Today's ironic Muslim lie

From Middle East Monitor (MEMO), the anti-Israel propaganda "newsletter" that employs Ben White:

Israeli archaeologist denies Jewish ties to Al-Aqsa Mosque 

An Israeli archaeological expert has asserted that there is no relation between the Western Wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and an ancient Jewish temple, Al Jazeera reported today. 

This will likely serve to undermine Israeli excavations of the site. 

Meir Ben-Dov, an Israeli archaeological expert who is author of many books about Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, further asserted that the Wailing Wall, the Jewish name for the Western Wall, has no sacred significance in the Jewish faith.

As far as I can tell, this is complete fiction.

No one claims that the Kotel is the Western Wall of the Temple; it is part of the retaining wall of the Temple Mount. (Ben Dov wrote an entire book about the Kotel.)

Here is a 1986 article about the Temple Mount and its magnificence from Ben Dov.

I did find a different relevant reference to Ben Dov:

Dr. Shmuel Berkovitz, a scholar of the holy places in the Land of Israel, found that until the eleventh century, Muslim scholars disagreed as to the location of the tethering of Muhammad’s steed and pointed to different places on Al-Haram al-Sharif.(12) Some said the place of Muhammad’s entry to Haram and the tethering of Al-Buraq was the Eastern Wall. Others said it was the Southern Wall, but no one at all looked to the Western Wall as the place where Al-Buraq was tethered. In the seventeenth century, it was common to identify a spot close to the southwestern corner of the mount as the site of the tethering. The archeologist Meir Ben-Dov believes that the Muslim traditions identifying the place as the Western Wall began at the end of the nineteenth century,(13) just when the wall was gradually becoming a symbol of the renewed Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.(14)

If the Muslims are now asserting that Ben Dov is an authority, then the claim of the Kotel a being "Al Buraq" where Mohammed supposedly tethered his magical flying steed is completely false - according to their own expert!

This is the kind of "journalism" that Israel haters rely on for their "facts."

As far as evidence that the Temple Mount is where the Temple was, the Temple Mount Sifting Project released a great list of archaeological evidence. (h/t Yoel)

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