UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is known throughout the world for the many places it designates as World Heritage Sites. There are more than one thousand of these, distributed unequally in many countries, with Italy at the top, followed by China.

The largest single category of sites consists of religious sites, categorized under the heading of cultural locations (as distinct from natural ones). Within this category, UNESCO has carried out many dialogues with communities in order to ensure that religious sensitivities are acknowledged and guaranteed. UNESCO has undertaken many measures in this field.

In 2010, the organization held a seminar on the “Role of Religious Communities in the Management of World Heritage Properties.”

“The main objective of the [seminar] was to explore ways of establishing a dialogue between all stakeholders, and to explore possible ways of encouraging and generating mutual understanding and collaboration amongst them in the protection of religious World Heritage properties.”

The notion of dialogue in this context was clearly meant to avoid unilateral decisions by one nation or community to claim exclusive ownership of a religious site.

Alleged or actual claims to multiple ownership of religious sites are not uncommon. A collection of essays entitled, Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution, examines such disputes over shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, providing powerful analyses of how communities come to blows or work reconcile themselves in a willingness to share shrines and other centres. Sometimes people come to blows over these sites, and sometimes one religion can cause immense pain to the followers of another, as happened in 1988 when Carmelite nuns erected a 26-foot-high cross outside Auschwitz II (Birkenau) extermination camp in order to commemorate a papal mass held there in 1979.

A more famous example of an unreconciled dispute is the conflict over the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India, a mosque originally built in 1528-29 on the orders of Babur, the first of the Mughal emperors. According to Hindu accounts, the Mughal builders destroyed a temple on the birthplace of the deity Rama in order to build the mosque — a claim denied by many Muslims.[1] The importance of the site is clear from a Hindu text which declares that Ayodhya is one of seven sacred places where a final release from the cycle of death and rebirth may be obtained.

These conflicting claims were fatefully resolved when an extremist Hindu mob demolished the mosque in 1992, planning to build a new temple on the site. The demolition has been cited as justification for terrorist attacks by radical Muslim groups.[2] The massacres at Wandhama (1998) and the Amarnath pilgrimage (2000) are both attributed to the demolition. Communal riots occurred in New Delhi, Bombay and elsewhere, as well as many cases of stabbing, arson, and attacks on private homes and government officers.[3]

Muslim invaders did indeed destroy or modify thousands of “idolatrous” temples and sacred sites in India, just as they did elsewhere on a lesser scale, and just as the Islamic State has been doing for several years in modern Iraq and Syria. This is not simply the sort of destruction normally associated with wars, invasions, or civil disputes. For Muslims, it has a theological basis. Islam, as it has existed since the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632, is predicated on three things: the belief that there is one God without partners or associates; the belief that Muhammad is the messenger of that one God; and the belief that Islam is the greatest and last religion revealed to mankind, authorized by God to destroy all other religions and their artefacts:

“He (God) has sent his prophet with guidance and the religion of the truth in order to make it prevail over all religion” (Qur’an 9:33; 61:9).

It is this last belief that has, for over 1400 years, instilled a deep sense of supremacism within the Muslim world.

As many Muslims believe that Islam is the final revelation and Muhammad is the last prophet, so they believe that they cannot possibly live on equal terms with the followers of any other faith. Jews and Christians may live in an Islamic state, but only if they submit to deep humiliation and abasement and in return for the payment of protection money (the jizya tax). Churches and synagogues may not be repaired or, should they collapse, be rebuilt. Islam trumps everything.

This last doctrine is used repeatedly in the works of modern Salafi ideologues such as the Pakistani Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb. Here is a fairly typical statement by Qutb, from his best-known publication, Ma’alim fi’l-tariq, (“Milestones”):

“Islam, then, is the only Divine way of life which brings out the noblest human characteristics, developing and using them for the construction of human society. Islam has remained unique in this respect to this day. Those who deviate from this system and want some other system, whether it be based on nationalism, color and race, class struggle, or similar corrupt theories, are truly enemies of mankind!”[4]

Here is a recent comment by a modern Salafi writer:

“this worldwide domination of Islam which has been promised by Allah does not necessarily mean that every single person on earth will become Muslim. When we say that Islam will dominate the world, we mean as a political system, as the messenger Muhammad prophesied that the authority on earth will belong to the Muslims, i.e. the believers will be in power and the Sharee’ah [Shari’a] of Islam will be implemented in every corner of the earth”.

