Cronaca notes that in addition to razing other cultures' holy sites, Islamists do the same to their own. More from Stephen Schwartz:

To Wahhabis, a beloved building, the tomb of a saintly figure, or a gravestone is an idol. In Wahhabism, prayers to the Prophet are forbidden--above all because Wahhabis see in them a parallel with Christian worship of Jesus. Thus, the Saudis followed their conquest of Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s with an orgy of destruction.

[ Parenthetically, I had no idea the Saudis didn't own Mecca and Medina until the 1920s, did you? ]

They leveled the "Jannat al-Baqi" or "Heavenly Orchard" at Medina that included graves of the Prophet Muhammad's son Ibrahim, as well as numerous of the Prophet's relatives and original companions. They also looted the Prophet's Shrine in Medina and demolished the cemetery in Mecca that included the graves of Muhammad's mother and grandfather. They completely destroyed mausoleums, mosques, and other honored sites, including Muhammad's own house. It was even said that they wished to uproot the grave of Muhammad himself and tear down the Kaaba, the stone temple at the center of Mecca. They were prevented from this last act by pressure from Muslims in India.

Wahhabi vandalism continues today, and its appearance is typically the first sign of aggressive Saudi penetration of Muslim lands. Saudi agents uprooted graveyards in Kosovo even before the war began there in the late 1990s, and Wahhabi missionaries have sought to demolish Sufi tombs in Kurdistan. Late in 2002, the Saudi government tore down the historic Ottoman fortress of Ajyad in Mecca, causing outrage in many Muslim countries.

The Temple is not the only Jewish holy site ransacked by Islamists. (Pictures here.)

Although Islam has a long track record of taking over enemies' holy sites, Muslim denial of the Mount's Jewish origin is fairly recent, a response to renewed Jewish power in the region.

Before 638 CE - a rather late date in the history of that region - there was no Islamic presence in Jerusalem. Its conqueror, the Umayyad Caliph, Umar, asked its Byzantine Patriarch, Sophronius, to show him the site of the Jewish Temples almost immediately upon entering the city. Sophronius did so and said, “Here is that appalling abomination.” Umar was indeed appalled—but not by the Temple itself. He was incensed at the accumulated garbage and debris, which he believed desecrated that Jewish holy site. He ordered the site cleansed immediately in a manner befitting its holy purpose. Soon thereafter, he commissioned The Dome of the Rock on the Mount, and his son had Al-Aqsa mosque built there as well. These edifices were not constructed to mark a Moslem holy site but to advertise Moslem hegemony over Jerusalem with its Jewish and Christian holy sites.

Although some Moslems later tried to connect the “furthest mosque” of the Quran’s Sura 17:1 with Jerusalem, there is no evidence of any kind to suggest that Moslems of Mohammed’s day recognized the Mount as anything other than a Jewish holy site. Islamic scholarship through the 1960s located the furthest mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa) in al-Gi-ranah on the Arabian Peninsula. Mohammed himself had no regard for Jerusalem, except for a brief time while he courted Arabia’s Jews, anticipating that they would flock to his teaching. When they rejected his proffered apostasy in 624, Mohammed strictly forbade all Moslems from facing Jerusalem when they prayed—a ban enforced on Al-Aqsa worshippers, as well, who face Mecca.

A tourist guide from 1930 published by the Muslim authority in Jerusalem at the time, repeatedly refers to the Jewish temples and acknowledges the Muslim presence as dating from 637 AD.
Jim Davila notes yet one more example found in the Cairo Geniza.
On the same theme, Ted Belman asks Whose Jerusalem is it anyways?

in contrast, Arafat's minion Mufti Ikrima Al-Sabri, whose religious authority legitimized the Temple Mount excavations, has praised child suicide bombers, approved expedited executions of Palestinian "criminals," and called for the destruction of America and Britain, two weeks before 9-11. (video via Palestinian Media Watch)

In an interview with Die Welt he said:

Sabri: There is not [even] the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish History. Our right, on the other hand, is very clear. This place belongs to us for 1500 years. Even when it was conquered by the Crusaders, it remained Al-Aqsa, and we got it back soon afterwards. The Jews do not even know exactly where their temple stood. Therefore, we do not accept that they have any rights, underneath the surface or above it.

Die Welt: It is agreed among archeologists that the Wailing-Wall is part of the foundation of Herod's temple. The Bible and other antique sources report about this place in detail. Why can't you respect the Jewish connection to this place?

Sabri: It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world. But they can't do it to us. There is not a single stone in the Wailing-Wall relating to Jewish History. The Jews cannot legitimately claim this wall, neither religiously nor historically. The Committee of the League of Nations recommended in 1930, to allow the Jews to pray there, in order to keep them quiet. But by no means did it acknowledge that the wall belongs to them.

Die Welt: In your July 2000 Fatwa you declared: "We insist on the Right of Return for all the 1948 refugees and prohibit them from getting compensations for [the loss] of the Holy Land, for it has no price. What are the borders of this Holy Land that you refer to?

Sabri: From an Islamic point of view, it stretches from the Mediterranean to the Jordan [River]. It is Palestine in its entirety.

Die Welt: And there is no place for the Israelis?

Sabri: For the Jews who lived here before, there will be a place, of course. But all those Jews who came here from all over the world, must return to the places from where they came. The Jews from Germany should return to Germany. (laughs) After all, you like them so much, don't you?

Speaking of Germany, the Islamist study of Nazi propaganda techniques has been often noted, and is very well described here:

The most striking analogy between the current Arab onslaught and its fascist precedents is the use of propaganda. Like Goebbels, its practitioners have learned the efficacy of 1) the Big Lie (the more outrageous the better), brazenly repeated so that people will ultimately accept it as at least part of the truth; 2) hijacking the language and symbols of the enemy so that you tar them with your vices; 3) trivializing and muddling the very meaning of words, so that your transgressions can be blurred and your opponent's responses magnified. Two key tactics in advancing this agenda are moral equivalence — for instance, equating the prevention of terror with terror itself, so that interdiction is seen as reprisal — and a distorted-numbers game, in which the only deaths that count in a violent conflict are one side's "martyrdoms" — since the other side's deaths are deserved.

The most flagrant example of the Big Lie is the Arab assertion that there was never a Jewish presence in Palestine until modern times. The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented in the records of the peoples who prevailed against them, and not least in the annals of Muslim chroniclers. . . .

. . . Arab propagandists ask: "In the current political climate, what is the worst thing of which we can accuse the Jews?" The answer: Racism, Apartheid. Genocide. Colonialism. Is it true? It doesn't matter. Let the Jews worry about whether it's true. The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them. It is not surprising that some pro-Taliban Pakistanis are now complaining because the U.S. failed to put Israel on its target list of terrorism. The goal is to vitiate the meanings of words so that, in the subsequent confusion, the onus is taken off the perpetrators and equivalence placed on the victims.

Robert Spencer has many more examples of disinformation from the Arab world, and Daniel Goldhagen notes that

In the previous eras of antisemitism, the demonology about Jews flowed first from the Christian, and then the European, center to the periphery. Today, there are many antisemitic centers and multidirectional flows from Europe, to the Middle East and elsewhere, and back. Essentially, Europe had exported its classical racist and Nazi antisemitism to Arab countries, which they applied to Israel and Jews in general, suffusing it with the real and imagined features of the intensive local conflict. Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to Europe and, using the United Nations and other international institutions, to other countries around the world. In Germany, France, Great Britian and elsewhere, today's intensive antisemitic expression and agitation uses old tropes once applied to local Jews — charges of sowing disorder, wanting to subjugate others — with new content overwhelmingly directed at Jews outside their countries and their continent.

. . . Perhaps most distinctive, though, is the unmooring of antisemitism from its original sources. It is detached from Christianity, even if there are still powerful Christian sources of antisemitism. It is detached from its 19th-century European sources of nation building . . . Globalized antisemitism has become part of the substructure of prejudice of the world. It is free-floating, located in many countries, subcultures and nodes, available in many variations, and to anyone who dislikes international influences, globalization or the United States. It is relentlessly international in its focus on Israel at the center of the most conflict-ridden region today, and on the United States as the world's omnipresent power. It is self-reinforcing, with its fantastical constructions of Jews and Zionism — which are divorced from the fair criticisms that can be made of Israel's policies — and by being located totally outside people's countries and experience. And it is only a few clicks of a mouse away.

This account of various international NGO gatherings provides numerous vivid examples of such propaganda in action, which activists then transport all over the globe, as demonstrated by this anecdote about International Solidarity Movement useful idiots.

Wretchard elaborates on the insidious reach of the Big Lie:

[Wahhabi grave desecrations] are an obvious illustration of Orwell's dictum that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Like the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan, their effect is remove any recollection of a creed or way of life that may have preceded Wahabism.

The academic world is not averse to bending the truth to advance a political agenda, as Claire Smith or Juan Cole could tell you. The insidious banality of "competing narratives" has come to Biblical archeology:

From the late 1920s through the mid-1980s, [archeologists] uncovered a remarkable number of finds that confirmed the biblical narrative. It is this overwhelming evidence that has made the new claims seem almost bizarre. The crucial fact is that there have been no new discoveries in the field of archaeology that cast doubt on the authenticity of the kingdom of Solomon. Rather, the new challenge has taken the form of a kind of post-modern "paradigm shift," an effort to deconstruct the traditional view by focusing on ambiguities in the data, and by showing that it can be reread through a different lens — but without proving why this way should really be scientifically preferred.

Mainstream archaeologists, for now, are not buying it. Some, such as Hebrew University's Amnon Ben-Tor and Amihai Mazar, and the University of Arizona's William Dever, have challenged the new theory point by point, convincing the majority of their colleagues that the conventional dating is in fact correct. . . . Yet one would never know this from the media coverage of the controversy, where the new archaeology has dominated the field completely. While revisionist scholars have made their case through articles, interviews and best-selling books, their opponents have restricted themselves almost exclusively to the scholarly realm — showing a surprising apathy, and even impatience, for the questions of greatest interest to the layman. . . .

The result of this attitude has been to move the field as far as possible from thinking about the Bible at all. Biblical-era excavations in and around Israel have more or less ground to a halt. In Jerusalem, where momentous First-Temple-era finds were uncovered in the two decades following Israel's conquest of the Old City in 1967, not one major biblical-era excavation has been undertaken since the late 1980s.

Several of the contributions in this section reflect on how the Jewish history of the Mount is often handled by the press, reflecting either ignorance or eagerness to appear "even-handed," resulting in a Holocaust revisionism by default, similar to CSPAN's attempt to have David Irving debate Deborah Lipstadt.

Jim Davila, who has been tracking "Temple denial" in the media for some time, points out two Anglosphere examples from earlier this year, another one from Turkey, and from 2003, one from Abu Mazen, and a pretty egregious example from Time.

David Nishimura points out an attempt at spin by our old friend the BBC.

Lynn B has more examples.

Jim also comments on the NYTimes article about the King David excavation. If you weren't sure why this blogburst is necessary, this curious remark is a good example of the kind of misinformation out there:

The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem - whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasir Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.

(If the Times link goes away, here is another version of the same article.)

Soccer Dad points out that this denial

makes Palestinian nationalism and Zionism mutually exclusive ideologies. One, Zionism, is based on the idea that after 2000 years of exile Jews are returning to their land. The other says that Jews have no ties to the land and therefore the Palestinians can determine what degree of a Jewish presence is legitimate.

And even if the Palestinian Authority ever abrogated its charter, this is such a deeply held belief among Palestinians that a simple vote would not reverse its force.

Some slipshod labelling in Chicago: The earliest Palestinian ever? (I wonder who the curator is . . . )