Christian group removes doctored image of Wall

By Ron Kampeas

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WASHINGTON (JTA)—A pro-Israel Christian group has changed its Web site banner image after learning the photo was doctored.

Christians United for Israel, a rapidly growing evangelical, pro-Israel group, had featured on its Web site (www.cufi.org) a banner showcasing a sunrise panorama of Jerusalem's Western Wall and the Temple Mount above it.

The Muslim mosques on the Temple Mount were missing.

JTA confirmed with the photographer, Michael Levit, that he removed the most prominent mosque, the golden Dome of the Rock, with Photoshop image-editing software.

The Temple Mount area is holy to both Jews and Muslims, and sensitivities over the site have led to bloody clashes in recent years.

CUFI, as the pro-Israel group is known, was unaware that the photo was altered when it was selected for the Web site, the group's executive director, David Brog, told JTA.

"If there's a chance that the photo was doctored, then I'm not comfortable using it," he said in an e-mail April 16.

By the next morning, the photo had been replaced by one that shows the familiar Dome of the Rock.

"If there is any doubt, I didn't want that picture," Brog said. "I don't want people to be able to attribute to us an agenda that does not exist. We were looking for a pretty picture of Jerusalem and nothing more."

Levit's reasons for altering the picture present a complicated tale involving aesthetics, politics and flexible ideas about what may or may not be done with a photograph.

The Temple Mount, site of the biblical temples, is the holiest site in Judaism, but since capturing it in 1967, Israel has gone to great lengths to preserve the site's Muslim integrity.

Muslims describe the site as the third holiest in Islam—partly, according to some post-Koranic Islamic commentaries, because of its holiness to Jews.