Group With Control Over Two Major Shrines Also Wants Other Group’s Biggest Shrine, To Complete Set

“It’s just not fair that they get one and we don’t get all three.”

Jerusalem, May 16 – A loose coalition of diverse ideological and political groups with collective access to a pair of sites central to the founding of their unifying ideology continues to express its bitterness over failing to maintain possession of a third such locale that happens to function as the most important such site in a different group’s worldview, and the coalition has advocated violence and other coercive means to remove the latter site from the purview of the other, smaller, historically-oppressed group in order to restore the larger, surrounding group to its customary dominance, a position without which it feels shame.

Muslims control Mecca and Medina in modern-day Saudi Arabia, the two most foundational places in Islamic theology and history. Control over the shrines where Muhammad established the faith and ushered in a wave of Islamic conquests that only began to abate centuries later convinced hundreds of millions that the movement’s initial lightning success represented eternal divine endorsement of its endeavors, and that perforce the only rightful place for the movement lies above all others. Conquest of Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire in the eighth century prompted the new potentates to assert dominance by constructing its own facilities atop the ruins of their more ancient predecessors. But twentieth-century reassertion of Jewish sovereignty after thirteen centuries of underclass status under Islam placed Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount in particular, back under Jewish control; that development compelled the surrounding peoples to insist that the site, which housed two ancient Jewish temples and has always served as the focal point of Jewish worship and longing, cannot remain under the control of those who consider it the holiest spot on Earth, but under Islam, whose adherents point their backsides to the site as they bow instead toward Mecca and spent centuries neglecting the city of the “Noble Sanctuary” whose name features not a single time in the Quran.

“It’s unjust for the Jews to deprive us so,” explained King Abdullah of Jordan, an activist working to undo five decades of Jewish access to the holiest Jewish site in the world after centuries of Islamic denial of such access, in addition to numerous degrading policies toward Jews designed to cement their status as inferior to the manifestly-dominant-and-therefore-correct Islamic hegemony – policies that only the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland – the location of the site in question – diminished.

“It’s just not fair that they get one and we don’t get three,” he explained further. “Yes, even for Shiite Muslims, who don’t give Jerusalem much thought at all in their theology. It’s the principle of the thing. The principle being, if we’re not on top in every single facet of life and power, others must suffer for the shame inherent in that.”

Abdullah’s own shame stands more acute than most, since it was his father Hussein who attacked the Jews in 1967 and ended up losing control of all territory west of the Jordan River as a result.

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