{Cross-posted at the Elder of Ziyon.}
Over at Israellycool, Deebo has some interesting statistics concerning Jewish visitation to the Temple Mount, illustrated by a couple of very nice pie charts. The statistics come from both the Jerusalem Post and the Jewish Press.
Here are the pie charts.
The green represents the percentage of Muslim visitation to the Temple Mount in 2013 and 2015.
The yellowish-orange represent Christian visitation.
And that thin blue line that is almost entirely invisible? That is the "slice" of Jewish visitation to the holiest site to the Jewish people.
Deebo explains:
As you can clearly see, in 2 years the blue slice in the pie has grown by a whopping 0.1% among the more than 4,000,000 Muslim visitors the site receives each year. The increased storming is a sure sign that Al Aqsa will fall to the Zionists. At this rate of 0.05% growth per year, the number of Jewish visitors are expected to surpass that of Muslim visitors by the year 3009, assuming the number of Muslim visitors remains equal for the next 994 years.Yes. Yes. Al Aqsa will fall to the Zionists who will transgress upon its sanctity with their filthy feet.
The next time that I am in Israel I intend to really filthy my feet up before I go stomping around on Islam's alleged third holiest religious site. I am not exactly sure how to go about doing that, but I am sure that there is mud to be had.
The truth, of course, is that the Temple Mount is not the third holiest anything to anyone. It is, in fact, the holiest site to the Jewish people, which is precisely why Islam claims it as its own.
If the Jews did not revere it in the first place, you can be sure, neither would Islam.
This is what the place looked like under Ottoman Muslim rule in the nineteenth-century.
I am pretty sure that most who read Elder of Ziyon or Jews Down Under or Israel Thrives or Israellycool or Love of the Land, or any number of the pro-Israel / pro-Jewish blogs or journals, recognize this.
The problem is that the rest of the world does not.
When the Arabs start wailing that the Jews are invading Al Aqsa the rest of the world shrugs its shoulders and watches Arabs stab Jews in Jerusalem on their laptops over their morning Pop Tarts. They do not understand that it was only when the Jews began to make aliyah that the Arabs resuscitated Yerushalayim as a "holy site."
For many centuries the only people who cared about the Temple Mount were the surviving observant Jewish remnant in that city. No one else.
The classic question is, "Can the whole world be wrong and the Jews be right?" And the answer to that question is, "Yes." To the extent that the "whole world" thinks that the Jews of Israel are the persecutors of the Palestinian-Arabs, and usurpers of their ancestral lands, then they are entirely wrong.
The Arabs of the Middle East have, until recently, been beating the hell out of the Jewish minority since Muhammad showed up on the Arabian peninsula with his mystico-religious head-chopping philosophy of fun.
It was thirteen long centuries of persecution and violence under Arab-Muslim imperial rule and sixty-seven years of constant warfare after that since the Jews shook them off.
There was no Judeo-Muslim Golden Age, as some speak about. Dhimmi status for Jewish people under the boot of Islam was sometimes, and in some places, better and sometimes, and in some places, worse, but for thirteen centuries it was almost never better than black people had it in the abominable Jim Crow South.
For centuries stoning Jews was an Arab-Muslim sport. It was the tenth-century Arab equivalency of American baseball. Children played it in the streets for entertainment and social comradery
It is said, within Islamic tradition, that Muhammad lined up hundreds of Jewish men and chopped their heads off in the town of Khaybar on the Arabian peninsula. It must have been very satisfying for Muhammad to finally do away with those annoying nay-saying Jews who refused to submit to him as the prophet of Allah. The Jews who were left, the women and children, were sold into slavery or forced to convert to Islam at the point of a blade... a practice toward non-Muslims that continues to this day.
The Jews had thriving communities throughout the Middle East, but the Arabs killed them and drove them out because Islamic law, al-Sharia, forbids non-Muslim self-determination on any bit of land that was ever a part of the Umma. Thus Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land is considered an abomination before Muhammad, the Koran, and the Lord God Almighty.
The very fact of Israel's existence is considered a humiliation to these backward-looking Islamists.
And this is why they bravely send Israeli-Arab children out to stab Jews with kitchen knives.
They have not the strength of character to fight their own fights, so they send their own children out to be killed in their stead.
It must be acknowledged, however, that it is the Euro-Liberal-West that enables this behavior.
European guilt for its colonialist-imperialist past is apparently so profound that they are literally willing to forgive any kind of Arab behavior, no matter how heinous, as they go about the process of committing cultural suicide. And, in addition, they are even paying Arabs and anti-Zionists to undermine the Jewish state as they vomit-out their own traditional, democratic, liberal values.
It was just two days ago that Islamists marched into a rock concert in Paris and slaughtered innocent people with the rat-tat-tat of automatic assault weaponry, even as the European Union is slapping a yellow Star of David upon Israel's forehead for products made in the wrong part of Israel.
I would like to say that it was nice to know you, Europe.
But, in truth... not so much.
Good luck.
{You are going to need it.}