Today is the sixth night of Hanukah, the celebration of the Jewish rebellion against the Seleucid Empire and the rededication of the Holy Temple in 167 b.c. — around 750 years before the birth of Mohammad. Yesterday, the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution by a 129–11 vote that denies any Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, referring to the site solely by its Muslim name of al-Haram al-Sharif.
The resolution was supported by numerous purportedly enlightened democracies of the European Union — Belgium, France, Spain, and Italy — who now have large Muslim populations. Hungary and the Czech Republic, incidentally, did not support it.
Unlike Islam and Christianity, Judaism is not a universal faith. It is tied to a place, and that place is Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Al-Haram al-Sharif sits on rubble of an ancient Jewish house of worship in a city with a permanent Jewish presence. It has meaning to all three Abrahamic faiths. Yet, to avoid conflict, Israel handed custodianship of that site to Jordan’s Hashemites. And Jews are often stopped from visiting or marching near it by the Israeli government to maintain the peace. Palestinian leaders, on the other hand, often spread conspiracy theories about Jewish incursions on the site to trigger riots and create political pressure. But none of that, and certainly not the UN’s resolution, can change irrefutable historical facts.