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Ruth King

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The Islamization of France in 2016 “France has a problem with Islam” by Soeren Kern

By on January 17th, 2017

“I am not an Islamophobe. Women have the right to wear headscarves, but I do not understand why we are embracing this religion [Islam] and those manners that are incompatible with the freedoms that are ours in the West.” — Pierre Bergé, French fashion mogul.

French security officials rejected an Israeli company’s offer of terrorist-tracking software that could have helped them identify the jihadist cell that carried out the attacks. “French authorities liked it, but the official came back and said there was a higher-level instruction not to buy Israeli technology,” a well-placed Israeli counter-terrorism analyst revealed.

Jacques Hamel, the priest who had his throat slit by two Muslims in Normandy, had donated land adjacent to his church to local Muslims to build a mosque, and they had been given use of the parish hall and other facilities during Ramadan.

At least five of the jihadists who carried out the attacks in Paris and Brussels financed themselves with social welfare payments: they received more than €50,000 ($53,000).

Muslim employees at Air France have repeatedly attempted to sabotage aircraft, according to Le Canard Enchaîné. “Concerning Air France, we have seen several anomalies before the departure of commercial flights,” an intelligence official said.

“There will be no integration until we get rid of this atavistic anti-Semitism that is kept secret. It so happens that an Algerian sociologist, Smain Laacher, with great courage said that ‘it is a disgrace to maintain this taboo, namely that in Arab families in France and elsewhere everyone knows that anti-Semitism is spread with the mother’s milk.'” — Georges Bensoussan, sued for alleged hate speech against Muslims for having made that statement.

The Mayor of Beziers, Robert Menard, was charged with incitement to hatred for tweeting his regret at witnessing “the great replacement” to describe France’s white, Christian population being overtaken by foreign-born Muslims. “I just described the situation in my town,” he said. “It is not a value judgement, it is a fact. It is what I can see.”

The Muslim population of France was approximately 6.5 million in 2016, or around 10% of the overall population of 66 million. In real terms, France has the largest Muslim population in the European Union, just above Germany.

Although French law prohibits the collection of official statistics about the race or religion of its citizens, Gatestone Institute’s estimate of France’s Muslim population is based on several studies that attempted to calculate the number of people in France whose origins are from Muslim-majority countries.

What follows is a chronological review of some of the main stories about the rise of Islam in France during 2016:

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Revisit the ‘One-China Policy’ A closer U.S. military relationship with Taiwan would help counter Beijing’s belligerence.By John Bolton

By on January 17th, 2017

The People’s Republic of China sent its aircraft carrier, Liaoning, through the Strait of Taiwan early this month, at least in part responding to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s phone conversation congratulating President-elect Donald Trump.

That’s Beijing’s style: Make an unacceptable long-distance phone call, and an aircraft carrier shows up in your backyard. It is akin to proclaiming the South China Sea a Chinese province and constructing islands in international waters to house military bases; to declaring a provocative Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea; and to seizing Singaporean military equipment recently transiting Hong Kong for annual military exercises on Taiwan.

It is high time to revisit the “one-China policy” and decide what America thinks it means, 45 years after the Shanghai Communiqué. Mr. Trump has said the policy is negotiable. Negotiation should not mean Washington gives and Beijing takes. We need strategically coherent priorities reflecting not 1972 but 2017, encompassing more than trade and monetary policy, and specifically including Taiwan. Let’s see how an increasingly belligerent China responds.

Constantly chanting “one-China policy” is a favorite Beijing negotiating tactic: Pick a benign-sounding slogan; persuade foreign interlocutors to accept it; and then redefine it to Beijing’s satisfaction, dragging the unwary foreigners along for the ride. To Beijing, “one China” means the PRC is the sole legitimate “China,” as sloganized in “the three no’s”: no Taiwanese independence; no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan. For too long, America has unthinkingly succumbed to this wordplay.

Even in the Shanghai Communiqué, however, Washington merely “acknowledges” that “all Chinese” believe “there is but one China,” of which Taiwan is part. Taiwanese public opinion surveys for decades have shown fewer and fewer citizens describing themselves as “Chinese.” Who allowed them to change their minds? Washington has always said reunification had to come peacefully and by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement hasn’t come in 67 years, and won’t in any foreseeable future, especially given China’s increasingly brutal reinterpretation of another slogan—“one country, two systems” in Hong Kong.

