Hurrah: CNN names some of the ghosts in Gezi Park

June 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment
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The coverage of events in Turkey roll on and on and the mainstream press continues to treat this as a simple clash between the moderate Islamic stance (whatever that means) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a hip, young, urban secular vision of at Turkey looking toward Europe and the future.

If only things were that simply.

The other day I dug into a very religion-free report in The Los Angeles Times (click here for a refresher).

The Times of the West followed that with a very similar piece that — once again — used a wide variety of labels, often attached to the undefined word “Islamist,” without offering much information about the symbolism of the very battlefield on which this drama is unfolding. Here is one chunk of that second story that captures the flavor:

Erdogan is still very much in control, and few would venture that the crisis will bring him down, but the protests have hurt him politically and exposed misgivings within his party. Tear gas and water cannons have damaged Turkey’s international image, upsetting the stock market and giving investors pause at a time when the once hyper-speed economy has slowed to about 3% annual growth.

The unrest also suggests that his blend of Islam and democracy is too restrictive for secularists, artists, activists and even working-class mothers who have turned out in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square. Like Egypt’s Tahrir Square two years ago, it has been transformed into an iconic, scorched patch of rebellion.

“Erdogan’s vulnerability now is the secular middle classes that have risen against AKP governance. And that genie will not go back into the bottle,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is a new dynamic in Turkish politics and this will challenge him on his urban renewal and foreign policy programs. So far, he has had an easy ride.”

All the usual camps are mentioned. The big themes are all rooted in the present, with constant attempts to hook events to the other uprisings in the Arab Spring. But wait, the Arab Spring revolts have all pushed against corruption and in favor of a rising sense of Islamic identity. Is that what is happening here? Does the history of Turkey fit that template?

Wait, Turkey has a unique history?

So what is missing from this story?

[Read more...]

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Got news? Is a global ‘war on Christianity’ newsworthy?

June 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Would it be newsworthy if a U.S. Senator claimed in a public address that American taxpayer dollars are being used in a war against Christian believers in — to pick one key region — the Holy Land?

Apparently not, since Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made that claim yesterday at the Faith and Freedom Conference and the media has all but ignored it. As James Hohmann of Politico reports:

“There is a war on Christianity, not just from liberal elites here at home, but worldwide,” he said. “And your government, or more correctly, you, the taxpayer, are funding it.”

Although it was noticed by a handful of the D.C.-based, politically oriented sites, few mainstream outlets picked up on the story (a mention by CBS News and the AP are the only ones I could find).

Why the silence?

Imagine if a senator — a potential candidate for president, in fact — had claimed we were funding a war on Islam, or Hinduism, or Judaism. Would that not be a front-page story? Why then the difference when it comes to Christianity?

Part of the reason, I suspect, is because few journalists understood what Sen. Paul is even talking about. The socially conservative Christians at the conference knew what he meant, but that is because they read alternative media sources. Religious media outlets mention persecution of Christians around the globe nearly every week, though such stories rarely find their way into mainstream news stories. Even when, earlier this month, the Vatican claimed that 100,000 Christians are killed annually because of their faith, no major media seemed interested enough to do a follow-up on the assertion.

Perhaps some journalists thought that by reporting on Sen. Paul’s statement they would be required to explain the context. But they needn’t have worried about that. Here, for example, is the entire mention by the Associated Press in their 900+ word article titled, “GOP leader says ‘a war on Christianity’ is funded by taxpayers”:

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WPost wants to know: So who built the Second Temple?

May 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Kudos to the Washington Post for moving quickly to correct an error in Wednesday’s article on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

In a story entitled “An audacious plan at the Western Wall”, the WaPo reports on plans under consideration by the Israeli government to double the space available for worshipers at the Western Wall to accommodate the fissiparous Jewish community.

The story is well written, well researched, and offers views and statements from all parties concerned. There were, however, two things that caught my eye when I first read the story. When the article moved from  current events to background it stated King Solomon built the Second Temple. A bell went off in my head when I read that.

According to 1 Kings chapters 6-7 in the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures, Solomon built the first temple on Mount Zion. The Bible goes on to record its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar in 2 Kings 25. Archaeological and rabbinic opinions differ as to the period of the temple’s construction and destruction offering dates of 10th century BC to 587 BC v. 832 to 422 BC. The Old Testament goes on to state in Ezra chapter 5 the Temple was rebuilt and completed during the six-year of the reign of King Darius the Great — approximately 517 BC.  Flavius Josephus records that Herod the Great completely rebuilt the Temple In the first century — and it became popular known as Herod’s Temple. In 70 AD the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the temple. The lower levels of the Western Wall are all that remain of Herod’s Temple.

