active in recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen SS, and was directly responsible for mass murders of Serbian Christians in the Balkans.) Furthermore, historical accounts suggest that leadership groups in Jerusalem at that time were rife with cronyism, corruption, and the infighting of various Jerusalem families.
Although it is somewhat dangerous to generalize, it might be said that Al-Husayni and the so-called Jerusalem Muslim Council in 1945 kept in place by the Brits represented a snapshot of exactly what a great many secular Arab nationalists (not to mention the later Islamic Revival throughout Muslim-majority countries) aimed to get rid of—not merely cronyism, greed and class oppression but also, in the case of Al-Husaybi, European-style fascism and anti-Semitism. The fact that neither Arab nationalism nor the Islamic Revival was entirely successful in doing so does not change the fact that Al-Husayni and the Muslim Council of 1945 represented those things to which the best Arab thinkers were irreconcilably opposed. It was for precisely this reason that the Palestinian Liberation Organization was careful to sideline al-Husayni and to downplay his influence in the years before his death in 1974.
In any case, neither al-Husayni nor the Muslim Council of 1945 are guides to important cultural and political decisions in Israel/Palestine of 2010, for the Palestinian community today is entirely different than it was in 1945. Sadly, that is difficult for Rabbi Hier and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to accept. For them, there is simply “the Palestinians,” the eternal enemy of the Jews, much as Christians used to refer to a mysterious entity known as “the Jews” who were supposedly the eternal enemy of Christendom.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is not a human rights organization, but an extreme rightwing group tinged by neo-fascism and with some of the characteristics of a hate group. See more exciting details about the tactics of the Simon Wiesenthal Center see the full investigative report by this writer to appear soon on a website near you.
PilgrimSoul: one of the most loathsome anti-Semites of the 20th century
Those are pretty big shoes to fill. Although far from a paragon of virtue, Haj Amin Al-Husseini was not the first to adopt the maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and was far less important than Zionist historians and propagandists would have us believe.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” was also what led those Bosnians to sign up with Hitler – not anything Al-Husseini may or may not have said to them, or British policies in Palestine. By the way, the only evidence I’ve ever seen linking Al-Husseini to those SS Bosnians is a widely-circulated photo of him reviewing some troops. Do you know of any evidence that he was instrumental – or involved in any way – in their recruitment?
According to Alan Dershowitz, Nazis were OK; it was only too bad that the Mufti corrupted them.
For an excellent analysis of Israel’s exaggeration of the role of Haj Amin Al-Husseini in the Holocaust, see Idith Zertal Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge University Press, 2005). (I’ve cited this before, by the Hebrew title The Nation and Death.)
…rabbi claims that there were “no Muslims” objecting to the parking lot in 1960.
I put my earplugs on last week when I threw food all over the walls, co-workers and desks around the office and no one complained either. All I heard was complete silence.
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