Israel Matzav

When it's okay to dig up a cemetery and when it's not

The 'Religion of Peace' is once again showing its double standards - one for itself and another for the dhimmis - in a controversy over a cemetery. In London, there are plans to dig up 350,000 graves to make way for a new cemetery. London's Daily Mail says that "Officially it would be known as a "multi-faith" cemetery but it is likely that it would principally answer calls for a Muslim graveyard in the largely-Asian East London borough." The cemetery, the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery (pictured, top left), was opened by an act of Parliament in 1841. By law in England, any grave that is more than seventy-five years old can be removed. Remind me not to be buried there.

Here in Jerusalem, for more than two years, the construction of the Museum of Tolerance, being built by Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center, has been tied up in the courts. The reason is that the Museum is being constructed on the site of a parking garage that was built in the 1960's on a corner of what was a Muslim cemetery. The cemetery was declared mundras (abandoned) by the Muslim Shari'a Court of Appeals in 1964. Burials had not taken place there in nearly forty years and none other than Haj Amin al-Husseini built a hotel on part of the cemetery ground in 1929. In January 2006, the Islamic Movement's Northern Front, a 'militant' organization headed by Sheikh Raed Sallah, filed an appeal with the High Court of Justice in the name of the Wakf, construction was suspended and the Wiesenthal Center has done nothing but incur costs ever since.

I discussed the cemetery's history at length here.

In light of the Muslim insistence that graves cannot be removed from a cemetery in which no one has been buried since the 1920's, it is ironic to see Muslims in London demanding that another cemetery, which has been in use much more recently (according to the Daily Mail it was declared full and closed in 1966), with 350,000 graves be 'removed.' But then, there's one standard for the Muslims and another for the Dhimmis.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:41 PM