From the JTA, via the Forward:
Yitzhak Glick cannot stand hearing his younger brother referred to as a right-wing “extremist.”
“He is a man of peace and a huge supporter of religious dialogue,” he told JTA on Tuesday, one week after his brother Yehuda was shot in the chest and stomach outside Jerusalem’s Menachem Begin Center by an assailant who fled on a motorcycle.
Further:
“Glick is an exceptional right-wing activist, who also befriends secular Jews and left-wingers,” columnist Roy (Chicky) Arad wrote in Haaretz days after the shooting. “In contrast to (right-wing lawmaker Moshe) Feiglin, who insists that visits to the Temple Mount should not be regarded as part of the discourse on human rights but rather as an issue of Israeli sovereignty, Glick views the matter as a question of freedom of worship for members of all religions, so he manages to reach a broader audience.”
Also complaining about the “extremist” tag is Honest Reporting:
The reality of Rabbi Glick’s views is quite different than the way he is being described. He is a proponent of the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Temple Mount is considered the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. Those familiar with the Rabbi know that his goal is not to supplant Muslim prayer in that place. He is actually an advocate of allowing all prayers there.
Certainly, taken in isolation, Glick’s vision is not the same thing as “right-wing extremism”, although it should be noted that Glick is associated with Feiglin: the attempted murder occurred in the presence of Feiglin’s aide, and occurred as Glick was leaving a meeting on the subject of the Temple in which Feiglin had also taken part.
And it’s impossible to divorce Glick’s wish for “allowing all prayers there” and the political reality that such a provision would represent an Israeli encroachment at a time of continuing conflict. As the Economist notes:
In the ever-contested ground of the Holy Land, prayer is not just an act of personal devotion: it implies ownership. Jews were allowed to pray at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, another contested city. But when a settler massacred Palestinians in 1994, the site was divided into Jewish and Muslim areas. Palestinians fear a similar cycle of provocation, violence and concession to Jewish radicals in Jerusalem.
There are strands within Judaism and Christianity that look forward to the destruction of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock: in 1969, a mentally-disturbed follower of Herbert Armstrong attempted to burn down al-Aqsa, and in the 1980s a group of Israeli extremists plotted to blow up the structures. In 2007, a “Night to Honor Israel” organised by Christians United for Israel in the USA included one speaker who said that God had told her “that Dome is coming down.” This is not Glick’s intention, but it shows there are practical risks involved.
Glick was interviewed last year for an apocalyptic documentary by “Glenn Beck’s End-Times Prophet” Joel Richardson. He writes:
Rabbi Glick is a courageous man of faith, but he is most certainly not an extremist. He is a man of peace. The extremists are not only those who sought to take Glick’s life, but also the left wing media that have cast Glick as a radical right-wing agitator before they even took the time to know who he really is. Let us pray that he comes to know Yeshua the Messiah.
I wonder how that last sentence will go down. Richardson also has a warning; as he explained to WND:
“Scripturally speaking, we look at the career of the Antichrist, who will be a deceiver, and he’s able to engage in a seven-year covenant with Israel (Daniel 9 and Isaiah 28) so he emerges seemingly as a man of peace that is able to engage Israel on a political level… Most likely, this covenant will allow concessions with the Jews such as allowing them to rebuild their Temple, and in the middle of that he will violate that covenant. Right now, the atmosphere is not such that the Muslims would allow the Jews to share the Temple Mount, but something is going to happen that would force them to accept that.”
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