“Al Aqsa Flood” is the name for the “holy” war that Hamas initiated on October 7 by butchering and kidnapping over 1500 Israelis. It is the rallying cry of the Islamic terrorist leaders and those who support their brutality. However, the image that Hamas, Iran and Iran’s other clients are using in branding the war the “Al Aqsa Flood,” is not the dark gray Al Aqsa Mosque but rather the golden Dome of the Rock shrine.

The aggressive and expansive Islamic claim for dominance has spread from the Al Aqsa mosque to the entire Temple Mount platform to the City of Jerusalem and now the entire nation (“…from the river to the sea”). The current and often recurring myth is that the Jews are somehow threatening the Al Aqsa mosque. This entire premise is a lie, and this lie is costing untold horror and devastation.

Here are some key facts:

Image: The Al-Aqsa mosque by Andrew Shiva. CC BY-SA 4.0.

For 830 years, long before Islam became a religion, there were temples on the site where the golden-roofed Dome of the Rock now sits. The first was Solomon’s, or the First, Temple, which existed between the 10th and 5th centuries B.C.E., and there are detailed descriptions of the temple from this period shortly after the Bronze Age ended.

The Second Temple was built on the same site 70 years after the First Temple’s destruction, which was more than a thousand years before Muhammed’s birth. Both Jewish Temples’ existence is undisputed, confirmed by contemporaneous records, archeology, and the surviving Western Wall. According to Jewish tradition, the site was holy even before the temples were built, for it is on this hill that God tested Abraham with the binding of Isaac. It is also on this site that 600 years after the Roman conquest, Muslims built the Dome of the Rock.

Caliph Umar was the first Muslim to control Jerusalem, conquering the city from the Byzantine Empire in the mid-630s C.E.

Within 50 years of the conquest, a prayer house was erected to the south of the remaining wall of the Second Temple. The reason for the mosque’s location was to ensure that it was easy for Muslims to face Mecca. Also, Omar reportedly told his Jewish accomplice that he did not want to pray from the temple’s north side because then Muslims would have a Jewish temple site between them and their prayers to Mecca.

The famous golden Dome of the Rock that now sits where the First and Second Temples were once is not a mosque. It is a shrine that Caliph Abd al-Malik originally built in 685. It sits more than 200 meters (656 feet) north of the Al-Aqsa mosque, where Muslims pray.

In 705 C.E., Caliph Al Walid replaced Omar’s modest Al-Aqsa mosque with the current plain, dark structure to commemorate the Muslim tradition of Muhammed’s night journey. This tradition holds that he departed from the “farthest mosque” on a winged horse-like creature named El Burak. On this journey, he allegedly met Jewish and Christian biblical heroes and negotiated with Allah to reduce the Muslim prayer requirements from 50 to five times per day.

While most Muslims follow the tradition that the mosque marks the site of Muhammed’s departure, there are quite a number who challenge this. They allege that the actual “farthest” mosque was in Saudi Arabia. There’s a theory that Muslims then centered around Damascus wanted to claim Jerusalem as the location because it was within their governing authority and would increase traffic.

In 1967, Israelis prevailed in the Six-Day War, regaining access to Eastern Jerusalem, in which lay their most sacred site and which Jordan had closed to them. Out of respect for Muslim traditions and in a misguided effort to try and be conciliatory to the Arab population after Israel’s victory, Jews allowed the Waqf, a Muslim trustee organization, to manage the Temple Mount platform, which includes both the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.

Unfortunately, the Waqf has been anything but a trustworthy manager. It allowed more than 400 truckloads of soil on the site, full of artifacts (coins, pottery, and more) from the first and second Jewish Temple periods of 2,000-3,000 years ago, to be dug up and dumped in the desert. It also continues to allow the imam who heads worship at Al-Aqsa to spew venomous hatred against Jews, as he did recently with a tribute to Ismail Haniyeh, the former leader of Hamas who masterminded the Al Aqsa Flood massacre.

The idea that Jews on the Temple Mount are a threat to the Al-Aqsa mosque is a total lie. It’s true that, someday, Jews do hope to see a third temple built on the location of the Dome of the Rock—but not where Al-Aqsa sits.

Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Chief Rabbis rule that Jews should not ascend to the Temple Mount on the grounds that Jews are not in a ritually pure enough state at this time to do so, and they might encroach on an area of holiness inadvertently. However, there are also well-respected rabbis who hold that it is permissible to ascend to the site after immersing in a mikveh (ritual bath) and staying away from the center of the Temple Mount platform.

As far as the Muslim expansionist claim to Jerusalem is concerned, there has been a Jewish majority in the city since the late 1700s and a Biblical history of ownership that goes back 3000 years to the era of King David, with a continuously rising tide of incontrovertible archaeological evidence.

While Jews pray for the time of the rebuilding of the Temple to arrive, the Temple was a means to express appreciation, rectify our sins, and get closer to God by building a home for Him in this world. The Temple was and will be a Temple for all the world.

Jews are no threat to Al Aqsa and never have been. Using an imaginary threat to the Al Aqsa mosque as a pretext for a massacre is beyond abhorrent. As the Islamic terrorist leaders disappear, so may the lies they spread.

Gary Schiff is a guide and resource consultant connecting Israel and the U.S.