by Ian Mosley

A BBC news article reports ” For the last 40 years Mohammed Hamdi Bader has left his tailor’s shop in the Old City once a month and taken a short walk to the heart of west Jerusalem where he prayed close to his grandfather’s grave. But the 49-year-old Palestinian father-of-five can no longer reach the grave and he’s furious about it. The Maamam Allah (Mamilla) cemetery, which is at least 1,000 years old, has become a building site. The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre is constructing a Museum of Tolerance on the cemetery. The centre says the museum will seek to promote ‘unity and respect among Jews and between people of all faiths.’ ”

Muslim leaders are outraged. The site being excavated in order to tell us all about the wonders of tolerance and religious and cultural sensitivity is on what was once the historic Mamilla cemetery, which has been an Islamic necropolis for almost a thousand years, and contains the remains of thousands of people, including emirs, Muftis, and members of the most prominent Muslim families in Jerusalem’s history of Islamic rule dating back over 1,000 years. To allow the Wiesenthal people to build one of their garish propaganda centers over such a place is roughly equivalent to erecting a statue of Joseph Stalin or Ho Chi Minh in Arlington National Cemetery.

Israeli law, written with archaeological digs in mind, explicitly deals with the handling of human bones uncovered during building anywhere in Israel. Technically the law applies to the remains of all faiths; in actual practice, Orthodox Jews riot whenever a Jewish cemetery is disturbed and everybody else gets brushed aside, as in the Mamilla case. The Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC and the LA Times, quote the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, as saying “It never would have been approved if Jewish graves were being disturbed.”

The cemetery has already been desecrated once. In 1929, Jews and British removed graves and built the Palace Hotel atop the southern part of the cemetery. Since the fall of 2000, there have also been a series of gun battles around Mamilla adding fresh blood to the cemetery soil. Needless to say, all Muslim protests have simply been ignored by the Israeli government and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the building of the Jewish temple of Holocaust promotion continues apace.

Every once in a while Mr. or Mrs. Joe Sixpack will wonder why the Muslims hate us. My guess is that in the long run it’s not even so much the outright slaughter of Palestinian civilians that tipped the balance against us irrevocably. It’s petty little vicious actions like this that will burn themselves into the memory of the Islamic world, the ineffable Jewish sneer and slap of contempt, the symbollic grinding their boot into Arab faces one time too many.