UNESCO Adopts Resolution Ignoring Jewish Ties to Temple Mount, Western Wall

"UNESCO's Executive Board in Paris on Friday adopted a resolution whose language ignores Jewish ties to its holy religious site of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem's Old City.

The broad-ranging resolution condemns Israeli actions in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but focus in large part on Israeli actions with regard to the Temple Mount and Western Wall Plaza.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all consider the Temple Mount to be a holy site, but the UNESCO Resolution referred to the area solely as al-Aksa Mosque/al-Haram al Sharif, except for two references to the Western Wall Plaza that were put in parenthesis. The text also referred to the plaza area by the Western Wall as al-Buraq Plaza.

In October, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization backed away from reclassifying the Western Wall as solely a Muslim holy site, but is now using language that almost solely refers to it as such...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the move as another 'absurd' UN resolution.

'UNESCO ignores the unique Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, the site of two temples for 1,000 years, and the place to which Jews prayed for thousands of years,' he said in a statement Saturday night. 'The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history and proving that there is no low to which it will not reach.'..."