I jotted down this error onto a notepad thinking I would return to it later in the day for a GetReligion piece. When I returned that afternoon to the web version of the article I found a correction had been posted at the top of the story. It read:

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that King Solomon built the Second Temple. Solomon built the First Temple. The story has been updated.

The body had been corrected to say that Herod built the second temple. Not quite – – still a mistake but not as big a brick as the first printing. I put the story to one side to move to pressing business and when I returned to the article on Thursday I thought it’d been corrected once more. The new correction states (and is at the top of the article as the date of this post):

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the Jewish temple built by King Solomon. Solomon built the First Temple, not the Second. The article also incorrectly referred to Herod as the builder of the Second Temple. Although the temple is sometimes called Herod’s Temple in honor of his expansion of it, the original construction occurred centuries earlier.

The body of the story was corrected a second time too. I give them credit for fixing this error so swiftly, but it did rob me of a GetReligion story.

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Yes, we know two Orthodox bishops are missing in Syria

April 25, 2013 By
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Editor’s note: This happens now and then, every two or three years. Two GetReligion writers jumped on the same news subject and then proceeded to write and post at precisely the same time. What are the odds? In this case, we will simply let the two posts stand as written.

Yes, your GetReligionistas — the Orthodox guy in particular — have received more than a few emails seeking our take on the media coverage of the kidnapping of two Orthodox bishops in Syria.

I have seen quite a bit of coverage. You can read European sources. You can follow the story at in Arab media, including Aljazeera.com. You can read about the kidnappings in Catholic Media. You can read about these events at Fox News and other conservative media.

At this point, you cannot read about the kidnappings in reports by the mainstream American press.

Why is that? I don’t know, although it does appear that many mainstream editors seem to think that the persecution of Christians in troubled parts of the world is “conservative news.”

There have been reports that Orthodox Bishop Paul Yazigi — the brother of Antiochian Orthodox Patriarch John X Yazigi of Damascus — and Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim of the Syriac Orthodox Church were kidnapped by terrorists in the village of Kfar Dael while they were on a relief humanitarian mission linked to relief efforts. Media reports indicate they were taken while on the road between Aleppo and the Bab al Hawa crossing with Turkey. The deacon driving their car was shot dead.

While there have been reports that the men were freed, this new report from Aljazeera states otherwise:

Two kidnapped Syrian bishops are still being held, sources have said, denying earlier reports that they had been released, and prompting calls by the international Christian community for their freedom.

Sources told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the two leading Christian figures remained captured a day after Pope Francis called for their release.

Early on Tuesday, reports quoting Greek Orthodox Bishop Tony Yazigi said that Bishop Boulos Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church and Bishop John Ibrahim of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, had been kidnapped while carrying out humanitarian work in the northern province of Aleppo. Later on the same day, reports said they had been released, quoting a Christian association.

A priest at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East in Damascus, who declined to be named, told Al Jazeera that the bishops have not been released.

“We haven’t heard anything from them. We do not know who kidnapped them,” the preist said.

And later in the story, readers are told:

“A rebel commander in Idlib told me he was sure they were not released,” Al Jazeera’s Basma Al Atassi, reporting from the Turkish border city of Antakya, said. “He said he believed they were kidnapped by an Aleppo-based battalion.”

As a member of an Antiochian Orthodox parish — Holy Cross Orthodox Church, just south of Baltimore — we prayed for the kidnapped bishops last night during the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts (we are still in Great Lent, on the ancient Julian Calendar). Pascha (Easter) is May 5th. The leaders of these two ancient churches in the East have released a joint statement about the kidnappings, which remains posted online. Here is a key part of that document:

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Kidnapped Syrian bishops still missing, despite reports

April 25, 2013 By

Horrible news out of Syria, where two Orthodox bishops were kidnapped.  There hasn’t been enough coverage of this kidnapping and to say the coverage that’s out there is weak is an understatement. Take this story from Reuters (but don’t believe it, as I’ll explain later):

Two kidnapped Syrian bishops freed: church official

Kidnappers freed two Syrian bishops on Tuesday who had been abducted in the northern city of Aleppo, a church official said, but the identities of their kidnappers remained uncertain.

“The two are on their way to the patriarchy in Aleppo,” Bishop Tony Yazigi told Reuters in the capital Damascus.