Beijing and its acolytes expected that Taiwan would simply collapse. It hasn’t. Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 retreat was not a temporary respite before final surrender. Neither the Shanghai Communiqué nor Jimmy Carter’s 1978 derecognition of the Republic of China persuaded Taiwan to go gentle into that good night—especially after Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

Eventually Taiwan even became a democracy, with the 1996 popular election of Lee Teng-hui, the peaceful, democratic transfer of power to the opposition party in 2000, and further peaceful transfers in 2008 and 2016. So inconsiderate of those free-thinking Taiwanese.

What should the United States do now? In addition to a diplomatic ladder of escalation, we can take concrete steps helpful to U.S. interests. Here is one prompted by China’s recent impoundment of Singapore’s military equipment. Spoiler alert: Beijing will not approve. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Obama’s ‘Scandal-Free Administration’ Is a Myth By John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky

By on January 17th, 2017

Even a prominent Trump adviser accepts the false premise that there has been no ‘ethical shadiness.’
You often hear that the Obama administration, whatever its other failings, has been “scandal-free.” Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest adviser, has said he “prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”

Even Trump adviser Peter Thiel seems to agree. When the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd observed during an interview that Mr. Obama’s administration was “without any ethical shadiness,” Mr. Thiel accepted the premise, saying: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

In reality, Mr. Obama has presided over some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades. Here’s a partial list:

• State Department email. In an effort to evade federal open-records laws, Mr. Obama’s first secretary of state set up a private server, which she used exclusively to conduct official business, including communications with the president and the transmission of classified material. A federal criminal investigation produced no charges, but FBI Director James Comey reported that the secretary and her colleagues “were extremely careless” in handling national secrets.

• Operation Fast and Furious. The Obama Justice Department lost track of thousands of guns it had allowed to pass into the hands of suspected smugglers, in the hope of tracing them to Mexican drug cartels. One of the guns was used in the fatal 2010 shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Congress held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt when he refused to turn over documents about the operation.

• IRS abuses. Mr. Obama’s Internal Revenue Service did something Richard Nixon only dreamed of doing: It successfully targeted political opponents. The Justice Department then refused to enforce Congress’s contempt citation against the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who refused to answer questions about her agency’s misconduct.

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Trump’s Bonfire of Pieties Will his nasty rhetoric shake things up or crack their already shaky foundations? Bret Stephens

By on January 17th, 2017

This column has previously observed that few things are as dangerous to democracy as a demagogue with a half-valid argument. The president-elect has offered at least a half-dozen such arguments, and that’s merely in the last week.

First we had Donald Trump’s press conference attack on CNN’s Jim “You Are Fake News” Acosta. Then a salvo against the pharmaceutical industry, which, he said, is “getting away with murder.” Mr. Trump also accused intelligence agencies of leaking a smear against him, asking in a tweet: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

This was followed by an interview with British and German newspapers, in which Mr. Trump called NATO “obsolete,” dismissed the European Union as “basically a vehicle for Germany,” and threatened to slap a 35% tariff on BMW for wanting to build a plant in Mexico.

Oh, and the feud with John Lewis. The congressman from Georgia had accused Mr. Trump of being illegitimately elected on account of Russian meddling. Mr. Trump fired back on Twitter that Mr. Lewis should spend his time fixing his “crime infested,” “falling apart” district in Atlanta.

Say this for Mr. Trump: He has no use for pieties. Mr. Lewis is routinely described in the press as a “civil rights icon.” The next president could not care less. Wall Street Journal Republicans believe that business decisions should be left to business. As of Friday those businesses will do as Mr. Trump says. NATO? Too old. The EU? Not salvageable. The fourth estate? A fraud. The folks at Langley? A new Gestapo.

All this baits Mr. Trump’s critics (this columnist not least) into fits of moral outrage, which is probably his intention: Nobody in life or literature is more tedious than the prig yelling, “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Liberals intent on spending the next four years in a state of high-decibel indignation and constant panic are paving the way to Mr. Trump’s re-election.

But the main reason the president-elect’s attacks stick is that they each have their quotient of truth.

Mr. Trump is not wrong that NATO’s European members don’t carry their weight. He isn’t wrong that the EU is in deep trouble no matter what he says. He isn’t wrong that Mr. Lewis’s attack on the legitimacy of his election was out of line, or that the congressman’s courage in the 1960s should not insulate him from criticism today. He isn’t wrong that drug companies price-gouge.

Nor is he wrong to be infuriated by BuzzFeed’s publication of an unverified opposition dossier regarding his Russia ties. He isn’t wrong, either, to suspect that outgoing CIA Director John Brennan may have leaked that the president-elect had been briefed on the contents of the dossier. In his previous incarnation as President Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, Mr. Brennan developed a reputation as a leaker and spinner of the first rank.

