UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova has panned yesterday’s now infamous anti-Israel vote, which denied any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and Western Wall.
And while I welcome her words, she gets something horribly wrong.
UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova spoke out Friday in support of Israel and against the 24-6 vote of her organization’s Executive Board took the day before to approve a resolution that spoke of the Temple Mount and its Western Wall as a purely Muslim religious site.
“Jerusalem is the sacred city of the three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
“Jerusalem is the sacred city of the three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”
“To deny, conceal or erase any of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim traditions undermines the integrity of the site, and runs counter to the reasons that justified its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list [in 1981],” she stated on Friday.
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Jerusalem, Bokova said, is a “microcosm of humanity’s spiritual diversity” and is a place where “different peoples worship the same places, sometimes under different names.
“The recognition, use of and respect for these names is paramount. The Al Aqsa Mosque / Al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred shrine of Muslims, is also the Har HaBayit – or Temple Mount – whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, a few steps away from the Saint Sepulcher and the Mount of Olives trees revered by Christians,” Bokova said.
