Last Saturday, the final day of Passover, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein was about to give his sermon when he heard a loud noise and rushed to the synagogue lobby to see that a man with a rifle had just murdered one of his congregants. The shooter then fired at Goldstein and hit the index fingers on both hands, which he raised to protect his eyes; two others were injured, one of them a child, before two synagogue goers managed to chase the shooter away. Goldstein writes:

In the past few years, Palestinian leaders have added to their familiar, scurrilous claim that Israel plans to seize or destroy the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock the assertion that there never was a Jewish Temple there, and that the site had no significance to Jews before modern times. Nadav Shragai argues that, to counteract this effort to rewrite history, it is not sufficient to turn to the wealth of archaeological evidence, which might not prove persuasive to a Muslim audience. Instead, he urges Israel and its defenders to build their case on Islamic sources: