The mob dispersed and its former participants returned to their previous activities atop the sacred plateau, such as soccer, jump-rope, tag, and relay races.
Jerusalem, March 27 - An incipient violent disturbance at the compound housing Judaism's holiest site and claimed by Muslims as third-holiest dissipated today when would-be participants discovered that the craft hovering over the sacred site, in violation of its sanctity, was piloted remotely by someone not Jewish, a fact that made the forbidden device's appearance over that location suddenly not a problem anymore.
Witnesses recalled that groups of angry worshipers and soccer-players on the holy plateau began pointing and shouting at a drone about 30 meters in the air above them, with the rhetoric escalating within minutes to include fears that "the Jews" were "defiling Al Aqsa with their filthy rotors" and concerns that Israeli security forces were spying on them.
Several tense moments passed before a group of soccer players began hurling their ball toward the drone - but the drone pilot moved the craft to avoid the ball each time. Others threw rocks or shoes, all of which missed the device. Six people sustained injuries from the rocks, including an elderly man who suffered a concussion and a teen whose glasses smashed and scratched his cornea. A third tripped and broke an arm while attempting to avoid a rock.
Within five minutes, however, word reached the unruly crowd that a Muslim worshiper some distance away was operating the device, news that for unexplained reasons removed the desecration from the drone's presence at the Haram al-Sharif. The mob dispersed and its former participants returned to their previous activities atop the sacred plateau, such as stockpiling bricks and fireworks to aim at Israelis, or their holy games of soccer, jump-rope, tag, and relay races.
"That was a relief," acknowledged Fulri Tard, who claimed to be the first to suspect the drone's desecratory purposes. "We know the Jews do things all the time to defile this holy site, such as praying, prostrating, singing devotional passages, and grieving over the destruction of a shrine that the Waqf once boasted stood here but now we deny ever existed. It doesn't take much to go from there to seeing Jewish plots in every unexplained phenomenon. We need a villain, and of course that villain can never, ever, be one of us."
The episode concluded with several members of the former impromptu protest bantering with the drone operator about the sacred use of the device, in particular the resemblance of its rotor movement sound to certain instances of human flatulence.
Please support our work through Patreon.
Buy In The Biblical Sense: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B92QYWSL