Under Islamic jihad law, any territory once captured for Islam must remain an integral and inviolable possession of the Muslim authorities.[5] In other words, even entire countries like Spain, Portugal, India, Greece or the Balkan nations that had been colonies under Ottoman rule, should be reclaimed for Islam, either by re-conquest or through the current “cultural jihad.”

It is through mass immigration, separatism, gradual introduction of Islamic law, and ghettoization that many countries in Europe have grown to be victims of a more determined Islam. But one territory remains under the threat of a violent takeover: the state of Israel.

Although there are revanchist and irredentist movements in many countries, Muslim effort to re-possess Israel has served to spark off and maintain the longest-lasting and most intractable physical conflict in modern history. Demands and counter-demands, attacks and counter attacks, wars and defensive responses taking place in Israel are in the media every single day.

The dispute is not primarily political. After the First World War, a system of international law was created, and that mutually agreed system was expanded after World War II to all countries joining the United Nations. Israel was created, not to displace the Arab inhabitants of what the British named Palestine, but to provide a homeland for the Jews alongside an Arab state. But all the Arab countries turned down this proposal. The Palestinians today still refuse to accept a state of their own, even while clamouring loudly for one.

Their deepest motive lies in a religiously-determined rejection of the nation state,[6] combined with the conviction that the Holy Land is an Islamic territory that cannot ever be awarded to the Jews.

That denial of international law and ethics allows many Muslims to claim the city of Jerusalem as an Islamic city, a city that can never be treated as the capital of a Jewish state, a holy place that has meaning for Muslims and Muslims alone.

You do not have to be a historian to know that Jerusalem was originally a Jewish city with, later, Christian connections and, later still, weak Islamic connections. More than that, it is the holiest city in the world for Jews, and it contains the most sacred site in the Jewish religion, the Temple Mount — the area on which not one but two Jewish temples were built.

There, Jews worshipped until the temples were destroyed, first by the Babylonian monarch Nebuchadnezzar (in 586 BCE), and again by the Romans in 70 CE. Jews have always turned toward the Temple Mount in their prayers.

Muslims, too, faced the Temple Mount when they prayed for several years while Muhammad and his small band of followers lived in Mecca. They continued to do so for many months after they emigrated to the oasis town of Yathrib (now Medina) in 622. They originally prayed facing Jerusalem because Muhammad was at first a great admirer of the Jews, from whom he learnt most of what he knew. But in Medina, he found he did not get on so well with the Jews of the city, who refused to convert to his new religion.

So, sixteen or seventeen months after the emigration, a revelation came to Muhammad that the Believers had to turn round about 180 degrees to face the city from which most of them had come, Mecca. In mid-prayer, the entire congregation turned their backs on Jerusalem. The holy city of the Jews was no longer of the least interest to them.[7]

The Qur’an could not be more explicit in this matter. Muhammad does not follow the direction of prayer used by the Jews. The Ka’ba in Mecca has erased all thought of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. At that point in time, there was not a single rock or stone or tree or building in Jerusalem that was Islamic in any way.

But for today’s Muslims, the opposite is true. There is nothing in Jerusalem that belongs to the Jews, and every part of it — especially the Temple Mount and the Western Wall — is and always has been Islamic. It is seen as the one of the holiest cities for Muslims, after Mecca and Medina.

The Muslim claim to Jerusalem is tenuous to say the least. One Qur’anic verse (17:1) talks of a night journey made by Muhammad from the Sacred Mosque (in Mecca) to the Farthest Mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa). Later commentators identify this Farthest Mosque with Jerusalem. But there were no mosques and no Muslims in Jerusalem at this time — in fact, not that many even in Arabia. The current Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount was first built in the year 705, seventy-three years after Muhammad’s death in 632, and rebuilt several times after earthquakes. By the 20^th century, it was severely neglected. A film of the mosque in 1954 shows serious deterioration. It was clearly neither cared for nor much valued by the Muslim community.

