Justifying her existence

Oh dear.  The Arab world is in violent upheaval and Reuters Jerusalem Bureau correspondents can only justify their existence by kowtowing to the Palestinians and beating up on Israel over site maintenance.

In a story assembled from bits of broken boilerplate drawn from Reuters capacious anti-Israel word processing files, correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan, who has zero credibility demonstrates why public trust in the media has virtually dried up:

(Reuters) - Israel has given preliminary approval for renovations at a contested holy site in East Jerusalem where rebuilding has triggered violence in the past, a city official said Sunday.
Municipal planners last week approved the project to repair an earthen ramp near the Mughrabi Gate connecting the Wailing Wall remnant of an ancient Jewish temple to a complex revered by Muslims and Jews, both of whom claim the area as their own [...]

Located in East Jerusalem's old walled city, the ramp is next to a compound Muslims know as Haram es-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, and the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site.
Jews also revere the site where two biblical temples stood and which is a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In September 2000 a visit there by Ariel Sharon, then Israeli opposition leader, triggered protests that led to years of Palestinian uprising in which thousands on both sides died.[...]

Israel took East Jersusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in a step that has not won international recognition. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they aim to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In her continuing efforts to artificially bifurcate the 3,000-year-old city of Jerusalem and assign ownership to the Palestinian Arabs, Fisher-Ilan capitalizes the "E" in "East" Jerusalem, ostensibly manufacturing a fictitious city that does not appear on even Palestinian maps.  In reality, there is only Jerusalem and indeed, in moments of rare candor, the Palestinians themselves acknowledge that they want the city as capital of their nascent state, unencumbered by artificial distinctions.

Fisher-Ilan apparently never tires as well, of demonstrating the utmost deference for Arab sensibilities, referring to the story's subject holy site by its Arab-designated title and characterizing it as "Islam's third holiest site" while omitting any reference to the Jewish appellation for the site, the Temple Mount; failing to mention that it is Judaism's holiest site; and further concealing the paramount historical and religious significance of the site to Jews by referring nebulously to "two biblical temples" rather than openly identifying the sacred and archetypal Temples as those of Jewish Kings Solomon and Herod.  This is perhaps the third or fourth time over the last eighteen months we've caught Fisher-Ilan duplicitously taking this same editorial tack and thus violating the Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism.

Along a similar vein, Fisher-Ilan regurgitates the canard and post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that the Palestinian terror war waged against Israeli civilians was precipitated by a visit to the Temple Mount by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.  As we've noted too many times to recount, this canard has been repudiated by the Palestinians themselves.

Only a naked ideologue who has lost the argument clings to discredited fallacies and cheap propaganda in an effort to remain relevant.

UPDATE MARCH 7th, 6:45 AM: A reader notes that the ramp slated for repair is not even within the al-Aqsa mosque compound boundaries and while Fisher-Ilan takes due note of purported Palestinian concerns with respect to possible damage occurring to "Islamic relics buried underground", she is not as attentive to (doesn't mention at all) Palestinian excavations on the Temple Mount that have routinely destroyed Jewish Temple-era antiquities.