The man who sold Jerusalem

[lovuian]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=637155

It seems all Church's have those corrupt little greedy men who sell their souls for money...

I think Judas was his name and he has many who are like him!!!


The man who sold Jerusalem
The secret sale of a priceless plot of land in the Holy City has threatened the fragile balance between the religions. Donald Macintyre reports on the Greek Orthodox priest accused of selling out his Palestinian flock for Israeli gold
10 May 2005


These are tense times for Abu Walid Dijani, proprietor of the New Imperial Hotel. The Arab hotel, one of the oldest in Jerusalem despite its name, has been at the centre of the city's turbulent history many times, thanks to its strategic location just inside the Jaffa Gate,.

From a balcony here in December 1917, General Edmund Allenby looked across Omar Ibn al Khattab square after dismounting his horse outside the walls and entering the Old City on foot to mark its liberation from the Turks.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the hotel housed a small cinema, and its elegant ballroom was a favourite Palestinian wedding venue. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, it was occupied and used as a base by Israeli troops, then returned to the Dijani family, the tenants of the property, which is owned by the Greek Orthodox Church. But during more than a century the old hotel has never faced a greater threat.

For it is at the centre of an international scandal which has infuriated the Greek government and may yet help sabotage the chances of a comprehensive peace settlement to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. It has also fuelled local demands from the Church's angry flock of 200,000 for the Greek hierarchy to be replaced, as in other Christian communities, by Arab prelates.

Irineos I, the beleaguered Greek Orthodox Patriarch - or as his most senior bishops have repeatedly referred to him since an unprecedented meeting of the Synod voted to depose him last Friday, the "ex-patriarch" - is accused of being behind a secret and politically explosive property deal.

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