You do not have to be a historian to know that Jerusalem was originally a Jewish city with, later, Christian connections and, later still, weak Islamic connections. The second Jewish Temple, completed by King Herod in 19 BCE, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE (depicted at left in a 1626 painting by Nicolas Poussin). The current Aqsa Mosque (right) on the Temple Mount was first built in the year 705, seventy-three years after Muhammad’s death in 632, and rebuilt several times after earthquakes. (Images’ source: Wikimedia Commons)

And there is more. For centuries, Muslim writers (not to mention Jewish and Christian historians and archaeologists) agreed that the Kotel, the Western or “Wailing” Wall, was the remaining section of the second Jewish Temple, the temple built by Herod and visited by Jesus. As far back as 1924, the Supreme Muslim Council in the British Palestine Mandate published a pamphlet entitled, A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif – Temple Mount Guide. This document confirmed the Jewishness of the site: on the fourth page, the historical sketch of the Mount declares:

“The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings (2 Samuel 24:25)”

According to the Jewish Virtual Library:

Early Muslims regarded the building and destruction of the Temple of Solomon as a major historical and religious event, and accounts of the Temple are offered by many of the early Muslim historians and geographers (including Ibn Qutayba, Ibn al-Faqih, Mas’udi, Muhallabi, and Biruni). Fantastic tales of Solomon’s construction of the Temple also appear in the Qisas al-anbiya’ [Tales of the Prophets], the medieval compendia [sic] of Muslim legends about the pre-Islamic prophets. As the historian Rashid Khalidi wrote in 1998 (albeit in a footnote), while there is no “scientific evidence” that Solomon’s Temple existed, “all believers in any of the Abrahamic faiths perforce must accept that it did.”

For some time now, however, Muslim individuals and institutions have started to claim that the Mount has nothing to do with a Jewish Temple, that no such temple ever existed, and that the Western Wall is in fact the wall at which Muhammad tethered his fabled winged-horse, Buraq. For example, with enormous effrontery, Sheikh Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, the leading religious figure in the Palestinian Authority, stated in 2009: “Jerusalem is an Arab and Islamic city and it always has been so.” Tamimi claimed that all excavation work conducted by Israel after 1967 had “failed to prove that Jews had a history or presence in Jerusalem or that their ostensible temple had ever existed.” He condemned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and “all Jewish rabbis and extremist organizations” as liars, because of their assertion that Jerusalem was a Jewish city. Tamimi accused Israel of distorting the facts and forging history “with the aim of erasing the Arab and Islamic character of Jerusalem.”

There is no reason why Muslims should not venerate the spot, whether from afar or while living in Jerusalem itself. In that way, the Temple Mount would be another religious site with connections to more than one religion — in this case to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Unfortunately, that sense of dominance over all other religions, as described above, means that Muslims are having none of that.

For them the Temple Mount and its surroundings are Muslim and nothing else. In the modern period, this is an offshoot of the wider view that all Israel is Islamic territory.

The Islamic concept of supremacy has overtaken UNESCO in direct contradiction to its acceptance of multi-religious sites.

In October 2015, six Arab states, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and others, proposed to UNESCO that it should change its designation of the site, turning it from a Jewish holy place to a Muslim one, as part of the al-Aqsa Mosque. A vote was set for October 20, but was postponed following an indignant protest by UNESCO’s head, Irina Bokova, who said she “deplored” the proposal.

But that vote may still go through in favour of the PA and its supporters. One day later, it was announced that UNESCO had voted to designate two other important Jewish holy sites as Muslim — the “Cave of the Patriarchs” in Hebron, and the Tomb of Rachel near Bethlehem.

The “Cave of the Patriarchs” is where tradition says the bodies of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried. It is the most ancient of Jewish holy places, second in importance only to the Mount on which the two temples were built. It will now be known as al-Haram al-Ibrahimi, the Sanctuary of Abraham, so named because Abraham is described in the Qur’an as the first Muslim. Bizarrely, that is enough to make it a “Muslim” site.

The Tomb of Rachel, situated toward the northern entrance to Bethlehem, is regarded as the resting place of the matriarch Rachel, the wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Considered the third holiest Jewish site and a place of pilgrimage for Jews since ancient times, it has been holy to both Jews and Christians for centuries. Since the tomb fell under Muslim hands in the seventh century, it has also been a place venerated by Muslims, because Jacob and Joseph are Qur’anic figures, although Rachel herself is not mentioned by name in the book.

Muslim authorities and leaders such as the head of the radical Northern Islamic Movement, Shaykh Raed Salah, do not want a little here and a little there. They want all of Jerusalem to be enshrined internationally as an entirely Muslim city and, as happened when Jordan occupied the city, to expel the Jews and destroy all the synagogues there.

