The Wandering Jew

Incitement (Old and New)

More incitement, more lies about Israeli efforts underway to build a pedestrian ramp near the Temple Mount.

From Intimidation Tactics in the Jerusalem Post:

In Gaza, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and elsewhere, Muslims are up in arms about what even a moderate like Jordan's King Abdullah called "a threat to the foundations of the Al Aksa mosque."

"What is happening is an aggression, we call on the Palestinian people to unite and protect Jerusalem," said Muhammad Hussein, the top Muslim cleric in Jerusalem. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for the Islamic world to "retaliate" and make Israel "regret" what it had done.

What is Israel doing that has sparked such violent threats? Some years ago, the pedestrian ramp leading up to Jerusalem's Temple Mount fell apart. Now municipal authorities plan to build a permanent ramp to maintain access to this holy site, and are conducting, as required by law, an archeological salvage dig to make sure no artifacts are destroyed in the process.

All of this is completely outside the Temple Mount platform, and bears no relation or threat to that structure, let alone to the Aksa mosque. Why would Israel dream of undermining the Temple Mount, which is Judaism's holiest site? The claim that Israel is doing so is patently absurd, as anyone familiar with the area can immediately see.

So how can the Muslim world be awash in violent threats based on an entirely fabricated pretext? Must there not be something to it?

The answer is that Muslim indignation is taken as self-justifying, and the more violent it is, the more the Western victims of it tend to question themselves.

Seems there's a long history of Arab incitement when it comes to the Temple Mount.

From Sarah Honig's Rude Awakening (Jerusalem Post):

Today it's replacing a collapsed walkway. In 1919, wooden benches for the old and infirm were cited as the insufferable affront. The British promptly removed them, but Arabs then began to regularly drive cattle and laden donkeys through crowds of Jewish worshipers. From 1920 the muezzin was dispatched to bellow his loudest chants precisely during Jewish services.

In 1921, the sound of the shofar blown on the High Holy Days in front of the Wall became the next pretext for unrest. The British obligingly forbade the annoying blasts.

The shrillest Arab outcry was raised in 1928 over a flimsy partition put up to segregate male and female worshipers at the Wall. The British lost no time in removing the insulting screen right at the climax of Yom Kippur services. From then on premeditated disruptions at the Wall grew increasingly violent, till trumped-up tales of Jewish attempts to take over the Temple Mount sent Arabs rioting on August 23, 1929. The bloodbath lasted a full week and left 133 Jews slaughtered.

The rampages began in Jerusalem, but the most notorious massacre was in Hebron, where 67 men, women and children were hacked to death in homicidal frenzy. The centuries-old Jewish community was uprooted, as were smaller Jewish enclaves in Gaza, Jenin, Tulkarm and Nablus.

That's precisely what Sallah has in mind when he urges "a third intifada." The carnage of 1929, still reverentially dubbed by Arabs as "the Burak Battle," is Sallah's jihadist model for liberating the holy site from the presence of Jews (who sanctified it in the first place). When he barefacedly accuses Jews of "aiming to raze al-Aksa," he knows that such falsehoods have already instigated horrific vendettas for counterfeit causes.

Honest Reporting has more on the controversy: Temple Mount Truths.

Year of the Pig

Happy Chinese New Year!

In the Days of the Czar

Three Generations, 1910

Jewish Children With Their Teacher, 1911

Tea Weighing Station, ca. 1907-1915

The Emir of Bukhara, 1911

The pictures above are from a fabulous collection of photos taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, the photographer to Czar Nicholas II. The images, originally shot in black-and-white, were transformed through a color rendering process explained here.

(via Solomonia)

Hatikvah

From Daniel Gordis's This Place Called Hope:

The tragedy of today’s situation is that you ask young American Jews to free associate with the word “Israel,” the first thing you’re likely to hear is “Palestinians,” or “war,” or “fence.” But the State wasn’t created for any of these things. Most young Jews, both in Israel and outside, can’t say an intelligent word about why the State was created. They might mention the Shoah. Or the refuge issue. But they’ll miss the major point — that the purpose of Israel was not Statehood. It was hope.

They don’t know, anymore, that the Zionist movement, and then the State, took as its national anthem a poem called “The Hope.” They know the melody, and Israelis know the words. But they have no idea what it’s about. They can’t begin to articulate the notion that Israel represented to Jews across the globe, after the worst century we’d known, life over death. Continuity instead of extermination. A homeland instead of exile. Rebirth instead of extinction.

They’re so consumed with the plight of the Palestinians (a horrific plight, obviously, that has to be addressed — as soon as the Palestinians make that their priority) that they don’t resonate at all to the pride Jews once felt about the rescue of Ethiopian Jews, or the rescue at Entebbe, or the technological prowess of Israeli companies, or by the now stereotypical tanned and hardened Israeli youth, stark contrasts to the common portrayal of Europe’s Jews as pale and passive. They don’t understand that it’s because hope — life over death — was at the core of this country that explains why there are still huge book fairs in this country, celebrating the mere simple fact that thousands of books are published each year in a language that 150 years ago, virtually no one in the world spoke. It was why dance became an integral part of this culture, and why Jews got excited about a song celebrating a sprinkler, written when the National Water Carrier project was completed. What person in their right mind sings about a sprinkler? Who dances to the idea of a sprinkler? Jews did, and do, when the sprinkler brings water from the north to the south, when it bring life to the desert, when it bespeaks not just the flow of water, but the possibility of hope when there could have been nothing but despair.

The Feel of Spring

Newly-Formed Wild Grape Cluster by Kathleen Connally

A beautiful spring-like day here in Suzhou, which reminds me: it's time for another Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania.

Chinese Orchestra

(Photo by W. Saunders, 1862-1888, NYPL Digital Library)

I recently reconnected with an old high-school classmate of mine. She's a violist who's been performing in the same musical group in Barcelona for over twenty years.

This photo is for her.

If You Prick Us...

(Gareth Armstrong as Shylock)

Nextbook presents a podcast on one of the most notorious Jews of all time.

Click here to listen.

Boy From Tongli

(Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Poem: Curator of Fruit

Curator of Fruit

— Isabella Dalla Ragione, arboral archaeologist

It is the old women I love
        most, the remembered
piles of pear, plum, apple,
        cherry, peach, medlar,
& quince that they cellared
        beneath their nuptial beds,
where it was cool. How I want
        to possess the smell
& taste of all that's past,
        to graft scion & rootstock,
bind them tight. I desire
        life itself, to turn my land
heavy with musked
        orbs of imperfect fruit.
A rutted road thrusts over
        potato fields to the Fiorentina
tree, black-freckled pear,
        its bark split & gowned
in a lichen intricate white.
        The life I've chosen is not
my own. I know that many
        could say the same: the trees,
blushing old women.
        It is no cause for complaint.
Marriage is a stony bed,
        is want. Inedible flesh
bagged in its spotted skin,
        the sap's inexplicable rise
to sky, & early morning, love
        heavy with the smell of winter
pears, firm & crisp & cold.

— Rebecca Dunham

The Next Holocaust

From Benny Morrris' This Holocaust Will Be Different:

As with the first, the second holocaust will have been preceded by decades of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different audiences, but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: "The Zionists/Jews are the embodiment of evil" and "Israel must be destroyed."

And Westeners, more subtly, were instructed: "Israel is a racist oppressor state" and "Israel, in this age of multiculturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous." Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.