Muslim anger over Temple Mount excavations - AKA hypocrisy in action

Today's big story is Muslim anger over Israel's renovation on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The Israelis are doing an archaeological excavation on the hilltop in the heart of Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the site of the al Aksa Mosque, prior to building a pedestrian walkway into the complex. The ramp is supposed to replace a centuries-old walkway that was damaged in a snowstorm three years ago.

The bit of elementary maintenance has been met with absolute hysterics by the entire Muslim world.

The Palestinians, predictably, rioted on cue from their leaders and several stories in the dinosaur media parroted the AP wire story about how the Israeli dig had `united Palestinians again.'

"What is happening is an aggression," Mohammed Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, told the Gaza Strip radio station of the Hamas militant movement. "We call on the Palestinian people to unite and unify the efforts to protect Jerusalem."

Hamas kingpin Khaled Mashaal weighed in as well. "Israel, which today is playing with fire when it touches Al-Aqsa, knows the consequences of this playing with fire."

And most improbably of all, King Abdullah of Jordan claimed that this was a violation of the peace agreement between Jordan and Israel!

"What Israel is doing in its practices and attacks against our sacred Muslim sites in Jerusalem and al-Aqsa is a blatant violation that is not acceptable under any pretext," the monarch was quoted by the state news agency Petra as saying.

Abdullah and his Arab brothers have some nerve, talking about preserving sacred sites.

After 1948, it is a matter of historical record that when almost a million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world, hundreds of old and historical synagogues and Jewish holy sites were desecrated in the most obscene fashion. In the Old City itself, 28 synagogues were profaned (two were turned into military latrines) by Abdullah's father, King Hussein, Jews were driven out of places they had lived for centuries and their holy sites in Jerusalem were barred to them until 1967, when Israel retook the eastern part of its ancient capitol.

In contrast to the Arabs, the Jews did not drive the Arab inhabitants out of East Jerusalem en masse from the homes they had stolen 20 years earlier; and they took special care to preserve the al Aksa Mosque and respect Muslim sensibilities..proof indeed that no good deed goes unpunished.

More recently, the Muslim world had nothing to say when the Palestinians destroyed Joseph's tomb in Judea after the Israelis gave control of the area to them, or the wholesale destruction of Jewish synagogues in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal.

Nor has the Muslim world had a single word to say about the burning of churches in Kossovo, Nigeria, Indonesia or elsewhere.

And of course, there was the Palestinian terrorist takeover of the Church of the Holy Sepelchure.

The arrogance and hypocrisy of these people in demanding respect for a mosque that was forcibly imposed by conquest on the original inhabitants 4 centuries ago while treating the religious sensibilities of others with blatant contempt is only matched by the dinosaur media's ignorance in falling in line with their bigotry and legitimizing it.

For many Muslims, it appears tolerance works only one way. And frankly, that racist double standard is something we in the west shouldn't tolerate.

As for Jerusalem..... I'll let this eloquent short film by Gil Ronen be my final comment.