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London editors thought last week that Arabia was the only really likely kindling place for a Holy War. There tall, sagacious, tortoise-spectacled Ibn Saud is Sultan, and King of the Hejaz to boot. He alone has sufficient prestige to galvanize and weld Moslem tribesmen of the Near East into mass enthusiasm for an Islamic pogrom. Last week despatches from Damascus (French Syria) told that 20,000 Arabs had paraded through the bazars shouting: "Long live the unity of Arab peoples under the Sultanship of Ibn Saud!"
"To ignore these signs," wrote the editor of London's Daily News, "would be to blind ourselves to the existence of combustible elements in the Arab nature, and to the possibility that a senseless and bloody 'Holy War' may emerge from the racial conflict in Palestine."
Egypt. Every afternoon last week fat King Fuad of Egypt took his usual garden ride on one or the other of his two favorite mules. Unperturbed, His Majesty read that Jews in Cairo had set upon and beaten an Arab "nearly to death"—the only racial disturbance reported in his realm.
Solomon's Temple. Many a commentator on the Jew-Arab crisis of last week loosely assumed that the "Wailing Wall," where all the trouble started, is part of the famed Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, built by the Louis XIV of Jewry circa 1000 B.C. and today utterly in ruins though the outlines of the Temple remain. Actually Jews wail for the lost glories of their race at a superimposed and much later wall built by detested King Herod. The lower courses of masonry alone are supposed to contain stones originally part of the Temple.