Jerusalem's holy place: No, NY Times, Certainty is not 'elusive'
I have never written to the Public Editor of the New York Times, but I am starting now because of this article , " Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place," which is irresponsible in some easily demonstrable ways. (a) It buries the lead. The beginning of the article states that the Jewish claim that the Temples stood on the site of what is known today as the ‘Haram al Sharif / Temple Mount’ is cloudy and disputed by serious scholars, so that ‘historical certainty proves elusive.’ But the only evidence of such clou diness or dispute in the piece concerns the First Temple, not the Second Temple. As the piece states later on, there is overwhelming evidence that the Second Temple was located on that site (though one scholar quoted in the piece questions whether it was exactly where the Dome of the Rock now stands, or in another location on the Mount.) In other words, the piece gets around to saying that Palestinian claims that there was never a Jewis...