Arrested for praying: Sarah Palin, Iran and the Temple Mount of Jerusalem – the “temple that doesn't exist”

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/22/10

The main sticking point remained the Temple Mount, known to Arabs as Haram al-Sharif. Mr. Arafat has been saying since the Camp David talks, when the question of sovereignty over the site was raised, that the Temple does not exist, a senior administration official said. – Sept. 8, 2000, news article in the New York Times on the Middle East, (“Summit in New York”) when the White House had begun to sense that “. . . a solution is slipping away.”

Say what you like about the invasion of Iraq and I have said the worst, but whether it was about oil (Cheney, Greenspan) or Israel (Kristol, Krauthammer) it cannot be denied that Israel is in a better place on the ground today than it was in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran.

Because whatever our American ambitions – oil, influence – it is clear that to some large degree due to Christian conservative influence in the heartland, Americans are willing to act collectively on Israel’s perimeter and near frontier. And an attack on Iran today to remove its nuclear threat to Israel would be sustainable politically here now if Americans went alone or with Israel.

Obama might do this – Sarko says he is a weakling – but it seems counter-intuitive that he will. As a personal matter of character I have no doubt that he can do it if he determines it to be the morally correct and historically inevitable path.

“Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do . . . if he decided to tough it up . . . I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and think maybe he’s a little tougher than he seems today,” Sarah Palin said this month to Chris Mathews.

Obama should do this because it is right and needs to be done and if he doesn’t, Mitt Romney (who said he would check with his lawyers first) will do it in 2012 as his first act as President. Or Palin.

When this action is successfully completed, discussion can begin about the centermost place and purpose of Israel, where Jews from everywhere in the world – after attempts in the heart of Europe (Germany, Vichy, Poland, Russia) to extinguish them failed – were allowed in post-war to return on an inner journey to their cosmic beginnings, but unbelievably were forbidden by the same agencies to pray when they got to the vortex, the Temple Mount. “Every religious looking Jew who ascends the Temple Mount is accompanied by a Moslem wakf attendant and an Israeli policeman, who together, scrutinize his/her lips. A Jew who is suspected of praying is detained or immediately arrested.” Moshe Feiglin, of the Manhigut Yehudit [Jewish Leadership] faction in the Likud party, reports.

This is where the discussion will begin again or perhaps where real discussion will begin for the first time, at the “temple that doesn't exist,” from which the entirety of the Western world awakened these past 2,000 years.