The attempts to deny any ancient and ongoing Jewish presence in Jerusalem, to say there was never a first let alone a second Temple and that only Muslims have any right to the whole city, its shrines and historical monuments, have reached insane proportions. The most extreme expressions of this gamut of ahistorical claims, supremacist assertions and conspiracies are the many speeches and comments of the above-mentioned Shaykh Raed Salah. Here is part of a speech he made at a rally in 1999:

“We will say openly to the Jewish society, you do not have a right even to one stone of the blessed Al-Aksa Mosque. You do not have a right even to one tiny particle of the blessed Al-Aksa Mosque. Therefore we will say openly, the western wall of blessed Al-Aksa is part of blessed Al-Aksa. It can never be a small Western Wall. It can never be a large Western Wall… We will say openly to the political and religious leadership in Israel: the demand to keep blessed Al-Aksa under Israeli sovereignty is also a declaration of war on the Islamic world.”

Salah is far from alone. The current head of the Supreme Muslim Council, Ekrima Sabri, has for many years done his best to invalidate Jewish claims to the area. He claims that Solomon’s Temple is an “unproven allegation” — something that the Jews dreamed up out of “hatred and envy.” He claims the Western Wall, too, is “a Muslim religious property” to which Jews “have no relation.”

In a recent statement, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that, “The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours… and they [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.”

According to UN Watch,

“Ambassador Shama Hohen [Carmel Shama Hacohen, Israeli ambassador to UNESCO] asked Palestinian delegate Mounir Anastas why Palestinians are not prepared to recognize the Jewish right to the Temple Mount and include the term ‘Temple Mount’ in the resolution, alongside the Arab term, Haram al-Sharif. Anastas replied… that if the Palestinians were to recognize the Temple Mount, then Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah would become number one targets of ISIS.”

Is this really what it boils down to? The Islamic State rules the international community? Including UNESCO?

On April 15 this year, the Executive Board of UNESCO’s Programme and External Relations Commission convened for its 199th session. The earlier Temple Mount resolution was moved by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan — all members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. That vote then passed to the 21 members of the World Heritage Committee during its 40th session in Istanbul, which had been scheduled to run from July 10 to July 20.

By mere chance, July’s military coup attempt in Turkey disrupted the event, and the vote has now been scheduled for an autumn meeting. That may be based on a draft resolution created by the European Union, which is, in fact, just another denial of the historical Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. But, considering the one-sidedness of this resolution, just where is UNESCO’s above-stated commitment to bring about “a dialogue between all stakeholders”?

Turning the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and other sites into exclusively Muslim holy places is directly linked to the growth of Islamisation in the modern era. By destroying churches, shrines, tombs, whole sites of antiquity deemed idolatrous, and even mosques deemed heretical, the Islamic State seeks to wipe out all traces of what is termed the era of Jahiliyya, the “Age of Ignorance” that held the world in its grip before the advent of Islam.

The world is outraged when it sees the stones of Palmyra tumble, or other great monuments of human civilization turn to dust. But that same world is silent when the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters Islamise everything by calling into question the very presence of the Jewish people in the Holy Land.

Denis MacEoin PhD has studied and taught Islam at several universities and is currently working on a book dealing with concerns about the religion. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

At least one person was pleased about the Obama Administration’s decision to abstain from the UN Security Council (UNSC) vote on Resolution 2334, effectively establishing the boundaries of a Palestinian state. For Gregory Khalil, the current president and co-founder of the Telos Group, an organization posing as “pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and pro-peace,” it was 12 years coming. His 2004 New York Times op-ed encouraged the US to abstain from exercising their UNSC veto in defense of Israel. In December 2016, the Obama Administration finally acted upon the advice of this former Palestinian negotiation-team lawyer by abstaining from — instead of vetoing — Resolution 2334.

Founded in 2009 with the original name of the “Kairos Project,” the Telos Group described itself as:

“… a non-profit educational initiative that seeks to educate America’s mainstream faith leaders and their communities about the causes of — and solutions to — the modern conflict that currently ravages the Holy Land.”

A “bio” for Telos Group President and Co-Founder Gregory Khalil reveals:

“Mr. Khalil spent the summer of 2000 in East Jerusalem researching refugee rights under international law — as well as other issues related to final status negotiations — with renowned Palestinian legislator, negotiator, and spokesperson Dr. Hanan Ashrawi.”

By his own account, Khalil later advised the Palestinian leadership on negotiations with Israel, and served four years on the Palestinian negotiating team.

In 2014, the Telos Group was outed as an anti-Israel organization not living up to its “pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and pro-peace” self-description. The following year, Telos doubled down, rebranding with that slogan as their central theme. Their rebranding efforts included unveiling a new logo, revamping their website,[1] and developing a more active presence on Facebook and Instagram. In July 2015, Telos announced on their blog the launch of their newly redesigned website “and a slightly new direction,” with the stated goal to “grow and direct the pro/pro/pro movement in America.”

