“Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths”, by Karen Armstrong

471 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0679435969

According to Karen Armstrong, there are three contenders for whose city Jerusalem is. No mystery here, really, but we must needs go through the list anyway. Shall we, then? Should Jerusalem be awarded to those evil Christians, who killed the Jews and pagans before going back on the noble idea of refusing to consider mere terrain sacred? Obviously not; Christians just make a hash out of everything, don’t they, what with their faith and inability to see just how noble and just all secularists are. Well, then, how about to the Jews? I mean, Jerusalem belonged to them the longest, right? Hell, it was even the capitol of their nation in eons past…but, no, them thar Jews are just interlopers who had to invent arbitrary myths to pretend that they cared at all about the place, much less had a right to be there. That can only mean that the winners of the “Jerusalem Belongs To Us Says We” sweepstakes are – *envelope please* – the Muslims! Yes, that’s right, the City of Peace belongs to the new kids on the block ‘cause Muslims had no need to invent any myths to “fuel their struggle”, for Jerusalem was theirs like a spouse (I wonder if Karen will award Paris to the Germans next…)

Karen Armstrong’s book Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths could have been a great book if only her bias against Israel, the Jewish people, Christians and Christianity weren’t so obvious. “But Donald”, I hear you cry out in shock, “how can a former Catholic Nun be biased towards Christians?! Well?! Huh?!” Calm down there, sparky; former Nun though she may be, Armstrong has long since joined the elite legions of the sophisticated world in having nothing but disdain for two of the three Abrahamic religions (the third, Islam, comes out smelling of fresh jasmine in her telling). There are several examples of this, but perhaps Armstrong’s trying to mislead her readers into thinking that Jerusalem is Arab by right and is in the process of being wickedly Judaized is the most pernicious; after all, as she even states, Jerusalem was over 60% Jewish by 1900, and this percentage changed much since then, even as the surrounding area has become far more Jewish. This sort of blatant bias makes Armstrong look more like a Hamas gun moll than a serious scholar.

Armstrong writes as the apologist for Islam that she is, a shill for the relatively recently established Palestinian grievances voiced through the PLO. And if you disagree with my assessment, well then you can take my review with a grain of Dead Sea salt.