Last week, the official Facebook page of Mahmoud Abbas' Presidential Guard posted a picture of the Western Wall with a Palestinian flag superimposed on it.
Text on the flag:
"The Al-Buraq Wall"
(Muslim term for the Western Wall of the Temple Mount)
Text on picture:
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the Palestinian Authority rejects that the Western Wall, the remnant of the Temple Mount destroyed by Rome in the year 70 CE, is a Jewish holy site, and claims it as an exclusively Islamic holy site. A documentary broadcast twice on PA TV declared that the PA plans to destroy the Western Wall Plaza, Judaism's holiest place of prayer used by millions of Jews, and build residential homes there instead. The PA TV documentary stated that Jews praying at the Western Wall were "sin and filth":
"Public Relations and Information - The Presidential Guard"
"Palestinian youth know their rights"
"Palestinian youth know their rights"
"They [Israelis] know for certain that our [Palestinian] roots are deeper than their false history. We, from the balcony of our home, look out over [Islamic] holiness (visual: Western Wall from a distance) and on sin and filth (visual: close up of Western Wall showing Jews praying) in an area that used to have [Arab] people and homes. We are drawing our new maps. When they [Israelis] disappear from the picture, like a forgotten chapter in the pages of our city's history, we will build it anew (residential area). The Mughrabi Quarter will be built here (on the Western Wall Plaza)."
[Official Palestinian Authority TV Sept. 10, 2010, Aug. 10, 2011]
Click to viewThe PA as political ideology claims that Jews have no connection to the Western Wall. The PA Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, said recently that all of Jerusalem and the Western Wall are "the sole right of Palestinians," and he falsely claimed that "no person besides Muslims ever used it [the Western Wall] as a place of worship, throughout all of history, until the ominous Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917."
The following picture of Abbas with his Presidential Guard is the banner for this Facebook page:
