Israelis Bulldoze Ancient Muslim Cemetery

As vitriolic debate breaks out over the proposed building of a mosque at the site of a Burlington Coat Factory building a few blocks from the gaping open hole which once contained the World Trade Center Towers, half a world away in Israel, a Muslim cemetery dating back to the seventh century has seen the remnants of it last residents unceremoniously disinterred from the graves where they have rested for centuries. The 1,500 remaining tombstones of the Mamilla cemetery came under assault by Israeli bulldozers in the early morning hours on the day preceding the Month of Ramadan. As the ghosts of muslim scholars and warriors of Salidin's once mighty army moaned balefully about the hallowed ground, "Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police" ethnically cleansed the last remaining graves of the ancient burial site whose sanctity the Israelis pledged back in 1948 to never violate. Since then the Muslim necropolis has been incrementally and systematically invaded providing the much needed lebensraum for an Independence Park, a major urban thoroughfare, a parking lot and now the proposed site of the "$100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles." In a fitting piece of irony, Rabbi Marvin Heir, the director of the SWC, has objected to the NYC Ground Zero Mosque on the grounds that the 9/11 hallowed ground is "a cemetery"

The Message of the Bulldozers/Jeff Halper http://www.counterpunch.org/