While the old Telos website originally emphasized the slogan of “Educating America’s Faith Communities for Holy Land Peace,” its new website prominently displays its “Pro/Pro/Pro Peacemaking” slogan and an updated mission:

“By resourcing leaders at the nexus of culture, faith and enterprise, we equip Americans to build a transformative pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace movement.”

While its leaders originally defined their target audience as “mainstream faith leaders and their communities” and then “American evangelicals,” they now define their target audience as “Americans.”

Telos’s rebranding efforts were quickly undermined by its own actions; its agenda remained unchanged. Khalil facilitated meetings with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) / Palestinian Authority (PA), Palestinian companies, and the chairman of the organization behind the PayPal4Palestine campaign. In 2011 (before its rebrand), Telos posted a picture with Hanan Ashrawi on the Telos Facebook page in a photo album titled, “Conservative Leaders Trip.” Now, in 2016, the PLO posted on Facebook two press releases[2] on Ashrawi’s meetings with “a Telos Group,” featuring pictures of both meetings (one picture included Khalil). Palestinian media also reported on the meetings.[3]

Notably, Telos social media accounts did not post about the two PLO/Telos meetings. In contrast to the rebranding’s emphasis on a “pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace” slogan, Telos met with an organization and government (PLO/PA) that has monetarily supported the families of terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians.

On the same day as their second meeting with Ashrawi, Telos met with Palestinian companies that are part of a larger Palestinian push seeking to establish a Palestinian high-tech economy in both the West Bank and Gaza. These companies pressured PayPal in an unsuccessful attempt to secure PayPal tools reportedly necessary to accomplish this goal. The PLO/PA expressed support for the PayPal4Palestine movement. Khalil also tweeted the Palestinian PayPal letter from his personal Twitter account and retweeted #Paypal4Palestine messages. Telos then facilitated a meeting between the Women Donors Network’s Middle East and Peace Democracy Circle (WDN’s MEPDC) and Sam Bahour, Chairman of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy. Bahour, whose organization is coordinating the #PayPal4Palestine campaign, letter, and hashtag, posted about the meeting and thanked Khalil for it on Bahour’s Google+ account. Again, the Telos social media accounts were strangely silent.

While every pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and pro-peace American longs for the day when Palestinians experience genuine economic freedom, they undoubtedly understand that money is fungible, and that in the West Bank and especially in Gaza, financial resources and economic products often end up in the hands of government and terrorist organizations instead of in the hands of impoverished Palestinians. The PayPal4Palestine movement (supported by the Palestinian companies who met with Telos) offered its assistance to PayPal to work around any legal issues by working with “officials.” But those PA and Hamas officials are part of the very regimes responsible for stealing resources from the Palestinian people. The unsuccessful PayPal4Palestine movement did not call for the serious internal Palestinian reforms necessary to enable genuine economic prosperity to reach the average Palestinian suffering under an oppressive government.

Khalil’s December 2016 New York Times op-ed provides a key insight into what could potentially be driving Telos’s and his private economic advocacy efforts: “They [leaders] should also help avert collapse of the partly dependent Palestinian economy by enabling greater access of goods and people to Jerusalem’s global marketplace.”

On January 10, 2017, Telos shared a Jerusalem Post op-ed by Gershon Baskin, asking, “Is the Palestinian Authority an effective government? What challenges does it face? Check out this opinion piece to learn more about the PA.”

In the piece, Baskin, who claimed to have worked to bring “tens of millions of dollars of private-sector investments into Palestine,” blamed Israel for the failures of the Palestinian Authority. He dismissed PA corruption, excused the lack of democratic elections, justified PA nepotism, and suggested that Palestinians have more freedom under the Palestinian Authority “than in any other Arab country.” Baskin urged Israelis and Palestinians alike not to give up on the PA, and argued:

“Investment in the private sector and especially direct foreign investment in Palestine is way too low. Part of that comes from the donor mentality that has been created and fostered whereby Palestinians have learned to expect projects to be supported by free money rather than having to risk investing their own money in expanding the economy.”

Instead of building substantive bridges between Palestinians and Israelis, the bridge Telos appears most intent on building is a financial one between America and Ramallah. Telos’s actions demonstrate the organization is pro-PLO/Palestinian Authority, not pro-Palestinian. At a time when Telos has a tremendous opportunity to advance genuine peace between Israelis and Palestinians, it is focusing its efforts on enabling a corrupt, oppressive PLO/PA government that has opposed peace on multiple occasions, oppressed its citizens by denying them freedom of speech and protection from religious persecution, and jailed journalists who dare to criticize the PA’s undemocratic government and its abuses of its citizenry.

