Wailing Wall of the West
by Nidra Poller
Temple Mount psychodrama
Act 1 July 14th: three Arab Israelis pick up weapons previously stored by an accomplice in the al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount and gun down two Israeli Druze policemen. Being courageous jihadis, they shoot the policemen in the back. Israeli authorities step in where the Waqf, guardians of the mosques, had failed to exercise due diligence. They bar entry to the Temple Mount, gather evidence, install metal detectors to prevent further killing-this type of crime often comes in waves-and then reopen the Temple Mount. This normal exercise of Israeli sovereignty provokes violence in Jerusalem and recriminations from Western media onlookers that echo the war cry: Israel is not respecting the status quo. Prime Minister Netanyahu remarks that stashing weapons in the mosque is a violation of the status quo, but chronology loses its bearing whenever Islam is concerned. Steps taken to restore that status quoi are presented by Western media and commentators as provocative measures that led naturally to rioting, murderous attacks, and diplomatic aggression.
Thousands of Muslims prostrate themselves outside the gates, defiantly refusing to pass through the metal detectors. In between prayer sessions they unleash their fury on law enforcement, throwing firebombs, firecrackers, allahu akhbars, and threats of extermination. The genocidal war cry khaybar khaybar ya yahud, jaish muhammad sawfa ya’ud! ricochets in the steep narrow lanes of Jerusalem’s old city. We know that tune. It was on the hit parade in the summer of 2014 when our local jihadis stomped through the streets of Paris bellowing khaybar khaybar (“Remember Khaybar [dirty] Jews, Mohamed’s army is coming [to exterminate you] again.”) [cf Poller, The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks la République]
Act 2: our French media, undoubtedly guided and fed by Agence France Presse, report fulminatingly on the distress caused to Muslim worshippers by the installation of metal detectors at entries to l’esplanade des mosquées [mosque compound]. Commentators, never at a loss for words, lock into default position: The problem is the colonies. The problem is far and further right wing Netanyahu, gobbling up Palestinian land, making peace impossible. The problem is, he won’t make a 2-state solution.
N.B. factual mistakes, careless mistakes, incomplete information and sloppy reporting of every sort are the hallmark of news makers. However, honest mistakes are random. Deliberately failing to mention that the two Israeli policemen were shot with weapons smuggled into the al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount is not sloppy reporting. It’s a lie.
The metal detectors become an arbitrary gesture of humiliation and, far worse, they’re one step away from the total destruction of the al Aqsa mosque. Yes, our ladies and gentlemen of respectable media automatically identify with the most bloodthirsty of the ranting raging rioters. They integrate the rage and the rationale. It’s so natural they don’t miss a step. Metal detectors, they’re tearing down the mosque, the Israelis have turned this into a religious war, au secours, help! What about the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Israel and the disputed territories that are not chanting khaybar khaybar kill the Jews? Enlightened Muslims publish op-eds denouncing the counterproductive uprising fueled by Islamic extremists. Our opinion makers don’t seem to be aware of their existence. Seventeen years since the al Dura blood libel triggered an unending wave of atrocities, the sky is still falling, the mosque is in danger, and kill the Jews seems like a reasonable response to a few metal detectors.
Muhammad’s army strikes Halamish
Act 3: another brave warrior girds for battle. Dressed like an Orthodox Jew, white shirt, black trousers, kippa…and a butcher knife, he deftly climbs over the barrier (we don’t know exactly how), enters the Jewish neighborhood of Halamish, and knocks on the door of the first house he comes to. The Salomon family, gathered around the shabat table, is celebrating the birth of a grandchild hat very morning. They open the door, thinking the young man is the first of many guests that will come to share their joy of fruitfully multiplying, of new life and renewed generations. He pulls out the knife and slaughters the grandfather, his adult daughter and adult son. The grandmother is stabbed but survives. The daughter-in-law runs upstairs, takes refuge in a bedroom with her five children and, holding the door closed with all her might, calls for help. An off duty soldier next door comes out, sees what is happening, shoots the killer, ending his spree but not his life.
We learn subsequently that the soldier did not shoot twice because the wounded murderer fell next to Yosef Salamon whose wife Tova had been the soldier’s kindergarten teacher.