But the opposite of not wrong isn’t necessarily right. There’s a distinction between “unverified” and “fake.” There’s a difference between BuzzFeed’s unethical decision to publish the unredacted dossier and CNN’s appropriate efforts to report on what Mr. Trump knew about it. To complain that our European allies don’t spend enough on defense is one thing. To conclude that NATO is obsolete is a non sequitur, reminiscent of the old joke about lousy food and small portions.

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Theresa May to Seek Clean Brexit From EU Prime minister to give speech on plans in London on Tuesday By Jenny Gross

By on January 17th, 2017

LONDON—Prime Minister Theresa May is set to declare Tuesday that the U.K. wants a clean break from the European Union, in a closely watched speech in which she is expected to lay out her plans for the divorce.

Mrs. May is expected to say that Britain doesn’t want “partial membership” in the EU “or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out,” according to excerpts of a speech released by her office on Monday.

Previous such comments, interpreted to mean that Britain is heading toward a looser relationship with the EU and could lose access to the bloc’s common market, sent the pound tumbling. The currency dropped to three-month lows against the dollar in European markets Monday.

“We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave,” Mrs. May’s prepared remarks said. Instead, Britain will seek a new type of relationship with the EU, according to the remarks. The prime minister is to deliver the address to a group of diplomats and other officials in London on Tuesday.

The prime minister has repeatedly said London wants to control immigration. EU leaders have said the U.K. can’t impose restrictions on EU citizens’ ability to live and work in the U.K. and retain its existing economic relationship, which includes unfettered access to the EU’s market of 440 million consumers.

The speech excerpts released by her office made no reference to the single market.

Politicians who campaigned for Brexit said the U.K. will be better off once it is outside the single market and can negotiate its own trade deals with countries elsewhere. They say the U.K. will thrive if it is no longer bound to EU regulations and required to abide by the bloc’s free movement of people principle.

Tim Farron, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, said that Mrs. May is delivering “a destructive, hard Brexit and the consequences will be felt by millions of people through higher prices, greater instability and rising fuel costs.”

In recent weeks, Mrs. May has come under increasing pressure to spell out details of her vision for Britain’s exit as the country prepares to give formal notice at the end of March that it will leave.

Mrs. May has broadly outlined her priorities. In addition to immigration, she has said she wants to remove the U.K. from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, while maintaining good trading terms with Europe. She hasn’t said whether she wants to stay in Europe’s single market.

“We want to buy your goods, sell you ours, trade with you as freely as possible, and work with one another to make sure we are all safer, more secure and more prosperous through continued friendship,” Mrs. May will say, according to the excerpts. She will also say she wants the U.K. post-Brexit to be “a magnet for international talent.”

“I want us to be a truly global Britain—the best friend and neighbor to our European partners, but a country that reaches beyond the borders of Europe too,” she is expected to say.

Negotiations between Britain and the remaining 27 EU governments are expected to be lengthy and contentious. CONTINUE AT SITE

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My Say: Hypocrisy, Ignorance on Parade in Washington D.C. January 21, 2017 by Ruth King

By on January 17th, 2017

On January 21,2017 after the inauguration, a protest march in Washington, originally billed as a “Million Women March” has been pared down by three quarters to an expected 176,000 (weather permitting) participants and is now billed simply as a “Woman’s March.”

The somewhat disappointing numbers do nothing to dampen enthusiasm. In fact, a sub group named the “Pussyhat Project” is busy crocheting, knitting and sewing 1.7 million (????)”pussyhats.” (https://www.pussyhatproject.com/)

And Vogue Magazine, whose editor is a big Hillary supporter has run a tribute to the women who planned the parade. (http://www.vogue.com/13520360/meet-the-women-of-the-womens-march-on-washington/)

In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”

Here is just a snippet of adulation:

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic-the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”

Incidentally, the column has been taken down from their site but is available in its entire idiocy:

(http://gawker.com/asma-al-assad-a-rose-in-the-desert-1265002284)

So, this is how Vogue describes the forthcoming march:

“……., a mass mobilization of activists and protestors that will descend on the capital on January 21, the day after we inaugurate into office a man who ran the most brazenly misogynistic presidential campaign in recent history, and whose victory has emboldened a Republican-led Congress to wage an epic war on women’s rights.

Perhaps you’re planning to be there? Perhaps you’re bringing your mother, your grandmother, your daughter, your sister? You’ll be in good company. Per the event’s Facebook page at press time, 176,000 people are planning to attend, with another 250,000 still on the fence. It seems likely, said Linda Sarsour, one of four national cochairs acting as spokeswomen for the movement, that it will be “the largest mass mobilization that any new administration has seen on its first day.”

