Metal Detectors – Hoax Protectors?

INTERESTING JUXTAPOSITION
Metal Detectors – Hoax Protectors?

by Eytan Kobre

Why does this sound so familiar?

[. . .] seeing connections between disparate events taking place in the world and mining those for potential significance. Indeed, the very fact that Hashem interacts with His world by means of middah k’neged middah facilitates discovery of the meaning embedded in current events and enables us to make use of it in our lives.

A very current example: What follows swiftly on the heels of the Great Heterodox Prayer Site Hoax? Another fraud of equal magnitude, involving a site just yards away — the Great Temple Mount Metal Detectors Hoax. Just days after the heterodox movements and their Jewish media allies tried creating an international uproar over the Israeli government’s cancellation of the Kosel agreement, the Arabs embroiled Israel in another worldwide crisis, one that hasn’t abated even with the removal of the detectors.

Walter Russell Mead, writing in The American Prospect, notes that “the Palestinian response is being driven by unsubstantiated paranoia about Jewish conspiracies to overturn the Temple Mount status quo.” “Overturn the Temple Mount status quo” — now, where have we heard of people trying to do something like that?

Mead writes that

it would be difficult to imagine a less sympathetic grievance to attract Western support to the Palestinian cause. In fact, the Palestinian response will appear contemptible to anyone who bothers to read even the basic facts of the matter. Israelis can’t go into shopping malls and bus stations, let alone visit the Western Wall, without passing through a metal detector.


He’s right, of course; the whole Palestinian fuss over the installation of metal detectors makes no sense, until one understands that it’s a make-believe claim dressed up as a religious plaint, serving as a convenient smokescreen for a political agenda seeking exclusive control of Har Habayis.

Hmm. A controversy over the entranceway to a religious site that’s really not about religion — because no one’s religious freedom is being curtailed — but about larger political ambitions and exclusive control… Why does that sound so familiar?

As I wrote several weeks ago, the Israeli cabinet’s cancellation of the agreement did nothing to deprive the heterodox of access to their prayer site. All it did was a) scuttle the plan to change the entranceway to the Kosel so that all Jews, whether going to daven at the Kosel or to do their thing at the other site, would enter through the same entrance; and b) cancel the plan to give a committee of heterodox and secular Jews exclusive decision-making power over their site. Both would have advanced the heterodox political agenda of full official recognition.

Of course, no one is comparing heterodox leaders, wayward Jewish brethren, to Palestinians. But it just may be — and this is just a personal musing — that when Jews turn a place from which the Shechinah has never departed into their personal battleground to further political goals in the guise of religious passion and try to rile the world in the process, what results is the sight of Palestinians riling the world against Israel in the very same way and in the very same place.

Source:  Mishpacha Magazine, Wednesday, August 02, 2017