Slash tag interlude: in nearby Amman, in the kingdom of Jordan, holy seat of the negligent Waqf, a young man delivering furniture to a residence in the Israeli embassy compound deliberately (or mistakenly…taking him for a piece of wood) stabs the security guard in the back with a screwdriver. The security guard shoots him dead. The owner of the building who had accompanied the delivery boy-reportedly the son of the furniture store owner-is apparently stuck dead by a stray bullet. So, of course, the royal Jordanian kingdom refuses to allow the security guard and other embassy personnel to leave his realm. Sticklers for international law, ready to set the world on fire if the status quo on their third holiest site is not respected, the Jordanians don’t only insist on the right to let Muslims store weapons in the mosque, they also trample diplomatic protocol like it was an Israeli flag at the feet of raging allahu akhbars. And of course they are raging all around the Israeli embassy.
The voice of reason strikes again
Act 4: A closed door emergency session of the UNSC is convened at the request of France, Sweden, and Egypt-three nations internationally known for their expertise in preventing jihad attacks and other subversive actions. The voices of reason prevail. What do they say? From this day forward, visitors to the Temple Mount will wear electronic bracelets, as do pilgrims to Mecca? Or perhaps, ceasefire first, negotiations afterward? Pull back your mob from the gates, apologize for allowing killers to store weapons in the Al Aqsa mosque, and then we can talk. The president of the United States brings the full force of his power to bear? True, the American embassy has not made one step off the Tel Aviv beachfront on its way to Jerusalem but never mind. The time has come to apply the directives outlined in President Trump’s May 22nd speech to sheiks, princes, kings and prime ministers assembled in Riyadh. What was the theme again? Oh yes, to fight terrorism.
Hah! The voices of reason prevailed. Israeli police under cover of the night dismantled the offensive metal detectors. An international sigh of relief and a friendly pat on the back to the Israelis for these tension- reducing measures. The liberated embassy staff comes home from Jordan. Smiles and thanks to the American president’s men, Greenblatt, Freeman, and Kushner without whom, it is publicly said, the metal detectors would not have come down and the embassy staff would not have come home and the tensions would not have been reduced.
Which is why the Temple Mount temper tantrum kept going strong. The high tech surveillance cameras had to come down too, but that didn’t prevent the war drums of street prayers interlaced with wild mob action to persist and grow with promises of another day of rage on Friday the 28th. The ummah was beside itself. Worldwide. An imam in Davis California, caught by MEMRI giving a classical exterminate-the-Jews sermon complete with the rock & tree surah protests his innocence: he was only referring to the Jews that prevent Muslims from praying at the al Aqsa mosque.
A day of rage is circled on the calendar when the mufti, the imam, Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah suddenly tell worshippers they can go back to pray in their mosque on the Temple Mount that they now call al Aqsa. Not just the mosque, the whole Temple Mount, jihadistically expropriated, with the help of the willing executioners of UNESCO. Rage mixes with joy as Muhmmad’s army celebrates its victory and our media headline Israel’s surrender. Conveniently forgetting that Muhammad’s army has already taken stabs at Notre Dame!
Compensating for the removal of every sort of low and high tech surveillance gadget, Jerusalem police chief Yoram Halevi stood upright and reaffirmed Israeli sovereignty in advance of Friday prayers. All will go well if everyone cooperates. Suspicious people will be searched as always. Worshippers will be admitted as usual. But anyone that tries to create trouble will be met with iron fisted force. There will be injuries there will be arrests. We are strong and we know what to do.1
Commemoration of execution of a priest in a Normandy church
July 26, 2017, St. Etienne du Rouvray. People gathered from near and far to commemorate the slaughter of Père Hamel, a Catholic priest celebrating mass in a small, nearly empty church in Normandy. Two young men born in France of North African origin put together a shahid video, walked into the church, solemnly pronounced allegiance to Daesh, forced an elderly parishioner to film the exploit as they slit the throat of the 86 year-old priest, and then stabbed their videographer-slave, who survived. The jihad attack was the third in a morbid series that summer: 13 June, a young couple, both members of the police force, were savagely assassinated in front of their 3 year-old child at their home in Magnanville. 14 July, 84 civilians were killed and more than a hundred maimed by a jihadi at the wheel of a truck on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Not to mention 130 murdered by ambitious shahids in 2015, and scattered incidents before and since…
Here too the voices of reason speak out. At the high point in a moving tribute to the slaughtered priest, President Macron thanks Catholics for not giving in to hatred after this heinous crime. He thanks them, as if they had been two steps away from going on the rampage, stomping through the streets screaming annihilate the Muslims, torching mosques, beheading imams, raping women in hijab and ripping open pregnant Muslim bellies. We’ve been hearing this nonsense for 17 years. Our bewildered citizens are doing candle and flower ceremonies and hugging the nearest Muslim, anything to prove how much we love each other.
We don’t make bloodthirsty calls for revenge! The ones that go on the rampage are there in front of our eyes. They are verbally photoshopped into defenseless victims. And the voice of reason orders the targets of their genocidal hatred to stand down. Jihadis are fulfilling their sacred duty to punish, annihilate, convert. They clearly state their inspiration and objectives. But our political leaders and confused opinion-makers keep prettying it up with lace embroidery. They [the killers] want to turn us against each other, preaches the president, but we won’t do it, we’re stronger than ever in our vivre ensemble. The blood of the innocent flows through the byways of our societies and the smooth talkers warble in harmony-Muslims and Christians closer than ever after the horrifying murder of the beloved priest. Here’s the July 2016 photo of Salafists in front of the mosque that is actually connected by a door to the [other] St. Etienne du Rouvray church. The sign says “mosque in mourning.”2
Dhimmitude
This wailing wall of the West is dhimmitude. This deliberate concealment of Islamic acts and methods, this insane identification with the bloodthirsty, this constant exhortation to tie our own hands behind our backs, this vicious condemnation of Israel’s self-defense is dhimmitude And it’s not just in France, not only European submission. I heard it wherever I went on a recent visit to the US. In North Carolina, in NY, in Boston, at a conference at Brandeis, always the same song, we should be better kinder more tolerant more aware of our faults and shortcomings more inclusive less judgmental… it’s dhimmitude. Bash me and I’ll weep for my sins. It’s not the media, the left, the stupid these and those, it’s jihad conquest. We’re being conquered and we don’t know it. It’s not just naked genocidal violence, it’s crass ignorance and dulled conscience. It’s cute conquest, an article bubbling with Muslim American patriotic appreciation of the American Eagle denim hijab, “as American as apple pie.”3 It’s the Islamic Center of Davis explaining that the imam only called for the annihilation of Jews that keep worshippers out of al Aqsa. And the Center has not been closed and shuttered.
It’s jihad conquest, dhimmitude, and vacancies at the highest levels of our democracies. At a joint press conference with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, President Trump awkwardly read out a prepared text praising the Lebanese army that is “on the front lines in the combat against Daesh, Al Qaida, and Hezbollah.” The statement included several lines about the evils of Hezbollah. Ha’aretz reports that Hariri respectfully corrected him: we’re fighting Daesh and A Qaida, yes, but not Hezbollah. They’re in the government. We have an understanding.” This rectification does not figure in the video posted by the U.S. government.4 Was it edited out? Or hidden in the untranslated questions and answers in Arabic?
Blood spattered wall
In the few short days since I started this text, a 26 year-old Palestinian born in the UAE stabbed a man to death in a Hamburg supermarket and wounded five. Like Kobili Traoré who savagely murdered Sarah Halimi, he is said to be psychologically fragile, and his motivations are not clear. At this stage of the investigation the flagged security risk doesn’t seem to “belong” to any terrorist “organization.” Like the Tunisian that crushed twelve people under his truck at a Christmas market in Berlin, this killer was awaiting deportation after rejection of his demand for asylum. The third European victim of a recent stabbing attack at an Egyptian resort died of her wounds. Two father-son couples suspected of preparing to bring down a plane have just been arrested in Australia. And Jordanian sources screaming for blood published the photo of the Israeli security guard that killed his assailant.
Metal detectors there, hamstrung bureaucracies here, and mentally disturbed allahu akhbars everywhere. But the Great Big International Al Aqsa Intifada did not occur. All things considered, who surrenders, and who stands his ground?
1. http://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-police-chief-threatens-casualties-if-protests-continue/
2. The running account, originally published by ruthfully yours, is collated here: http://www.newenglishreview.org/Nidra_Poller/Jihad_Attack_on_a_Little_French_Church/
3. http://nypost.com/2017/07/20/american-eagle-introduces-the-denim-hijab/
4.https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=trump+hariri+joint+declaration+to+press&view=
detail&mid=C9F32D40CB9B26348C09C9F32D40CB9B26348C09&FORM=VIRE
First published in Family Security Matters.