This was “released to the press” on September 7, 2007: ” The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has written to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert urging him to immediately take action to stop the wanton destruction of priceless Jewish antiquities on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount by the Waqf, the Muslim religious authorities who control the Temple Mount area.”

For those who may not know, the Waqf is a sort of religious foundation that, in this case, is in charge of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The trench being dug is for laying electrical cables for the mosque area. Zionists have professed on many occasions that the Temple of King Solomon, Peace and Blessings of Allah be Upon Him lies under the Al-Aqsa Mosque, despite the fact that their own efforts at desecrating the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque to “find” the Temple have not produced any trace to speak of, of such a temple.

Having said that, it goes without saying, there is absolutely no harm to Islam if the Temple of Solomon could indeed be found near, under or around the Al-Aqsa Mosque. After all Solomon, David and all the Prophets of Ancient Israel are indeed Prophets of Islam and are probably revered by Moslems more than they are by the ZOA.

The important thing to ask is where was the Zionist Organization of America when the Zionist gangs were desecrating and indiscriminately destroying literally hundreds of Christian churches as well as Moslem mosques that were ON THE SURFACE in Palestine and have been in existence for hundreds of years, some of them since the early dawn of Islam some thirteen centuries back. We never heard of the ZOA “urging” David Ben Gurion to interfere and prevent the Stern, Hagana, Irgun and other Zionist terrorist organizations, from carrying out their wanton and systematic destruction of anything and everything that represented the indigenous population of Palestine, and with the generous funding of the ZOA, the United Jewish Appeal and the Anti Defamation League of B’nai Brith. Why does not the ZOA ask the millions of Christians and Moslems that were forcefully evicted from the Holy Land of Christians, Moslems and Jews, in one of the worst and most merciless ethnic cleansing campaigns of modern times, what happened to their churches and mosques?

Why didn’t the ZOA scream and shout when the Zionist hoodlums burned the Al-Aqsa Mosque and slaughtered scores of worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque (in the Holy fasting Month of Ramadan) just over the last decade and when Zionist “extremists” of the like of Netanyahu were digging tunnels that were indeed desecrating the subsurface of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, supposedly in search of the long lost Temple of Solomon? It is worth noting that all reasonable archeologists have said that this last act would indeed threaten the steadfastness of the foundations of the mosque and associated facilities.

Why didn’t the ZOA write to the Israeli Prime Minister in the early and mid 1990s when the Israelis were actively mentoring the Serbian mobs that wantonly destroyed hundreds of mosques in Bosnia-Herzegovina, some of them aged hundreds of years, not to mention carrying out the most horrific and shameless ethnic cleansing campaigns of our age? It is about time that the ZOA and other pro Zionist organizations to use their leverage to teach their Israeli pets some more important lessons in high morals then to distort the facts and mislead the views of world opinion.

One final comment: How can the ZOA proclaim itself as qualified to determine what is “significantly” holy to Moslems or other believers as they stated in their “Press Release” (see link: https://www.zoa.org/2007/09/zoa_olmert_gove.htm). On a similar note, the Qur’an specifically mentions the Al-Aqsa Mosque on more than one occasion and for Moslems to have it mentioned even once is sufficient enough to render it as indisputably holy, bearing in mind that Moslems used to pray facing the Al-Aqsa Mosque prior to Mecca. On a similar context, why does not the ZOA regard Mecca as a Holy site to all monotheists, since it was Ibrahim (and Ishmael, Isaac’s brother), who built the First Holy Mosque in Mecca, and consider it “significantly” holy, as Moslems regard all genuine Jewish holy places as “significantly holy. Otherwise the Moslems would not have built the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where it stands today, in the first place, and without any destruction inflicted to the “Wailing Wall”, reportedly the only remains of the Holy Temple.

Hassan Al-Haifi has been a Yemeni political economist and journalist for more than 20 years.