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UNESCO Decision on Jerusalem's Temple Mount Distorts History
(Boston Globe) Editorial - Jerusalem's Temple Mount is so named for the two Jewish temples that stood on the site for almost nine centuries - the first built by King Solomon nearly 3,000 years ago, the second destroyed by the Roman legions under Titus in 70 CE. One needn't be a Bible scholar or a historian to know that the cultural, religious, and emotional bonds that link the Jews to Jerusalem are unparalleled. For millennia, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have been central to Jewish self-awareness - and thus to Christianity as well, since the Temple figures prominently in the Gospels' account of the life of Jesus. UNESCO's tendentious semantics play into an ongoing propaganda campaign by the Palestinian Authority to "de-Judaize" the identity of Jerusalem, the foremost Jewish city on earth. Jerusalem's holy sites have never been safer, or open to more people, than in the 49 years since it was reunified under Israeli administration.