Dear Editor:
It's a small and unexpected positive step for The New York Times to, in its current online version, eliminate a grotesque omission in the print version of its article "Gunman Hurts at Least 8 in East Jerusalem" and acknowledge the Temple Mount is the holiest site in the world for the Jewish people.
Unfortunately, the article continues to include a number of other errors, including one that's routinely repeated, either deliberately or out of ignorance, by almost all the media: the mindless mantra that the Al Aqsa Mosque is "the third-holiest mosque in Islam."
The fact is that Al Aqsa has never been holy to Shiites, although the fanatical ayatollahs have been pretending otherwise since they took over Iran in 1979. Even its holiness to Sunni Muslims is based on a fraud perpetrated by Abd al-Malik a half century after Muhammad's death when Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr conquered Mecca and denied him access. Al-Malik desperately needed to come up with an alternate pilgrimage site, took an obscure Koranic reference to a mosque near Ji'irrana in what is today Saudi Arabia, and pretended it referred to a mosque on the Temple Mount which didn't even exist.
It is, however, refreshing that in the midst of several baseless opinions expressed in the paragraph "But most of the world considers East Jerusalem occupied territory, and Palestinians hope that the area, including the Old City and its holy sites, will one day form the capital of a Palestinian state," The New York Times joins Mahmoud Abbas in recognizing that, other than Jordan, no Palestinian Arab state exists at the present time.
Sincerely,
Alan Stein