One might think that a correspondent with several years’ experience of working at the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau would by now be capable of accurately informing audiences about the status of religious sites in that city.
Here is Yolande Knell in a BBC News broadcast from May 26th on the subject of the Pope’s visit to Jerusalem.
“You can see the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem just behind me and that’s where he [the Pope] went to the two most important sites in the Old City for Muslims and for Jews, starting at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. He also met the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem there and then he went to the Western Wall – the most holy place for the Jewish people.” [emphasis added]
Fortunately, Dr Jeffrey Woolf was on hand to correct that:
“The Temple Mount is not just sacred to Muslims; it’s sacred to Jews. It is the most sacred place in fact in the Jewish religion…”
This really is not a complicated issue, and yet it is one that for some reason, the Western media – including the BBC – gets wrong time and time again.
