Posted on 11/16/2001 1:08:51 PM PST by veronica
JERUSALEM - Working under cover of darkness, Muslims in Jesus' boyhood town of Nazareth have begun constructing a mosque alongside the Basilica of the Annunciation, despite protests by the Vatican and Israeli authorities.
The Vatican, in a statement issued in Rome, called on the Israeli government to stop "Muslim extremists" from building the mosque next to the church marking the site where Christians believe the angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus.
"Building the mosque here will in effect put this holy place in a state of permanent siege and make its gate a gathering place for the most hostile elements," the statement said, according to the Vatican news service Fides.
Israeli authorities charged today that the work constituted a provocation and threatened to stop the construction by force, even as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins. Local Christians warned the work could re-ignite the interreligious violence that erupted at the site last year.
Construction on the mosque began Monday, without the necessary permits, but the Israeli Lands Authority ordered it halted. The Wakf, or Islamic Trust, stopped the work today but said it will start again if it does not get the necessary permits within a week.
Witnesses said crews were working at the site Monday and Tuesday nights in an apparent attempt to keep the construction secret.
A lawyer for the Muslims, Dan Shafrir, said the construction had been going on day and night. The Israeli Lands Authority promised to help the Islamic Trust obtain the permits for the Muslim-owned land if the construction was stopped, Shafrir said.
"We're not hiding anything from anyone," Shafrir said. "Whether or not we get the permits, we will continue construction in a week."
The construction was halted only temporarily, and steel beams arrived at the site today, said Ahmed Saleh Hamudeh, the head of the Islamic Trust in Nazareth.
Christians are a minority in Nazareth, and tensions over the mosque have been running high between the Christian community and the Muslim majority in the city of 70,000. Nazareth is the largest Arab city in Israel.
Under pressure from Christian leaders, including the Vatican, the previous Israeli government worked out a compromise in 1999 to defuse a tense situation in which Muslims were praying in a large tent a few meters from the church, as a planned millennium visit by Pope John Paul II neared. The Vatican had hinted the issue could force the cancellation of the pope's visit, which took place as scheduled in March 2000.
According to the agreement, the tent was removed, and a mosque would be built on one third of the 2,000-square-meter plot, but only after the millennium year.
Church leaders in the Holy Land complain that Israel made excessive concessions to the Muslims, while ignoring promises made to Christian leaders, including the pope.
Despite the pledges of the previous government, Israeli officials are indicating that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will not allow construction of the mosque.
"A decision on the matter will be made by the government" due to the sensitivity of the issue, Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon said. "We are absolutely against the work going on at the moment."
Israel believes that starting construction days before the start of Ramadan is a cynical use of the holiday by the Muslims, with the hope authorities will not act to stop the work, a government official said on condition of anonymity.
The authorities will forcibly halt the work if necessary, the official said.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, himself a Muslim, sided with the Christians in the dispute, saying in December 1999 that the Muslims should not build the mosque so close to the church.
The Muslims say a Crusader-era sage is buried at the site, and they hoped to build a large mosque there. Church leaders wanted the plot for a plaza to accommodate millennium pilgrims.
Their holy places always seem to turn up on top of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, & Hindu ones. Seems almost parasitical to me.
Let's get this straight. I am not a Muslim sympathizer or a Christian basher. But, I can't just sit here and do nothing while you sneer at stryker's comments, because everything in his post is historically accurate.
For goodness sakes, please, take a remedial history course. Haven't you people heard of the Hugonauts and the Valdenses? (English spelling--Waldensians) fdcc, you are a teacher? Shame on you.
You got a problem with the crusades? The crusades were very neccessary to defend the Christain West from an aggressive and expansionist Islam. Almost all the Christain Eastern Roman Empire fell to Muslem swords. What was once Eurpoean/Christain Middle easst is now Arab/Turk Islam. Might have happen to Western Europe too, had not the Crusades slowed down the Islamic tide.
When a Bible costs more than the average person's yearly income, aren't you going to keep it under lock and key? That is what it was like before the advent of printing. And people DID know that Christ taught of freedom--they heard readings from the Bible at every mass and were taught through pictures and oral instruction. With the advent of the printing press, the Church authorities clamped down on unauthorized translations of the Bible because of the fear that some people would distribute innacurate or heretical versions. As indeed they did, with Luther's butchered Bible, hacking out any and all statements that didn't meet with his approval.
I know that some people were arrested and even killed. But it was not a one-sided deal--the Protestants killed too, and vandalized priceless works of art.
The idea that there has been, from the times of the Apostles until the Reformation, a secret and continuous society of "Bible-only" Christians constantly harried and persecuted by the "Roman" Church is an utter fabrication. Read the Church fathers. Until the Reformation there was only one Church. (Our split with the Orthodox was -- and still is -- merely political; we could be one again so easily.) The various groups of dissenters that cropped up from time to time were 1) temporary and local and 2) heretics.
The world still makes sense if you give up the paranoid history.
"Fox's Book of Martyrs"
written by John Fox (1517-1587)
**It's published in modern English and King James English. The modern version is much easier to read.
My bets for the Christians ... they have the most nukes (and God).
Or else a sausage casing factory.
Give free samples out on the sidewalk.
In Latin, not a language the common people could understand.
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