...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

“Tolerance” and its opposite: The Wiesenthalers have been dying to build another of their edifices devoted to “tolerance”—this time in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, they’ve run into a bit of a pickle. The site they were hoping to use has turned out to be the final resting place of some Muslims, and, well, the Arabs aren’t as keen as the tolerance machers about having a building on top of their bones. Here’s some background on the controversy, from a September ‘06 AP report:

The Museum of Tolerance started off with good intentions, over US$100 million in donations, an eye-catching design by architect Frank Gehry, a 2004 kickoff ceremony attended by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a great piece of Jerusalem real estate.

But underneath that real estate, it turned out, there were Muslim graves. As a result, instead of bringing this contentious city's warring tribes together, the museum has sparked a fight with political, religious and historical dimensions between Muslims and Jews _ and all this before it has even been built.

Months of arbitration have ended in deadlock, the site is enclosed in aluminum walls, and the dispute is now before Israel's Supreme Court. Even if the court gives the go-ahead, however, the Museum of Tolerance could well remain permanently tainted by allegations of intolerance.

The museum was conceived by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a nonprofit Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles. It was to promote coexistence in a city holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, and claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians as a capital.

The center's plan includes a conference center, a theater, and museums for adults and children with exhibits covering Jewish history and Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors.

The Jerusalem municipality gave the Wiesenthal Center a municipal parking lot in central Jerusalem on which to build the museum.

But in Jerusalem, a parking lot is rarely just a parking lot. Before it was turned into a four-story underground garage in the 1970s, the land had been a small part of a sprawling Muslim cemetery.

The cemetery fell out of use after the creation of Israel in 1948, but many of its graves are still visible, crumbling among trees in what has become the heart of the Jewish side of the city. Part of the cemetery is now known as Independence Park. Another part had been sold much earlier, in the 1930s, at the initiative of the top Muslim clergyman of Jerusalem, to become the renowned Palace Hotel.

The project's backers say they didn't know the lot contained graves when they got it, and cite the Palace Hotel precedent and a 1964 ruling by a top Muslim cleric permitting construction on the land. But this has not mollified critics, who charge that nothing justifies the desecration of graves.

When surveyors found human remains at the site early this year, two Israeli Arab groups got a court order freezing construction.

One of the groups fighting the museum is the Al-Aqsa Company, affiliated with Israel's Islamic Movement, a rising political force among the country's 1.2 million Arab citizens.

"Islamic law is very clear: You can't build on land that was once a cemetery," said Muhammad Suleiman, a lawyer for the group. The cleric who issued the 1964 ruling was corrupt, Suleiman charged, and the fact that Arabs were silent about the parking lot's presence for decades doesn't mean they should remain silent now.

The Wiesenthal Center's compromise proposal -- to move the graves, construct a memorial and fund the rehabilitation of the remaining gravestones nearby -- is not good enough, Suleiman said, insisting that the museum must be moved.

The Wiesenthal Center refuses, saying it has already spent millions. Rabbi Marvin Hier, who heads the center and conceived the museum idea, said the delays alone have cost more than US$1 million…

Here’s an update on the kerfuffle from Islam Online:

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — An Israeli court ruling allowing the construction of a Jewish museum over graves of some companions of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) in Al-Quds is sparking a controversy.

"Israeli is declaring a global war on Muslims and Arabs," Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, told a press conference on Thursday, October 30.

"A general of the [prophet's] Companions is buried in this cemetery."

Sheikh Salah noted that thousands of other Muslims have been buried in the cemetery, putting the number at 70,000 thousands until 1948.

Israel's High Court on Wednesday, October 29, rejected an appeal by two Muslim groups to halt the building of a Jewish museum on the site of a Muslim cemetery in central Al-Quds.

The court argued that the cemetery has been in public use since the municipality authorities put a parking lot over a small section of the graveyard in the 1960s.

It claimed that a proposal put forward by the museum planners to rebury the bones or cover the graves was "satisfactory" to resolve the issue.

The court said the construction of the museum, halted in 2006 after human remains were discovered during the digging, can resume immediately.

The Mufti of Al-Quds, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, said the verdict was a "grave decision which harms the Muslim holy sites."

He described the construction of the $250-million museum by a Los Angeles-based Jewish group as "act of aggression."…

Now, bearing in mind that Islam Online is a Wahhabi mouthpiece and fully onside with the eliminationist agenda, and bearing in mind, too, that Arabs have never exactly respected Jewish sites in Jerusalem (an understatement of immense magnitude) and that they’re apt to cry foul no matter what the Jews do there, one cannot help but think that perhaps Wiesenthal may have erred here. So it spent a bunch of money on plans—so what? Isn’t it sending entirely the wrong message—a message of intolerance—to persist in trying to build a shrine to “tolerance” on this site?

For that matter, do we really need another such shrine at all, since Jerusalem already has Yad Vashem, its world-renowned Holocaust memorial and since, clearly, “tolerance” is a fiction which actually has very little to do with Judenhass or with the reason why eliminationists persist in wanting to rid the world of Jews?

Just asking.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:39 | link | comments

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