Juan Cole looks at what Muslims are saying about what is happening in Jerusalem. What's that, you say?
The far-right Israeli extremists who demonstrated in Jerusalem were not just protesting the plan to remove Israeli colonists from Gaza, as was reported in the Western press. Rather, they were threatening to invade the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim world understood this threat as an intention to destroy the third-holiest shrine in the Islamic world... ...So an issue that stirred Muslim fundamentalists to fury and might be a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda was surely intensively covered by the Western press, right? Wrong... ...Now, maybe Revava never threatened to destroy the mosque. I don't know. They don't appear to be humane, level-headed people, so maybe they did make the threat. But it is a gross dereliction of duty for the US press to neglect to even report that this threat is what had alarmed the Muslims around the world. How can we possibly fight al-Qaeda and understand the Muslim world if our press does not even report what Muslims think is at issue in incidents like this? And note that no Western press article appears even to have rounded up the reaction in the Muslim world. They are invisible to our public, even when they are outraged.Read his full post to learn more.