UPDATES 8 pm Israel time, Sunday, May 11 2014:
**The intifada that is supposedly not an intifada rages on for Israelis, particularly for the residents of Judea and Samaria. This week, there were 61 attacks by Palestinian terrorists which resulted in nine Israelis being physically wounded and numerous more emotionally traumatized. Cars have been smashed, olive trees uprooted in Jewish communities, and fields have been burned.
And none of the above includes the horrific murder of Shelly Dadon early in the week.
Just this morning, the terrorism continued with an IDF position firebombed at the Jit Junction in Samaria, and a soldier wounded at an undisclosed location.
Part of the burned out shell of the IDF base firebombed at the Jit Junction today. The caption is a plea for help from the residents of Judea and Samaria (picture: Observation Agency).
**The Community Association of Samaria has filed a police complaint today against noted leftist Israeli writer Amos Oz who made a splash in the news two days ago by calling those who live in the fledgling communties on Samarian hilltops “neo-Nazis” (in reference apparently to the graffiti they are presumed to have sprayed in Arab settlements and elsewhere).
The complaint specifies that Amos Oz’s comments are a grave “incitement to racism.”
The ultra leftist author Amos Oz has been charged in a police complaint as inciting racism (picture: theguardian.com).
Today, Oz’s son said in a Facebook posting that the soldiers of the IDF were “even worse” than neo-Nazis.
**Proposed legislation to institute the possibility of “life in prison without the possibility of parole” passed its first hurdle in the Knesset today as it was approved in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation.
Specifically the law will allow the courts to apply the sentence for special cases like “terrorist attacks, murder with nationalist motivations, or murder of children.” The law which would become a Basic Law (unable to overturned by the Israel Supreme Court) would specifically prohibit presidential pardons of those found guilty of those special cases.
In your humble servant’s opinion, such a law is long overdue.
Nevertheless, the outcry against it has come from the usual quarters with the Palestinians brazenly declaring it a “provocation” and Zehava Gal-On of Meretz calling the bill “demagogical and discriminatory.”
Gal-On went on to make this absurd statement: “I can understand the families of victims of terror when Israel frees prisoners during negotiations. At the same time, the government needs room for diplomatic maneuvers that will allow prisoners to be freed…as part of a deal, a political move, that will be a faith-building step to lead toward reconciliation and a peace treaty.”
Say what? The release of murderers is now supposed to be an assumed Israeli “faith building step” and a step toward “reconciliation.”
Unbelievable.
**The U.N. self-proclaimed “Panel of Experts” who are supposed to be monitoring Iranian compliance on the reduction of its nuclear weapons program issued a ridiculous report today.
In it, the “experts” said that there has been “a decrease in the number of detected attempts by Iran to procure items for prohibited programs, and related seizures, since mid-2013. . . It is possible that this decrease reflects the new political environment in Iran and diplomatic progress towards a comprehensive solution.”
But before you get too excited, dear reader, note the phrase “detected attempts.”
The report goes on to state that the “decrease in the number of detected attempts” actually “may be a function of more sophisticated procurement strategies on the part of Iran, which has developed methods of concealing procurement, while expanding prohibited activities. Such methods can also be used by Iran to procure and finance legitimate trade, which further complicates the efforts of states to identify illicit procurement.”
Unbelievable.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Grand Poobah, the Ayatollah Khamenei, ordered his Revolutionary Guards today to begin the “mass production” of missiles.
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We continue today with Part 2 of our blog series on the Dome of the Rock and the false picture it portrays of a “Muslim Jerusalem.”
As noted yesterday, we begin today at the beginning with “the rock”.
The holiest spot in Judaism: the Foundation Stone.
Why is the Dome of the Rock called the Dome of the Rock? Simply because it contains the holiest spot in Judaism, the rock which Jews have known as the Foundation Stone for thousands of years.
In fact, from time immemorial, Jews have revered the Foundation Stone as the first part of the world that God created; as the site of the material from which Adam was created; as the place where Cain, Abel, and Noah made sacrifices to God; and the place where Abraham readied to sacrifice his son Isaac.
All of these events are believed by Jews to have taken place on the site from more than 5000 years ago to about 3800 years ago.
Skip ahead to another point in Jewish history. It was this Jewish Foundation Stone that the Torah says was purchased by King David from Auranah the Jebusite. When David’s son Solomon built the first Jewish Temple in approximately the year 950 BCE, the Foundation Stone is where he placed the Ark of the Covenant.
An ancient Jewish midrash expresses it well:
As the navel is set in the centre of the human body,
so is the land of Israel the navel of the world…
situated in the centre of the world,
and Jerusalem in the centre of the land of Israel,
and the sanctuary in the centre of Jerusalem,
and the holy place in the centre of the sanctuary,
and the ark in the centre of the holy place,
and the Foundation Stone before the holy place,
because from it the world was founded.
This will be our stopping point today at the building of the First Jewish Temple–built with its Holy of Holies directly over the Jewish Foundation Stone and built some 1,520 years before Mohammed was born and some 1,640 years before the Dome of the Rock was built.
Tomorrow, we will discuss the First and Second Temples.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.