Well, I was referring to the claim that Judaism has one major holy site, when it has more than one, and the claim that only Jews are denied access to their primary holy site, which also isn’t true. I’ve provided concrete examples to illustrate the falsity of both claims (@Wanderfound provided another, too).
To paraphrase somebody who asked me not to quote her, “the victim olympics is the game everybody loses.”
The deal with the Baha’i Pilgrimage is in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Baha’i are Abrahamic, people of the book). You can read an English translation of the Tablet of Pilgrimage here. The Kitáb-i-Aqdas say if you can’t get to the Holiest Site, the House of the Bahá’u’lláh in Baghdad (presumably because it was seized in 1922 and mysteriously destroyed in 2013) you can go to the House of the Bab in Shiraz (except you can’t because the Iranian government razed it and paved over the site as part of their ongoing campaign to extirpate Baha’ism).
Lesser, alternative sites (in Israel, as you noted; Israel took Acre in 1948) are thus currently the target of the religiously mandated pilgrimage. This is conditionally permitted because of a pragmatic caveat in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas acknowledging that oppressed religious traditions like the Baha’i faith sometimes just have to make do the best they can. I think you might be sympathetic; I certainly am!
Israel, to the credit of the Israeli government, is notably more tolerant of the Baha’i faith than other Middle Eastern states. Adherents are permitted pilgrimage to the sites associated with the Bahá’u’lláh’s imprisonment and torture in Acre, and as far as I know Israel has not interfered in the building of the Arc or the operations of the Universal House of Justice in Haifa. This may or may not be related to the fact that Baha’i are not permitted to proselytize in Israel, or the fact that several Arab states opposed to the government of Israel consider Baha’ism to be an abominable perversion deserving of death. Personally, I don’t care so much about the reasons as the actions, and while I’m certainly no fan of the Israeli regime as currently constituted, here Israel seems to have acted admirably and honorably. Kudos are deserved!
None of this has a great lot to do with the UN or UNESCO, of course. My apologies to everyone for the derail. I was just correcting what looked to me like errors of fact.