While operating as a pro-PLO/PA-narrative non-profit, the Telos Group masquerades as a pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian/pro-peace non-profit. Based on its leadership and their behavior to date, its ultimate objective would appear to be an economically viable Palestinian state on terms more favorable to the PLO/PA than to Israelis, Palestinians, or peace — certainly not a pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian/pro-peace agenda.

Given the recent UN vote, Khalil’s New York Times op-ed from 12 years ago is still relevant. Khalil’s 2014 hour-long presentation to students participating in a model UN cleverly presented the pro-Palestinian narrative as the historical perspective. His choice of language during his history review and his version of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives cast Palestinians in a sympathetic light and Israelis in an unsympathetic and historically inaccurate light.

Gregory Khalil addresses students participating in a model UN, in Jackson, Wyoming, on November 16, 2014. (Image source: InterConnections21 video screenshot)

During the presentation, Khalil told the audience:

“I see different conversations emerging, among key populations in Israel, in Palestine, and in the international community who’s been a full party to this conflict all along — it’s not half a world away. I see different conversations that aren’t about silly talking points anymore like, ‘Oh, if Palestinians just learned to love their own kids more than they love killing Jews.’ Like, you know, racist sentiments like that. Or ‘Oh, if Israelis just didn’t want to just wipe all Palestinians off the map and just trying to just completely kill us and get rid of us.'”

Paraphrasing a quote popularly attributed to former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Khalil labeled it a “racist sentiment.” While there is now some question whether Golda Meir did in fact say the original quote (“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us”), his criticism of the quote’s message was misleading. Peace with Israel is premised on Palestinians no longer supporting their children engaging in terrorist acts against Israel. Khalil’s choice of a parallel Palestinian talking point is strange, considering that talk of wiping Israel — not Palestinians — off the map is the anti-Israel rallying cry popularly attributed to Iran then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (although the exact translation is disputed).

Talking to the model UN students, Khalil promoted the narrative that the State of Israel came into existence primarily as a result of the Holocaust, and that Palestinians were unjustly punished for what the Jewish people endured during the Holocaust:

“Palestinians on the ground were like, ‘Wait a second! What are you talking? Why should we be responsible for what happened over there in Europe in this massive war. Like we’re connected to this land too.’ Just as my family would tell you or Palestinian Christian, their first Christians were, of course, here in the Holy Land. And Muslims have family trees that go back 1,500 years.”

Khalil’s narrative misconstrues the history of the region during, and immediately following, the Holocaust. By suggesting that Palestinians were innocent bystanders during the Holocaust, Khalil is misleading his student audience. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has documented how the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, met with Adolf Hitler, sought to assist the Nazis in murdering Jews in Europe, and expressed his desire to destroy Jews and the Jewish homeland. By inaccurately seeking to establish Palestinians as the indigenous people of the Holy Land, Khalil’s speech does not address that the first Christians of the Holy Land 2,000 years ago were Jewish disciples of Jesus, a Jewish carpenter whose Jewish family tree dates back thousands of years.

On at least two occasions, Khalil has misrepresented the legal situation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, also known as historic Judea and Samaria. Both in his 2014 model UN speech and during a January 2, 2017 Global Immersion webinar, Khalil used the analogy of a foreign country invading the United States to describe the settlements. For his model UN speech, he equated Israeli settlements to Canada building towns in the United States. During the webinar, he used the analogy of Mexico invading and building towns in San Diego.

While Khalil appeals to UN Resolution 242‘s “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” to justify his position on Israeli settlements, he neglects to mention that this “land-for-peace” resolution was premised on the Palestinians halting all violence against Israelis and recognizing the State of Israel. Historically, when Israel has withdrawn from territory in exchange for peace, Palestinians have continued to launch both verbal (incitement to violence) and physical attacks on Israel’s sovereignty and security. Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Israeli communities have lived under constant threat of Hamas rocket fire. And as recently as January 2017, Hanan Ashrawi reiterated the PLO/PA’s unwillingness to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

So how is the Telos Group continuing its anti-Israel narrative and advocacy under the guise of a new direction? Demonstrating that its rebranding is nothing more than a facade for its real agenda, the Telos Group cleverly packages and disseminates PLO/Palestinian Authority talking points — creating a generation of misinformed anti-Israel activists in America while the PLO/PA does the same in the Middle East. The key is Telos and Khalil’s choice of language, construction of narrative, and questionable public relations efforts.

