Another important piece from Steyn in which he explores the new (and completely politically acceptable) antisemitism which unites Leftists and Islamists. Such a union has real consequences which are already being played out every day.

"By 2005, there were fewer than 150 Jews in Tangiers, almost all of them very old. By 2015, it is estimated that there will be precisely none. Whenever I mention such statistics to people, the reaction is a shrug: why would Jews live in Morocco anyway? But in 1945 there were some 300,000 in this country. Today some 3,000 Jews remain—i.e., about one per cent of what was once a large and significant population. That would be an unusual demographic reconfiguration in most countries: imagine if Canada’s francophone population or Inuit population were today one per cent of what it was in 1945. But it’s not unusual for Jews. There are cemeteries like that on the rue du Portugal all over the world, places where once were Jews and now are none. I mentioned only last week that in the twenties, Baghdad was 40 per cent Jewish. But you could just as easily cite Czernowitz in the Bukovina, now part of Ukraine. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, visiting the city in 1937. Not today. As in Tangiers, the “community” resides in the cemetery."

Israel's leader is quoting the Bible to stake claims on Jerusalem as being the nation's capital. Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a parliamentary session commemorating Israel's capture of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war that "Jerusalem" and its alternative Hebrew name "Zion" appear 850 times in the Old Testament--Judaism's core canon. Citing such ancestry, Israel calls all of Jerusalem its "eternal and indivisible" capital -- a designation not recognized abroad, where many powers support Arab claims to East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Since the Western world no longer has even a basic education, it should surprise no one that this is actually news. What? Jews in Jerusalem?

An interesting series of discoveries lately in Israel. I'm not sure how they dated this at 3,700 years but that would be during the late patriarchal period. I think the traditional dating for the birth of Abraham is about 250 years before that.

Here's one for the prophecy buffs - the Temple Institute has begun construction of the altar for the future Temple, in Jericho. I read that it's being made of the smallest possible size so that it can be relocated to the Temple Mount more easily. The event took place on Tisha b'Av, the day when the Jews recall to mind the destruction of the first two Temples. While clothing and perhaps some pieces of furniture have been prepared for the Third Temple, to my knowledge this is the first time those involved have begun to make such a key component of the Temple sacrificial system.

Israel Finkelstein, chairman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology, began championing a theory several years ago that the biblical accounts of Jerusalem as the seat of a powerful, unified monarchy under the rule of David and Solomon are essentially false. The scientific methods for his assumptions, called a "lower dating" which essentially pushes archaeological evidence into a later century and thus erases all evidence of a Davidic monarchy, were laughed off by traditional archaeologists. But his book, The Bible Unearthed, wound up on the New York Times' best-seller list and he became the darling of a sympathetic media. He concluded that David and Solomon, if they existed at all, were merely "hill-country chieftains" and Jerusalem a poor, small tribal village. He claims that the myth of King David was the creation of a cult of priests trying to create for themselves a glorious history.

But the debunkers of Jewish biblical history got some bad news recently, when a spunky, dedicated archaeologist began her latest dig. Dr. Eilat Mazar, world authority on Jerusalem's past, has taken King David out of the pages of the Bible and put him back into living history. Mazar's latest excavation in the City of David, in the southern shadow of the Temple Mount, has shaken up the archaeological world. For lying undisturbed for over 3,000 years is a massive building which Mazar believes is King David's palace.

Complete with pottery shards from the 11th century B.C. Follow the link to Aish.com - very interesting.