Boston Globe Editorial: UNESCO Decision on Jerusalem's Temple Mount Distorts History

"The United Nations' animus toward Israel took a truly deplorable turn last week with the passage of a resolution implicitly denying the Jewish people's historic connection to the holiest site in Judaism.

That site is Jerusalem's Temple Mount, so named for the two Jewish temples that stood on the site for almost nine centuries - the first built by King Solomon nearly 3,000 years ago, the second destroyed by the Roman legions under Titus in 70 A.D. One needn't be a Bible scholar or a historian to know that the cultural, religious, and emotional bonds that link the Jews to Jerusalem are unparalleled. For millennia, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have been central to Jewish self-awareness - and thus to Christianity as well, since the Temple figures prominently in the Gospels' account of the life of Jesus.

Alas, that didn't stop the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO - the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - from adopting an Orwellian resolution on the status of conservation in Jerusalem that pointedly ignored Judaism's connection to the Temple Mount...

Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Its holy sites have never been safer, or open to more people, than in the 49 years since it was reunified under Israeli administration. If UNESCO has constructive suggestions to improve the status quo, by all means let it proffer them. But spiteful resolutions that distort history are the very opposite of constructive and deserve only contempt."