Last night we got a tip from our travel agent that we should probably stay out of the Old City today. The tensions that I mentioned earlier over the new ramp to the Temple Mount are heating up and there were supposed to be demonstrations today. Friday is the Muslim holy day and their leaders used their weekly worship of God this week to incite a riot on the Temple Mount. CNN was showing what seemed to be the same pictures over and over. In truth, yes, there was some violence, but it was actually not nearly as bad as what CNN was trying to show. You really have to take what the western media shows with a grain of salt. You would have thought that all of Jerusalem was about to go up in smoke and yet I was about a half mile from where all this was happening and you wouldn’t have even known it. Still, there is definitely a heightened state of alert here. This ramp doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal to me, but it doesn’t take much in this city to create a war. So, maybe it’s good that we will be leaving in a few days. It will be interesting to read about this in the news back home. The end result today was that we basically stayed at Notre Dame all day and studied. Hopefully things will be better tomorrow.
Construction on the New Ramp