In 2010, at a Capitol Hill event, Gregory Khalil laid out the reasoning behind the Telos Group’s (then known as the Kairos Project) values-oriented language:

“For many years, we’ve sort of ceded the language that relates to values, and fundamental human rights, and social justice in favor of a more sort of pragmatic political language. Now, I don’t mean to diminish the role of politics, because this conflict is not a theological conflict; it’s a political problem. But I’m trying to say that there are ways to engage new voices who can be helpful rather than harmful.”

As someone of Christian Palestinian descent, Khalil should be familiar with the fact that Islamic radicals such as Hamas and Hezbollah cite Islamic texts to justify theologically their attempts to destroy the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Many Christians and Jews also view this conflict not in strictly political terms, but in theological terms. While secularists in both Israeli and Palestinian societies may view this conflict only in political terms, to deny the theological underpinnings of the conflict is to ignore the root causes of the conflict and to be ignorant of potential real-world consequences of proposed conflict solutions.

As a result of this misguided perspective on the conflict, the Telos Group is indoctrinating “new voices” (the younger generation and their influencers) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the storytelling method that builds empathy for the Palestinian cause while using language that appeals to this generation’s values, sense of social justice, and dedication to protecting human rights. Khalil’s model UN speech was a prime example of this process and agenda. Through his language and narrative, he builds support among his model UN audience for taking action and upsetting the status quo.

Four articles published since the Telos rebranding, and shared on Telos’s social media accounts, vividly demonstrate that while the organization’s public relations efforts were supposed to establish the rebranding, they in fact revealed the organization’s efforts to disseminate PLO/PA talking points.

After going on a Telos Group tour, Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote a glowing piece in December 2015 entitled, “How some evangelicals are challenging a decades-long stance of blanket support for Israel’s government.” Bailey’s article title is of note, since in describing their tours, the Telos website states tour participants “encounter multiple Israeli and Palestinian narratives,” and that “Telos guides expertly balance and interpret these meetings…”

Former Telos trip participant Justin Kron is a Christian tour guide, leading Israel tours emphasizing the Christian faith’s Jewish roots. Researching Palestinians’ access to water after his 2013 Telos tour, he found the tour had provided him with only one side of the story on that hot button topic — the pro-PLO/PA narrative. In 2014, another Telos Group trip participant, Cameron Strang, Founder and CEO of the Relevant Media Group, wrote an article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presenting only the pro-PLO/PA narrative on a host of topics, including Palestinian water access.

In her Washington Post piece, Bailey had observed, “The trip focused mostly on Israel as a modern state, rather than Israel as a biblical land.” The pro-PLO/PA narrative promoted by Telos focuses on Israel’s current existence and the conflict, while willfully ignoring thousands of years of Jewish presence in the land and seeking to replace it with the false narrative of an indigenous Palestinian population. Writing in the Middle East Quarterly, author and professor Dr. David Bukay explained:

“Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel by erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history is a central goal of the Palestinian Authority (PA)…. In the official Palestinian narrative, the Palestinian people are authentic and indigenous while it is the Israelis who are the foreigners, invented, and sown in a land that is not theirs.”

December 2016, Khalil was quoted in a Washington Post article about Palestinian Christians, and also authored a New York Times op-ed about moving the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Both articles illustrated that the Telos Group, Khalil, and their friends in the media are regrettably shilling for the PLO/PA through the use of language and storytelling which mirror the language and narrative of an oppressive, undemocratic, often genocidal group.

In the Washington Post piece, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian (Assistant Editor of Foreign Policy) inaccurately blamed Israel as the cause of Palestinian Christians’ suffering. She quoted Khalil misrepresenting the Holy Land’s history:

“I and many other Americans of Palestinian Christian ancestry will often get asked: When did you convert? ‘2,000 years ago, when did you convert?’ is a standard response.”

In words eerily similar to those of the PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi, Allen-Ebrahimian reprimands American Evangelical Christians for supporting “Israeli security policies” that “have…made life difficult for Christians in Palestine and have cut them off from parts of their homeland.” Allen-Ebrahimian goes on to claim:

“Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), an outspoken conservative Christian politician and proponent of Israel, demonstrated that particular myopia when he gave the keynote speech at a 2014 conference hosted by [In Defense of Christians] IDC. A contingent of Arab Christians booed Cruz off stage after he declared ‘Christians have no better ally than the Jewish state.’ For Palestinian Christians, that simply isn’t true.”

