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The Holy and Capital City of Israel: Jerusalem



THE HOLY AND CAPITAL CITY OF ISRAEL: JERUSALEM In 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which called on The United States to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This was always delayed through the mechanism of a six monthly waiver by a president if it was felt inopportune to do so in the face of Arab threats of violence. Successive presidents all spoke of the justice in moving the embassy and recognizing Israel’s capital is Jerusalem. But they all succumbed to perennial Muslim Arab threats of intimidation and aggression. All the presidents since 1995 -Clinton, Bush and Obama - used the waiver. None had the courage to do what President Trump has now so magnificently and proudly accomplished. Here is an American president who defies the genocidal intentions and threats of terror and violence hurled towards the embattled Jewish state by much of the Islamic and Arab world. In this he puts to rights a cruel policy adopted by large swathes of an often hostile world, which would deny the Jewish people not only their historical and ancestral homeland but their very 3,000 year old capital: Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of only one people in all of that same recorded history: the Jewish people. The Jewish Bible along with the Talmud and the Midrash tell us that the Torah, (the first five books of the Holy Bible) its light and its message, is to be broadcast to the entire world from one specific place: Jerusalem. Each time the Torah scroll is taken from the Ark to be read during synagogue services the following prayer is always sung. “For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah (Law) and the word of God from Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2) In the complete Jewish Bible (the Tanach) the words Jerusalem and Zion appear 821 times with Jerusalem appearing 667 times and Zion appearing 154 times. Both Zion and Jerusalem are considered synonymous. In the Christian Bible - itself an account of Jewish personalities whose lives were formed within Judea, the Jewish Roman province, as well as in the Galilee - the name Jerusalem appears 154 times and Zion seven. In the Islamic Koran, Jerusalem and Zion do not appear at all. Indeed, it was only after the Arabs, under their new banner of Islam, conquered Jerusalem in the year 638 that they created Islamic history in and around Jerusalem. We are told that Mohammed flew on his magic horse to a place called Al Aksa, which means simply the farthest place. Much later, and for political reasons to do with historic, temporal and spiritual Jewish and Christian ties to Jerusalem, did Muslims name the Holy City as their Al Aqsa and placed a mosque on the site where the two holy Jewish temples had stood. Let me quote the words from 1918 of the great Rabbi J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, at the thanksgiving service for the liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks by British forces. He spoke of the nearly 4,000 years of history since the time of the first Jew, Abraham, that bound the Jews to their spiritual and physical capital city and of their fate in defending it against its many conquerors:
“Like the Jew, this Holy City of Israel is deathless; fire and sword and all the engines of destruction have been hurled against it in vain. The Babylonians burnt it and deported its population; the Romans slew a million of its inhabitants, razed it to the ground, passed the ploughshare over it and strewed its furors with salt; Hadrian banished its very name from the lips of men, changed it to Aelia Capitolina and forbade any Jew from entering it on pain of death. Persians and Arabs, Barbarians, Crusaders and Turks took it and re-took it, ravaged it and burnt it; and yet, marvelous to relate, it ever rises from its ashes to renewed life and glory.”

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Rabbi Hertz was talking on the very day that 2,080 years earlier, Judah Maccabee, the legendary Jewish hero, led his warriors against the Greek-Syrians to liberate the Holy City from its heathen occupiers, entered the Temple, and re-dedicated it to the glory of the One and Only God. Rabbi Hertz ended his speech by proclaiming the prophetic teaching of the Maccabean Festival, we know as Hanukah, in Zechariah, 4:6:
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
Jewish sources speak of the seventy names by which Jerusalem is referred to in the classical Jewish sources. These include Ariel/lion of God (Isaiah 29:1); Kirya Neemana/Faithful City (Isaiah 1:25); Ir Ha’emet (City of Truth (Zechariah 8:3); Klilat Yofi/Paragon of Beauty (Lamentations 2:15); Yefay Nof/ Beautiful Panorama (Psalms 48:3); and the ancient commentary of Rabbi Akiva in Sanhedrin 58a on 1 Chronicles 29:11 Hanetza/Eternity. From the 10th century, the Muslim Arabs still called the city various names that echoed its original Jewish origins. For instance they called it Beit al-Makdis, the Arabic version of the Hebrew name, Beit Ha Mikdash - House of the Sanctuary. The Arabic name, Al-Kuds, is derived from the Hebrew, Ir Hakodesh - City of Holiness. From 1948 to 1967, Jordan invaded and occupied the Jewish biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) along with the eastern half of Jerusalem. Only Pakistan and Britain had ever recognized Jordan’s illegal occupation. Indeed, the British officered Jordanian Arab Legion had forced out at gunpoint the Jewish residents of the Old City and from the neighboring Jewish villages: It was Apartheid and ethnic cleansing, Arab style. The Legion went on to desecrate the Jewish graves on the ancient Mount of Olives, toppling the headstones and using them to build latrines. They desecrated and destroyed over 50 synagogues and forbade Jewish and Christian pilgrims to worship at their holy places. They had turned the Via Delarosa, the Way of the Cross, into a filthy, sewage strewn alley through which Christian pilgrims were forced to walk. Non-Muslims count for little under Islamic Sharia Law. Jordan cut the Holy City in half with barbed wire and erected walls, complete with snipers along the dividing line, killing many Jews in the western half of the city. Another city that was divided against itself was Berlin and President Reagan called upon Soviet President Gorbachev to, “tear down this wall.” The world applauded when the wall came down. In stark contrast, President Obama during his eight baleful years in office - along with much of a hostile world - called upon Israel to re-divide Jerusalem. Obama essentially called upon Israeli Prime Minister to ‘build up a wall.’

Only when Israel was able to restore dignity and cleanliness in 1967 to all the holy places after their liberation was the earlier Muslim discrimination against Jews and Christians finally brought to a long and overdue end. Only under Israeli administration has Jerusalem been open for free and unfettered worship to members of all faiths. But this persecution of non-Muslims is par for the Islamic world and it continues today throughout the territory foolishly given to the overwhelmingly Muslim Palestinian Arabs as a result of the grotesquely misnamed Oslo Peace Accords. Throughout the Middle East, Christians are fleeing from Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Authority itself. The only nation in the Middle East where the Christian population is protected and growing is Israel. In the nineteen years that the Jordanians occupied Judea and Samaria, they never remotely considered it as anything but Jordanian. Certainly they never thought it belonged to another Arab people who later called themselves Palestinians. But the Obama White House, and the relentlessly anti-Israel State Department, nevertheless decided that they would echo the demands of the Palestinian Authority by demanding that Israel stop building homes, not only in Judea and Samaria, but even within Jewish suburbs of Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem; this while illegal Arab settlement building still continues unchecked throughout the area at a feverish pace, financed by the EU and the UN. The modern State of Israel endures a world willing to divide Jerusalem again - even as it celebrates the reunification of Berlin - and to give away ancestral and biblical Jewish lands to an enemy led by a Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas, whose own Fatah organization continues to murder Jews and gleefully claim credit for its crimes.


The terror infested Palestinian Authority demands that the eastern half of Jerusalem must be given to them in order to declare it the capital of a new Arab state called Palestine. Such an independent Arab state called Palestine has never existed in all of recorded history. Palestine has always been a geographical area just as Siberia or Patagonia are: never an independent state. Jerusalem has never been the capital city of any Arab or Muslim people. President Trump, no stranger to irrational hatred levelled against himself, is now the recipient of yet more torrents of venom and abuse because of his principled action in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But he towers over his critics as a man blessed with a God given sense of morality and justice. Prime Minister Netanyahu withstood brutal pressure from Barack Hussein Obama and fought to defend Israel’s ability to remain a viable state with an undivided capital city in eternal Jerusalem. President Donald Trump deserves our heartfelt gratitude for recognizing reality and acting with honesty and integrity. Surely now is the time for Jews and Christians alike, and all who reject the twin plagues of Islamic triumphalism and an intolerant Left, to joyously recite Psalm 100. Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer and author of the acclaimed four volume work, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. His Fourth volume has just been published and is available on Amazon.com.

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Victor Sharpe -- Bio and Archives

Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer and author of several books including the trilogy, Politicide:// The attempted murder of the Jewish state


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