The five people killed in the Holy Land on the Jews’ ancient Temple Mount at the end of last month consisted of two Israeli policemen and the three Muslims using weapons previously smuggled onto the Mount who murdered them, and in turn were killed by other Israeli police in the area.

This bloodshed then led to the closing of the entrances to the Temple Mount for Muslims in order to allow Israeli police to search for other weapons possibly planted on the site.  The closure enraged Muslims, because never before in fifty years had Israel done that so completely -- though for years, on days of political and religious tension, Israel does limit the age of those who may enter to 50 and older because the younger they are, the more likely they will try to throw rocks from the Mount down below onto the heads of Jews praying at the Western (wailing) Wall.

Israel then installed identical metal detectors identical to those used throughout the city for Jews and gentiles to pass through.  This was styled a second “aggression” in Muslim minds.  How dare the infidels inspect Believers in the One True Faith like this at their Third Holiest shrine?  Jews examining them like this would be a humiliation.

Before long, as is common in such episodes, angry crowds of Arab youths gathered, rocks in hand. Israeli TV archives bulge with footage of such teenagers, heads and faces wrapped in keffiyas, who come to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers and police. In the wake of the death of the three Muslim murderers of the Israeli policemen, their co-religionists praised each as a shahid/martyr for Islam, which ignited the passion of another homicidal Muslim maniac who, on the following Friday night in Samaria, broke into a gated Jewish community and politely knocked on a Jewish family’s front door.  The family, in the middle of enjoying their traditional Sabbath Eve meal, innocently opened the door, which allowed the Muslim wielding a big knife to jump in and start butchering them, slashing and plunging the blade again and again, murdering three, wounding others, splattering their blood all over the table set for the festive meal; all over the floor, the furniture, the walls.  In a flash, this Jewish family’s home was turned into a human abattoir.

What followed politically was a crisis for Israel and Jordan that administer the top of the Temple Mount.  Violent mobs of Arab males attacked Israeli security forces; frantic diplomacy erupted between Jerusalem, Washington, Riyadh, and Amman, where the killing of the three Muslim assassins inspired a Jordanian Muslim maintenance man at the Israeli Embassy to stab an Israeli security guard with a screwdriver, who of course shot him dead and, inadvertently, an innocent bystander.

As the boiling cauldron of feelings, fears, and threats percolated in the region, Arab-Muslim behavior was characterized by indignant protestations against Israel for its imagined aggression against Al-Aqsa Mosque by shutting down and installing security devices, which of course was meant to detract attention from the double homicide by the trio of suicidal Muslim assassins.  The Deputy Head of the Muslim Waqf that administers the top of the Temple Mount said the Israelis closed it down after the killing, not in order to search for other hidden weapons, as they claimed, but to inject chemicals into the walls of Al-Aqsa Mosque to make them crumble. 

In Istanbul, too, tens of thousands of Muslim men and boys rallied to shout their hatred of al-Yahud/the Jews for wanting to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque, and they were joined all over the Arab and Muslim worlds by people who hate the Jews for their dastardly plot to destroy Al-Aqsa.

In 2000 too, when the so-called Second Intifada erupted, the fuse was lit when Ariel Sharon dared to walk innocently on the Temple Mount past the grey-domed mosque.  That is all he did, which was nonetheless perceived as an insult to Islam. Indeed, the historical record does show that in some Muslim jurisdictions, a Jew walking past a mosque had to remove his shoes as a sign of respect for the One True Faith, or face punishment. Sharon’s walk then “licensed” Yasir Arafat, the son of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Mandatory Palestine, to summon the “Arab street” to begin another intifada, like the one in 1987 that led to the Oslo retreat engineered by those old Jewish Lefties Rabin and Peres.

And so it was.  The ensuing “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” as it was soon nicknamed, would take over five years for Israel to suppress, during which time over one thousand Jews were murdered in terrorist horrors and thousands more who survived them were maimed, mutilated and crippled for the rest of their lives.

Even seventy-one years before then, there was August 1929 when the leader of the Muslims in Mandatory Palestine, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, fabricated doctored photographs of the mosque seemingly in flames, which he sent around the country with the fake news that al-Yahud had not only done this to Al-Aqsa; they had also slaughtered five hundred Believers.

The result: pogroms in various locations, the worst of all, in Hebron.  Countrywide over three days, one hundred thirty-seven Jews were massacred.

So, it was hardly news at the end of last month that there was murder in cold blood, ghastly and grisly in a Jewish home, and riots, and all the result of Muslim delusions about Jews scheming to harm Al-Aqsa Mosque.  It is always about Al-Aqsa.

It is a repeating pattern in the behavior of the Arabs in Israel who masquerade as “Palestinians.”  The politically correct, antireligious MSM in Israel goes along when covering these events by always referring to the terrorists as “Palestinians,” never “Muslims.”  When this latest outrage eventually abated, an Israeli newspaper posted a photo of a mass of them on the Temple Mount once again kneeling in prayer, assuming the position of slaves, face to the floor, for Islam means submission.  It is a religion that hates its opposite -- freedom of the mind and individual liberty -- with the caption beneath reading, “Palestinians at prayer on the Temple Mount yesterday.”

But why?  There is absolutely nothing “Palestinian” about any of the men in this picture. These “Palestinians” insist that they are the indigenous people of Palestine, but if so, why don’t they speak the indigenous language of the country, which is Hebrew?  The provenance of their Mother Tongue (mamaloshen) is the Arabian Peninsula.  They also five times daily bow down in the direction of the Peninsula and its holiest city, Mecca.

In sum, the reason that the “Al-Aqsa Mosque is in Danger” gambit has a history is that there is no “Palestinian” history to draw on to rally the troops.  It is always Islam that lights their fire. In fact, for the first biblical generation of forty years following the League of Nations Mandate to create a jurisdiction called Palestine that thirteen centuries of Islam never knew existed, the official Arab line was that of the Grand Mufti, who said there was no such country with that name. It is never mentioned in the Quran.  The land was all southern Syria, Haj Amin said, and even published a newspaper with that name, Al-Suria al-Janubia.  This is why for the quarter-century lifetime of the League of Nations (1920-1945), not a word about any “Palestinians” was committed to paper.

And neither was this putatively Paleolithic people ever mentioned in the documents of the UN for its first twenty-five years.  Not until November 1970, three years after the historic Israeli victory in the Six-Day War and Jewish conquest of Holy Jerusalem, did a UN General Assembly resolution contain the word “Palestinian” as it is used today to refer to not the indigenous people of the Holy Land -- the Jews who speak its indigenous language -- but a nationality that is wholly Judenrein/Jew-free, a favorite Nazi word.

And this is the reason why the violence against the Jews in the Holy Land never stops: the antisemitic delusion of a Jew-free “Palestinian” people with rights to a state on the land the Jews stole from them and won’t give back.  This, of course, bears no relation to the historical record of the last 150 years.  Decades before the world ever heard of “Palestinians,” the Muslims were at war with the Jewish resurrection of the Holy Land that the Muslims kept as wasteland.

On the contrary, the principle, literally backstabbing murderers of Jews these days are the same homicidal-suicidal Muslim psychopaths who brought down the World Trade Center and have been responsible for all the major jihadi massacres of innocents for decades.

There is no record thus far of any Muslim terrorist murdering innocent people and being slain in the climax of his passion who shouts, “Long Live Palestine!”  It is always “Allahu Akbar!”  and there is no hope for peace until this truth is recognized. President Trump is wrong that the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism.”  No, the enemy is Islam, just Islam, plain and simple.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com.