Post-Media Mortum

Over in Ireland, we have a press report that there are:-


Protests over Israeli move on religious site

Headline editor flubbed this one.


Who was protesting?

Which religion?

What site?

Too much missing information.

Let's proceed and read what MARK WEISS in Jerusalem has to write:

ISRAELI TROOPS clashed in Hebron yesterday with a crowd of angry Palestinians protesting against the Israeli government’s decision to add the West Bank city’s Tomb of the Patriarchs to a list of Israeli heritage sites.

Well, that is a clearer statement. But it still needs more 'why?' input.

Demonstrators accused Israel of planning to restrict Muslim access to the shrine, also known as the al-Ibrahimi mosque. The Mufti of Palestine, sheikh Muhamed Hussein, claimed Israel “devoted all of its efforts to steal Islamic holy sites to change their Arab and Islamic character to prove the country is Jewish.”

The 'why?' element is more clear but is there something else?

Yes:-

The Tomb of the Patriarchs, the biblical burial site of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is holy to both Jews and Muslims and has been a flashpoint for religious tension in the past. Some 500 Jewish settlers live in an Israeli-controlled enclave close to the tomb, surrounded by 170,000 Palestinians under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.

Okay, what is your average Irish reader to understand?

Well, he could assume that Jews are stealing another religion's holy site, one that is, at the least, only half their's.

And that accusation. Is their an Israeli response? Cannot the reporter add a sentence pointing out some facts?

Could he not add that actually, "stealing holy sites" is what Muslims did with the Temple Mount's historical artifacts, dumping them, destroying them? That up until 1967, Jews could not ascend the stairs of the Tomb of the Patriarchs beyond the 7th step? That the only reason there are any Muslim sacred sites in this country is because they were first Jewish sites and, to recall some other words and some other time:

we waz robbed.

But the Irish reading this paper won't know that.

That and much more.