Expressing similar sentiments, Hanan Ashrawi recently rebuked Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilos III (whose title is “Patriarch of Jerusalem and All Palestine“) over his description of Israel as a “democracy” with “freedom of worship.” Launching into the PLO/PA narrative, she libeled Israel, inaccurately claiming the Jewish State is the cause of Palestinian Christians’ suffering. Ashrawi disingenuously referred to “the impact of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem” and preposterously declared “thousands of Palestinian Christians cannot access their own Holy Sites in Occupied East Jerusalem due to Israel’s illegal annexation Wall and other movement restrictions.”

In contrast to the PLO/PA narrative, both the Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh and Pierre Rehov have described the heartbreaking causes of Palestinian Christian suffering under both the PLO/PA and Hamas.

In Khalil’s December 2016 New York Times op-ed, he claimed, without citing statistics or historical precedent to back up his claims, that violence would be the likely result of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Khalil’s comments mirror, in part, those of Fatah Central Committee official Sultan Abu Al-Einein, who reportedly said on January 1, 2017:

“We must prepare for a new confrontation with the new US administration, which has declared, clearly and audaciously, that Israel and its settlements are legitimate and legal, and has sent a delegation in order to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I believe that any American act of stupidity will ignite the Palestinian territories, and that the US administration, along with the Israeli arrogance in continuing its settlement activity, will bear responsibility for the return of bloodshed in the Palestinian territories.”

On January 15, 2017, the day of the Paris conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Telos posted and article by its Executive Director and Co-Founder Todd Deatherage, in Christianity Today, about the Security Council resolution vote, Secretary Kerry’s speech, and the incoming Trump Administration’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Deatherage’s Christianity Today “bio” stated that Telos “aims to build a pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace movement.” In contrast to his organization’s pro-PLO/PA actions, Deatherage admonished Christians:

“any community steeped in the Sermon on the Mount must seek ways to reject the fictions of a winner-takes-all world, and embrace things like working for security, dignity, and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians.”

Considering the current Middle-East turmoil, his dismissal of “the fictions of a winner-takes-all world” shows a profound disconnect from current Middle East reality facing Israelis and Palestinians — the PLO/PA and Hamas both pose an existential threat to Israelis’ safety and security and obstruct Palestinians’ pursuit of freedom and prosperity.

Deatherage claimed:

“Any just end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires an honest diplomatic process, accompanied by vigorous bridge-building and reconciliation at the grassroots level. Christians in the US often envision their role in this as taking one side against the other. But there is a third way, one that takes seriously Jesus’ admonition that ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ and seeks to live that out by indentifying [sic] with those on both sides who are working for peace.”

Unfortunately, Telos and Deatherage’s unwillingness to hold the PLO/PA accountable for their corruption and oppression, and their willingness instead to spout PLO/PA talking points about the conflict and proposed conflict solutions, undermine their credibility to lead the bridge-building, reconciliation, and peacemaking efforts of Christians genuinely seeking to ensure peace and security for all Israelis and Palestinians.

So why was the Telos Group facilitating meetings with the very government and organization that oppresses its own people and, through their actions, limits Palestinians’ freedom of speech and economic activity? Why was the Telos Group, through its public relations efforts, participating in gaslighting Israel and its Christian supporters right before Christmas? Unfortunately, the Telos slogan of “pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and pro-peace” is misleading: that is not its true identity behind the facade. The Telos Group’s most recent blog post by Deatherage, “How can we be Pro-Pro-Pro Right Now?”, confirms what research has shown. Gregory Khalil’s model UN speech and his New York Times op-ed demonstrate the organization’s attempts to use deceptive language and the storytelling method to disguise its true agenda.

Facilitating meetings among those seeking to revitalize the Palestinian economy without necessary Palestinian reforms, Telos plans to use congressional lobbying and their ties with philanthropists and activists to upset the status quo and disrupt peace. Its false narrative currently targets grassroots Americans who are genuinely pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and pro-peace. Given that the upcoming 2017 Telos Leadership Gathering’s theme is “Disrupting the Status Quo: Pro/Pro/Pro in Action,” Americans should be aware of this organization’s true intentions and agenda. It is time to call the Telos Group for what it really is — Anti/Anti/Anti: anti-Israeli, anti-Palestinian, and anti-peace.

Noah Summers is a specialist on Middle East affairs and American foreign policy.