The biography of Mohammed Najib says he “a journalist, war correspondent and defense analyst based in Ramallah, Palestine. He reports and writes on the Middle East region for leading newspapers and journals like The Jerusalem Post, Yomiuri Shimbon, Le Monde, Special Operations Report, the Wall Street Journal and Jane’s Information Group.”
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? But just one of his articles could have been reprinted in all those “leading newspapers,” and Najib may now be using those multiple appearances of the same article to convince us that he’s a real journalist. What he doesn’t say is that almost all of his pieces appear not in the Western press, but almost exclusively — do an Internet search of his name for the evidence — in Arab, especially Palestinian Arab, newspapers, including Arab News, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, and others of that Saudi or Palestinian ilk.
He is a Palestinian based in Ramallah.
Judging from this article in the Saudi-based Arab News, he has no business pretending to be any kind of journalist. The article is filled with absolute lies and Palestinian propaganda.
Palestinians are outraged by the Israeli government’s move to hold a weekly Cabinet meeting on May 21 inside the tunnels it has dug under Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Israel has not dug a single tunnel underneath the Temple Mount or under the mosque. All the tunnels that archaeologists have uncovered and excavated are adjacent to the Mount, or stretch hundreds of meters away from it.
The Israelis have to date excavated approximately 2,000 archeological sites in Jerusalem alone. But they have never dug a. tunnel, despite Najib’s malign claim, under the Temple Mount; the tunnels they have dug in the vicinity have been located either next to the Mount, or extend for hundreds of meters away from the Mount. It’s no secret; the Israeli archeological digs are not hidden from view, and Mohammed Najib surely has visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and knows about the Marwani Mosque built beneath it. He knows perfectly well that there are no Israeli tunnels underneath Al-Aqsa.
Najib claims:
For decades, Israel has been excavating under Al-Aqsa as part of a vague, historically motivated search for “Solomon’s Temple” in an attempt to justify the occupation through archeology.
Israel doesn’t need to excavate under the Mount to find evidence of the First and Second Temples. Israeli archeologists have discovered every sort of Jewish artifact – oil lamps, utensils, knives, plates, coins, pottery, menorahs – from both the First and Second Temple periods, in the hundreds of tons of debris dug up when the Palestinians excavated under the Mount in order to build a new mosque, the Marwani Mosque, under Al-Aqsa. The Palestinians threw out that debris, wanting to get rid of what they surely suspected contained Jewish artifacts from the Temple periods, but Israeli archeologists rushed to collect that debris, and have spent years sifting through it, finding many hundreds of artifacts. Some of these artifacts are now on display in Israeli museums. Mohammad Najib can hardly be unaware of the Palestinian excavations under Al-Aqsa, or of the debris that the Palestinians threw out and Israeli archeologists then salvaged, as much as they could, for study. And he knows perfectly well that the Israelis have not excavated under the Temple Mount.
Najib continues:
However, after years of digging, Israelis, who claim they can trace their heritage to the land of Palestine, have found nothing linking their history to the Al-Aqsa region.
Elder of Ziyon then notes:
The only people who have excavated underneath the Temple Mount since the 19th century have been the Muslims of the Waqf.
They dug out hundreds of tons of debris removed to illegally build the huge underground Marwani Mosque at the site of what was (erroneously) called Solomon’s Stables.
It was the biggest archaeological crime of the century.
The Temple Mount Sifting Project has been going through the truckfuls of debris – and found countless Judean artifacts from the times of the First and Second Temples.
One example is this bulla inscribed with the name of a well-known priestly family of First Temple-era Jerusalem, the children of Immer.
They also found the distinctive Herodian tiles from the Second Temple period. So we know Herod built something big there – now what structure could it have possibly been and described in detail by Josephus?…
Yes, a very large structure was built on the Temple Mount during the period of the Second Temple, a building described by the Jewish historian Josephus. What, oh what, could that building have been? Yes, you’ve guessed it. But Najib knows the Second Temple, like the First, never existed; they are part of the fictive history the Jews have made up to justify their presence in Palestine.
