In his 2002 book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount Israeli Journalist Gershom Gorenberg analyzes the volatile religious significance of the Temple Mount. As the Oxford University Press summarizes, "Members of the world's three major monotheistic faiths--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--hold this spot to be the key to salvation as they await the end of the world", and as a Publisher's Weekly review describes Gorenberg's work, "Jewish messianists and Christian millennialists insist that building the Third Temple on the site where both Solomon's and Herod's temples stood is essential for the advent of the Messiah, while Muslim apocalyptic believers fear that efforts to destroy Al-Aqsa mosque to make way for the Third Temple will prevent fulfillment of the prophecy about Islam's Meccan shrine migrating to Jerusalem at the end of time... Gorenberg's prescience is manifest by his calling Temple Mount "a sacred blasting cap" and by stating that "any incident at the site can spin out of control."

But maintaining the peace in the volatile Mideast region does not appear to be high on the agenda of pastor John Hagee and other evangelical leaders now under CUFI's aegis.

As I wrote in an April 14, 2007 Talk To Action story entitled Christians United For Israel "Wipes" Dome Of The Rock From Website Logo

As the JTA news service reports today, "Christians United For Israel, a pro-Israel evangelical group, features on its website a photo of Jerusalem with the city's holiest mosques wiped out."

The JTA story actually misses the nub of the controversy ; the Dome of The Rock, considered the 3rd holiest Islamic site in the world, has been removed from the image of the Wailing Wall and environs featured in CUFI's website logo. The symbolism inherent in the logo casts a disturbing light on the tactical alliance between American Jews and CUFI founder John Hagee's new political lobbying group. The possibly incendiary nature of such symbolism to the Islamic world raises the question of why American Jewish groups and leading American politicians have associated with a leader such as John Hagee whose political views would be considered within Israeli society to be out on the extremist or even violent political fringe.

CUFI's first response, to the charge that  the Dome of The Rock had been airbrushed from the image used in its logo was to deny it and claim the Dome was missing simply because of a question of perspective.

In my April 14 piece though, I provided a number of pictures, of the same site- the Wailing Wall and the Temple Mt.,  which showed that claim was highly unlikely and even impossible.

In a followup story, CUFI's Odd Case Of the Dome That Vanished In The Night, I discussed the outcome, as a New York Jewish Telegraph Agency news story stated, unequivocally, that the image had indeed been wiped.

CUFI then changed its story and stated that the image had indeed been altered but not under CUFI's direction - the image, the group said, had been airbrushed by the artist who took the photograph from which the image was derived. The suggestion was that CUFI's use of the wiped image was somehow "accidental" but in a Google image search of literally hundreds of different images, from a similar perspective, of the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall, I was unable to fund even a single image from which the Dome of The Rock had been airbrushed. There were two likely conclusions: either CUFI had specifically searched for the airbrushed image or it had in fact commissioned the image in the first place.