That fluidity says something about the Women’s March and how it functions; it’s an organic, grassroots effort that prides itself on being inclusive, intersectional, and nonhierarchical, on taking what Bob Bland (one of the movement’s cofounders, now serving as a national cochair) called “a horizontal approach to leadership.” Horizontal????Huh????

And this is how the epic event’s founders describe their goals:

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Special Report: Close Settlement on the Land (Part I) Eugene Rostow •

By on January 17th, 2017

Editors Note: Jewish history in the Land of Israel is contiguous, spanning more than 3,000 years. Its capital has been in Jerusalem since King David’s rule in 1010 BCE. There were periods of occupation by Romans, Byzantines and Sasanids, Arabs, Crusaders, the Ayyubid dynasty and Mamluk Sultanate, and the Ottoman Empire – each leaving a footprint.https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2017/01/11/special-report-close-settlement-land/

These occupations came and went across periods of greater and lesser Jewish habitation – but never without Jewish communities from those days to these.

UN Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted on 2 January 2017, asserts that land acquired by Israel in the course of defending itself in the 1967 Six Day War is to be considered “occupied Palestinian territory.” The resolution has no legal status, but it bears heavily on the politics of our time – politics grounded neither in history nor in law, but rather in anti-Semitism or the pigeon-hearted fear that drives countries to curry favor with Arab and Islamic potentates or terrorists.

The Editors at inSIGHT are departing from our usual pattern of writing and publishing in this column to balance the scales at least a bit to put history and law in their rightful place. For this, we go back to a time before this current political crush but anticipating it in important ways.

Professor Eugene V. Rostow (1913-2002) served as dean of Yale Law School, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and director of the US Arms Control Agency. He co-authored UN Security Council Resolution 242 and was prolific on the role of international law in determining how and where Jews could settle. It is not a spoiler to say his view was “everywhere.” The following – and articles that will appear in the near future – are excerpts from his authoritative 1980 Yale International Law Journal article, “Palestinian Self-Determination: Possible Futures for the Unallocated Parts of the British Mandate.”

Who, today, even knows what the “British Mandate for Palestine” was a mandate/requirement/demand to do? Read on, and you will and realize how much current anti-Israel diplomacy and international lawfare have departed from history, law and justice.

The Soviet Interest

The exploitation of Arab hostility to the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and the existence of Israel has been a major weapon in the Soviet campaign to dominate the Middle East. The Soviet Union’s use of this tactic is in itself a considerable psychological feat, since the Russians provided Israel with decisive help during the wars of Israeli independence in 1948 and 1949. The anti-Israel card is not the only asset in the Soviet Union’s Middle East hand, but among the Middle Eastern masses it has been trumps.

The goal of the Soviet campaign in the Middle East is to control the oil, the seas, and the air space of the region, and to substitute Communist or Communist-oriented governments for royal and other traditional regimes. Once such control is achieved, the Soviet Union believes, it will be possible for it to outflank Europe and force the United States to dismantle NATO, withdraw its forces, and leave Europe to Soviet domination…

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Special Report: Close Settlement on the Land (Part II) Eugene Rostow •

By on January 17th, 2017

The Editors at inSIGHT are departing from our usual pattern of writing and publishing in this – the second in a series of three columns – to balance the scales at least a bit and put history and law regarding Israel and Jewish “close settlement on the land” in their rightful place. This is a response to UN Security Council Resolution 2334 and to the presumed outcome of the Paris “Peace” conference Sunday.

Professor Eugene V. Rostow (1913-2002) served as dean of Yale Law School, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and director of the US Arms Control Agency. He co-authored UN Security Council Resolution 242 and was prolific on the role of international law in determining how and where Jews could settle. It is not a spoiler to say his view was “everywhere.” The following is excerpted from his authoritative 1980 Yale International Law Journal article, “Palestinian Self-Determination: Possible Futures for the Unallocated Parts of the British Mandate.” To read Part I click here.

Part II

While the Permanent Court of International Justice, its successor the International Court of Justice, and many other authorities have confirmed the status of mandates in general and of the Palestine Mandate in particular, the dispute over the future of German Southwest Africa, long a South African Mandate, and now generally called Namibia, has been the most prolific and important source of international law on the subject.

