The Times didn't deny a Jewish connection to the Mount!

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"World is being silent about the bombs in Turkey ! Or are we only supposed to say that about Israel bombs? Confused about the minhag..." -- me on Twitter, today.

There were terrorist attacks today in Turkey and Chad that killed over 100 people. Did the world say anything? Did the Jews? I confess I didn't notice.

What I have noticed, is that many of my friends and coreligionists are furious about an article the Times published yesterday. I didn't think much of the piece when I read it myself, but that Jewish outrage about it seems over-the-top.

For starts, following a necessary and needed correction, its a thousand percent clear that the article is about the scholarly doubt regarding the Temple's precise location on the Mount, and it is not (as everyone is claiming) denying that the Temple actually stood somewhere on the mount.

Second, the article presents paragraphs and paragraphs of corroborating evidence that Temple really did stand on the spot of Dome. Here's the introductory paragraph:

"Many archaeologists agree that the religious body of evidence, corroborated by other historical accounts and artifacts that have been recovered from the site or nearby, supports the narrative that the Dome of the Rock was built on or close to the place where the Jewish temples once stood."

Following this, the Times makes a strong argument that the Temple stood on Mount Moriah exactly where Jews say it did. We're told about the evidence from Josephus, and the discovery of Warning Stone, and the New Testament verses and more, before the article's concludes with this:

"Kent Bramlett, a professor of archaeology and history of antiquity at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif., said historical records of the destruction committed by the Romans, just by themselves, are “pretty overwhelming” in supporting the existence of the second temple in the immediate vicinity of the Dome of the Rock."

So how can anyone honest or fair make the claim that the Times was trying to deny a Jewish connection to the Mount? At the end of the article it quotes an authority who says the evidence for this connection is "pretty overwhelming"! How can anyone fair or honest claim that the article says there is no proof of Jewish Temples on that Mount? It actually supplies scores of proof!

Unfortunately, this sort of thing - uproar over an article that blatantly misstates what the article actually does - is far too typical of Jewish media criticism.

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