Al-Aqsa Mosque fire issue rekindled with Israel

By: Nabil Raza

LONDON, Britain: Jordan's official Petra news agency has accused the Jewish authorities of instigating a blaze that hurt the Al-Aqsa Mosque – one of Islam’s holiest sites - in Jerusalem 35 years back.

At the time, a fundamentalist Christian Denis Michael Rohan, 28, was arrested for setting the blaze to Al-Aqsa, declared insane and deported to his native Australia.

On the eve of the 35th anniversary of the tragedy, Petra offered its own review of events by asserting that the 1969 blaze had been started by a “radical Jew.”

The agency went further by quoting a Jordanian government official as saying there was “crystal clear proof” that Israeli authorities were involved in “this ugly crime.”

Similar charges were made at the time in Arab news reports, leading to global outrage and threats of another war two years after Israel won control of Jerusalem in the 1967 war.

Jordan's news agency, by rehashing those charges on the 35th anniversary of the incident, withdrew an angry response from Israel.

President of the Israeli Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Yuval Steinitz said, “This is an outrageous libel against us, similar to the continued claims in the Arab world that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are genuine.”

He was referring to a forgery from Czarist Russia about a Jewish plot to take over the world — a document that is accepted as fact today throughout much of the Arab world.

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