In its series of decisions and advisory opinions on Namibia, the International Court of Justice has ruled that a League Mandate is a binding international instrument like a Treaty, which continues as a fiduciary obligation of the international community until its terms are fulfilled. All states, the Court, and the Security Council have responsibility for seeing to it that the terms of the Mandate are respected and carried out…

In Palestine, Israel and Jordan already exist as states, and only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank remain as unallocated parts of the Mandate. The reasoning of the Namibia decisions requires that the future of these two territories be arranged by peaceful international agreement in ways that fulfill the policies of the Mandate.

Jewish rights of “close settlement” in the West Bank are derived from the Mandate. Therefore, they exist; it is impossible seriously to contend, as the United States government does [with the Carter administration’s March 1, 1980 vote for a Security Council resolution calling on Israel to dismantle all post-June 19967 West Bank Jewish communities], that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal.

It is true that since the Six-Day War in 1967 the United States government has taken the nominal position that Israel held the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip only as the military occupant under international law. The State Department has maintained that under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, a state administering the territory of another state as military occupant cannot in the absence of military necessity or governmental need displace the inhabitants of the territory and establish its own citizens in their place. The Department’s position is in error; the provision was drafted to deal with “individual or mass forcible transfers of population,” like those in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary before [, during] and after the Second World War. Israeli administration of the areas has involved no forced transfers of population or deportations.

The Israelis responded to the State Department in an argument of great cogency, which the State Department has never answered. The Israeli view is that while the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1949 Geneva Convention apply to the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and the Sinai, which are Syrian or Egyptian territory in the contemplation of international law, they do not apply to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza

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Remembering Rich Blumenthal’s Vietnam Deception Senate smear never paid a price for claiming he served. Lloyd Billingsley

By on January 16th, 2017

​In the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions, president-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, proceeded as though David Horowitz had been the AG choice.

David Horowitz was not present but Blumenthal cited his statements that all the major Muslim organizations are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, that 80 percent of the mosques in America are filled with hate against Jews, and that too many blacks are in prison because too many blacks commit crimes.

Senator Blumenthal, an attorney, had not taken the trouble to investigate these statements, which are all true and accurate. Instead he called them “apparently racist” and demanded that Jeff Sessions denounce David Horowitz and give back an award he had received from the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

By any standard, this was the most loathsome and gutless performance many had seen since the hearings for Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, where smear artists Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) respectively held forth. In the Sessions hearings it failed to emerge that Blumenthal, 70, bears a history of problems with truth and courage alike.

“Candidate’s Words on Vietnam Service Differ from History,” ran the New York Times headline on a May 17, 2010 article by Raymond Hernandez. Blumenthal, then Connecticut Attorney General and running for the U.S. Senate seated vacated by Christopher Dodd, had recently appeared at a ceremony in Norwalk honoring veterans. There he proclaimed, “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam.” There was one problem, Hernandez noted. The aspiring Senator “never served in Vietnam.”

According to records obtained by Hernandez and his colleagues Barclay Walsh, Kitty Bennett and Bonnie Kavoussi, Blumenthal “obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war.”

These deferments cleared the way for Blumenthal, son of a wealthy New York businessman, to complete studies at Harvard, serve as a special assistant to Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, and “ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House.”

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A Farcical ‘Peace’ Conference in Paris Last gasp of an old era? P. David Hornik

By on January 16th, 2017

The 70-nation conference on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in Paris on Sunday included neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives and was a farce and a fraud—but could have been still worse.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the conference represented the “last twitches of yesterday’s world. Tomorrow’s world will be different—and it is very near.”

It was, of course, one of the reasons the conference was farcical: although Secretary of State John Kerry was in attendance, he was representing an administration that is in its last five days in office, and whose policy of harassing Israel was—among much else—repudiated in the U.S. elections two months ago.

France, the host and convener of the conference, was hardly in a stronger position: the Socialist government of François Hollande is on its last leg and its path, too, is expected to be jettisoned in the upcoming French elections.

Israeli columnist Prof. Eyal Zisser notes that “in the actual Middle East…no one gives France a second thought and no one is taking its peace initiative seriously.” It was, after all, France that led the misguided Western assault on the defanged Qaddafi regime in Libya and reduced that country to jihadist chaos; and it is France that has sat impotently while its former colonies, Lebanon and Syria, have fallen under Hizballah rule in one case and into Hobbesian mayhem in the other.

And as David Harris has pointed out, France’s credentials as an honest broker on the Israeli-Palestinian issue are also less than sterling:

at the World Health Organization General Assembly in May…France voted in favor of a measure that bizarrely singled out Israel by name as the only country in the world accused of undermining “mental, physical and environmental health,” and…France could do no more than abstain at UNESCO in April on a resolution that denied any Jewish (and Christian) link to the holy sites in Jerusalem.

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