Christian Science Monitor Contributors Stack the Ethnic Deck

CAMERA
Media Analysis
13 August '10

To learn what "bias" means, you could flip through the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary and discover that it is "an inclination, leaning, tendency, bent; a preponderating disposition or propensity; predisposition towards; predilection; prejudice."

Or, if you are the type who learns better from examples, you could turn to page 15 of the Aug. 9, 2010 Christian Science Monitor.

There you’d find, in the article "Why land disputes in Jerusalem turn epic" by contributors Omar Kasrawi and Sommer Saadi, a striking illustration of "inclination," "leaning," or "bent" about the source of ethnic/religious disputes in Israel.

The authors describe as "common" the tendency among both Jews and Palestinians "to deny the spirituality or the sanctity of the history of the other," as George Mason University's Marc Gopin put it in the article. But inexplicably and unfairly, their follow up paragraphs providing several purported examples of such a tendency finger the Jewish side alone as a perpetrator. This strikingly biased handling of the topic violates the Monitor's promise to readers to be "unrelenting but fair."

The relevant section reads:

In Israel especially, place is connected to identity, making it a priority to protect the places that offer a sense of belonging. Any effort to remove evidence of historical ties is seen as an attack on identity. Just last week, Israeli authorities destroyed at least 15 tombstones in the Mamilla cemetery which it said were illegally built.

"There is a tendency in both communities to deny the spirituality or the sanctity or the history of the other on a certain spot," says Marc Gopin, a rabbi and the director of George Mason University's Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution.

Such tactics are common. This past March, a right-wing Israeli group sponsored ads on 200 buses that displayed fictitious posters of the Temple Mount, in which a Third Temple replaced the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In 2000 Israeli leader Ariel Sharon set off the second intifada by visiting the Temple Mount and asserting permanent Israeli sovereignty over the compound. The violence lasted four years and claimed the lives of more than 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.

But even lesser-known holy sites become part of the conflict if a community feels its presence being threatened.

Recently, the Israeli government named as heritage sites Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which both Judaism and Islam claim as Abraham's birthplace. By claiming sites in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, Israel further blurred the lines of the ownership of land – and history.

(Read full analysis)

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