JERUSALEM--WHY IS THIS SACRED CITY OF CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND JEWS FILLED WITH HATE, VIOLENCE AND DEATH? YOU WOULD ASSUME A HOLY CITY LIKE THE VATICAN WOULD ENJOY UTTER PEACE AND PROGRESS YET JERUSALEM'S HISTORY IS POSSIBLY THE BLOODIEST EVER RECORDED!

KEE@FSWMAG.COM
READ THE BOOK ON JERUSALEM BY SIMON MONTEFIORE AND THE DOCUMENTARY BY BBC BY CLICKING ON THE LINK BELOW. 

I doubt peace can be attained in our lifetime as Buddha has revealed to me terrible things to come and Buddhism is not even connected remotely to Jerusalem! 

But read this book and watch BBC's documentary for thought-provoking insights.

Jerusalem: The Making Of A Holy City (BBC)

Jerusalem: The Making Of A Holy City (BBC)
(Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2011)

Part 1: Wellspring Of Holiness - 12-8-2011

Part 2: Invasion, Invasion, Invasion - 12-15-2011

Part 3: Judgement Day - 12-22-2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTWb_g6g7-k

Jerusalem: The Biography By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Munro Price praises Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography, a history of the capital city of religion and blood

By Munro Price

6:00AM GMT 23 Jan 2011

Compelling and thought-provoking, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book seeks to explain an agonising paradox: why the most spiritual city in the world, sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has such a terrible history of violence, inhumanity and strife. Sadly, as the news from the Middle East makes clear almost daily, this history does not seem likely to change very soon.

The obvious problem, of course, is the centuries-old struggle of the three faiths for physical control of Jerusalem, but the deeper cause lies in the theology of each of them. For all three, Jerusalem is where the earthly world will come to an end and be replaced by the heavenly kingdom.

As Sebag Montefiore eloquently puts it: 'As the meeting place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse – the End of Days, when there will be war, battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgment, resurrection of the dead and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem.’ For Jews, these prophecies are embodied in the Books of Isaiah and Daniel; for Christians in the Book of Revelation; and for Muslims in the Koran.

Since at least 586BC, Jerusalem has been the focus of apocalyptic yearnings, accompanied by apocalyptic violence. Working on an immense chronological and thematic canvas, Sebag Montefiore does his subject more than justice. He narrates the terrible history of Jerusalem vividly and graphically. Indeed, the bloodletting described is so horrendous that one wonders whether the Apocalypse, if and when it comes, could improve on it.

When Titus besieged the city in AD70, he crucified hundreds of prisoners daily, and on capturing it he not only destroyed the Holy Temple but sold possibly half a million of the inhabitants into slavery. Storming Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders embarked on a two-day massacre, slaughtering 3,000 Muslims in the al-Aqsa Mosque, allegedly riding in blood up to their bridles and burning the Jews alive in their synagogues. The Tartars kept up the tradition, beheading and disembowelling the priests in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when they swept through the city in 1244.

The modern history of Jerusalem is well known. One of the great merits of this book is the emphasis it places on earlier, much less familiar periods, especially the late Roman and medieval ones.

These are dramatic and extremely complicated, peopled by rulers whose names, fittingly, could have come out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Zangi the Bloody, Selim the Grim, Baldwin the Big and his successor Baldwin the Little and Fulk the Repulsive. In contrast, the Ottoman conquest in 1517 brought Jerusalem a semblance of peace for the next three centuries, but at the price of decay.

This succession of dynasties all had one thing in common: they were foreign, and this fact underlines another aspect of Jerusalem’s tragic destiny, as the victim of successive invaders and a pawn in their struggles with each other. Yet the last conquest of Jerusalem had a twist: it aimed to restore it, at least in part, to its original owners.

On December 11 1917, having put the Ottoman armies to flight, General Edmund Allenby entered the city on foot. Just one month earlier, the British government had published the Balfour Declaration with its promise of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Sebag Montefiore convincingly shows that it was no coincidence that of all the great powers, Britain, with her Protestant, Bible-based religious culture, should have been the most sympathetic to Zionism.

Both Balfour and his principal ally, Lloyd George, had been reared on the Old Testament, and this clearly helped motivate them to issue the Declaration. As Lloyd George later put it: 'I was taught more in school about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land.’ With the departure of the British in 1948 and the creation of Israel, the Jewish homeland now has another great-power patron, the United States. This development is often seen as simply a by-product of the Cold War but, as in the case of Britain, this would be to ignore the Protestant subtext. The US was first conceived by the Pilgrim Fathers as a new Jerusalem.

As Sebag Montefiore acutely observes: 'The American Constitution [is] secular…separating state and faith, yet on the Great Seal, the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin depicted the Children of Israel led by cloud and fire towards the Promised Land.’ For millions of Christian Americans today, supporting the Jewish state is a case of the new Israel protecting the old.

This fascinating but ghastly past does not inspire optimism for Jerusalem’s future. Yet its history does seem to teach one lesson – that attempts by any one religion to control the city are doomed. Ironically, the founder of Zionism himself warned against the dangers of this trap. Outlining his plans just before the First World War, Theodor Herzl wrote: 'We shall extra-territorialise Jerusalem so that it will belong to nobody and everybody, its Holy Places the joint possession of all Believers.’ Words for Binyamin Netanyahu to ponder.

Jerusalem: The Biography

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Jerusalem with Simon Sebag Montefiore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPbVFrLrI34


Author of the bestseller, Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore speaks of the world's most contested place through the lives of those who created, destroyed, conquered, wrote about and believed in the Holy City of Jerusalem. Series: "Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies" [3/2012] [Humanities] [Show ID: 23503]