Temple Mount Violence – When Amnesty International Knows Better than Everyone Else
Late last week, on Thursday, July 27, Palestinians arrived en masse to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque for the first time since terrorists killed two Israeli police on the Temple Mount on July 14. As happened many times over the past few weeks, the area of Jerusalem’s Old City and on the Temple Mount itself was chaotic and violent.
One news outlet described how Israeli police “responded” to “many young people throw[ing] stones and bottles at the forces.” A filmmaker who was present noted, “I was there. There wasn’t one single vantage point where you could tell either way who started it.” A Haaretz editor called it a “complex scene,” with multiple sites of confrontation between security personnel and Palestinians.
Amnesty International, though, professed total clarity. In a press release published July 27, based on claims originating with “Amnesty International staff at the scene,” Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director, accused Israel of attacking “peaceful crowds at Jerusalem holy site.” Amnesty further alleged that this was an “entirely unprovoked attack” and that Israeli police of used “unnecessary and excessive force to disperse a peaceful gathering.”
Following its standard procedure of adopting a stridently Palestinian narrative, as documented by NGO Monitor and others, Amnesty also failed to convey the enormity of the violence perpetrated by Palestinians on the Temple Mount and the Old City throughout the day. As was widely reported, Palestinian rioters “began hurling rocks at security forces” and “some stones fell at the Western Wall plaza below,” forcing the evacuation of worshippers. None of these details appears in Amnesty’s statement.