Najib insists:
Dozens of far-right Israelis visit the Al-Aqsa compound daily to show defiance and provoke Palestinians.
Elder of Ziyon responds:
No, they (and visitors like me) visit to be at Judaism’s holiest spot – a small fact that Najib doesn’t mention to the readers.
Believe it or not, Mohammed Najib, Israelis of all political persuasions, and not just those who are “far right,” visit the Temple Mount (which Najib misleadingly describes as the “Al-Aqsa compound”) with no desire to “show defiance and provoke” the Palestinians. They do everything they can to avoid disturbing the Muslims. They do not pray on the Mount, openly or silently. They do not bring prayerbooks, prayer shawls, and tefillin onto the Mount. They limit their walk to the same well-worn route along the perimeter of the Temple Mount. They visit only five days of the week, and only for three hours in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. They do not visit the Mount on Fridays, in order to avoid possible conflict with the influx of Muslims who stream into Al-Aqsa for Friday prayers. And Jews from all over the world ascend to the Temple Mount for a simple reason that has apparently escaped Mohammed Najib’s notice: they visit the Temple Mount because it is the holiest site in Judaism.
Najib continues:
In July 2017, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee issued a decision affirming that Israel has no sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967. It condemned the excavations carried out by the Israeli Antiquities Department in the city….
That UNESCO resolution of 2017, condemning excavations carried out by Israelis in the city that has been the capital of the Jewish people for more than 3000 years, was an outrage. It completely ignored the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount site, which was referred to only by its Muslim name, Haram al-Sharif. The Western Wall was described as the Al-Buraq Wall. And the resolution said nothing about what the Muslim Waqf was doing, carrying out extensive excavations inside the Mount in order to build, deep underground, the Marwani Mosque. And neither then, nor since, has UNESCO condemned the massive excavations undertaken by the Arabs at the Temple Mount, and the destruction of so many Jewish artifacts that were thrown out with the piles of dirt removed in the Marwani excavations.
There are tens of thousands of archeological sites all over Israel. Two thousand of them are in Jerusalem alone. Archeologists, Israeli and non-Israeli, have unearthed thousands of Jewish artifacts dating as far back as 3000 B.C. And then there is the stunning written evidence on ancient parchment of Jews in their land, dating from between the first and third centuries B.C., found in the caves of Qumran – the Dead Sea Scrolls, now on view at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. Yet Najib and Ikrima Sabri, a preacher at al-Aqsa Mosque whom Elder of Ziyon also quotes, claim that the Israelis have found no archeological evidence of an ancient Jewish presence on the land. How do Sabri and Muhammed Najib explain the existence of those scrolls, all of them written in Hebrew, save for two written in Greek? The answer is: they don’t. They simply ignore the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other scrolls found later in other Qumran caves, and don’t mention, either, those Jewish artifacts carbon-dated to the First and Second Temple periods.
It is not the Jews, but the Muslims, who have destroyed Jewish (and Christian) antiquities in Jerusalem and in the rest of Israel. The latest example is the disposal of hundreds of tons of earth, rich with archeological evidence, that the Muslims dug out from under the Temple Mount when building the Marwani Mosque. That disposal was a great crime; thousands of artifacts were destroyed in the process.
The only thing the Israelis have had trouble finding is not ancient Jewish artifacts in the Land of Israel, as Ikrima Sabri claims, but enough museum space to display even the tiniest fraction of those ancient artifacts that their archeologists have so carefully unearthed. And the series of lies Mohammad Najib tells, about Jewish tunnels dug under Al-Aqsa — there are none — and his claim that Israelis have “found nothing linking their history to the Al-Aqsa region,” when the Temple Mount debris dug up by the Muslims themselves and rescued for sifting and study by Israeli archeologists turned out to contain a wealth of Jewish artifacts carbon-dated to the periods of both the First and Second Temple, should disqualify him from appearing in the Western press. Should, but won’t, because that Western press has shown itself all too willing to publish the most absurd charges against Israel.