Yazigi, a relative of one of the kidnapped bishops, did not say who was behind the kidnapping of Greek Orthodox archbishop Paul Yazigi and Syriac Orthodox archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim.

The only problems being that there is no Bishop Tony Yazigi and there was no release of the bishops.

But other than that, great story! The same source was used by the BBC and The Guardian, though those outlets later explained that there were “conflicting” reports. Reuters has retained the story and the New York Times still has its Reuters story on its web site. A subsequent story did mention contradictory reports.

The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America responds:

Release Reports False

There have appeared many reports in both the Eastern and Western press that the two hierarchs who were abducted yesterdayby terrorists in Syria, Metropolitan Boulos Yazge, Antiochian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, and Archbishop Youhanna Ibrahim, Syriac Archbishop of Aleppo, have been released. His Eminence Metropolitan Philip spoke by phone this morning to His Beatitude John X, Patriarch of Antioch and all the East (pictured), who said that these reports are false, and that the release of these two hierarchs has NOT taken place.

We ask you to continue to pray for their safety, and eventual release.

A search of the news shows that the error is being repeated all over the place. But the Christian Science Monitor has a story:

Kidnapped Syrian bishops still missing, despite reports otherwise 

The churches of two prominent Syrian Orthodox bishops reportedly kidnapped in northern Syria were unable to verify a claim that the pair had been released by their armed rebel captors.

A review of that story indicates that pretty much every news outlet could use better sources in Syria! If Syrian sources are lacking, phone calls to related orthodox churches are in order. What a difficult story to report when dealing with source problems. The CSM handles it well, though, simply explaining what those conflicting reports are and where the information came from and is coming from.

But it really is important to get this story right. As one of the readers who notified us of the problems said:

This is a serious matter, as these false reports reduce the amount of international exposure of the event and the resulting political pressure– something necessary for the eventual safe return of the bishops.

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Let us attend: Waiting for a religion shoe to drop in Boston

April 16, 2013 By
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As you would expect, people were a bit tense last night on my commuter train from Union Station in Washington, D.C., back to Baltimore. If anyone was talking, they were talking about the Boston Marathon explosions and the other unexploded bombs found in that tense area.

Of course, police were everywhere near the U.S. Capitol. That was to be expected. And there was another element of the scene that was to be expected. I didn’t hear anyone express the slightest doubt that they believed this would be shown to have been the work of a terrorist or terrorist with some kind of link to radical Islam.

That’s the world that we live in, of course. That’s the world journalists have to work in, as well. The early reports of a Saudi national being question and detained, but not arrested, did not help matters.

In other words, everyone is talking and now we are waiting for the religion shoe to drop, waiting to see the quality of (a) the information that government officials choose to release and (b) the additional information that journalists — left, right and center — attempt to dig up.

Everyone is being extra cautious — as they should — when it comes to the facts that they think they know at this point.

One of the main stories at The Boston Globe has the basics, with the “person of interest” angle played down. Note the plural language in the lede:

A changed Boston started the search for normalcy today as law enforcement continued its search for those responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings that has so far claimed 3 lives, left more than 140 wounded and transformed downtown Boston into a closed-off crime scene.

Commuters faced increased security on the MBTA today in one of the signs of increased security in response to the detonation of two bombs, within 12 seconds of each other, at the finish line of the Marathon on Boylston Street Monday afternoon. At South Station this morning, Amtrak passengers were met by police with a bomb-sniffing dog who strolled alongside passengers. Baggage was swabbed by police and put through explosives-detecting scanner before passengers were allowed to board.

Overnight, a wave of law enforcement officials swarmed a home in Revere, looking at what the Revere Fire department described as a “person of interest,’’ but no arrests were reported this morning. The FBI, which has taken the lead in what a top official called a “potential terrorism investigation,’’ is expected to update the public at 9:30 a.m. today.

And later in the story, this addition glimpse of the behind-the-scenes activity:

No arrests have been reported this morning. According to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation, authorities are trying to determine if more than one person was involved in the attacks. …

On Monday, a Saudi national was questioned by investigators at a Boston hospital and late Monday night descended on a high-rise apartment building in Revere and conducted a search related to the investigation. FBI and Homeland Security agents were seen entering the Water’s Edge apartment complex at 364 Ocean Ave.

So what are journalists looking for? At what point does religious information or, sadly, speculation enter the news picture?

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Jewish Identity and the Western Wall

April 14, 2013 By

You couldn’t, he thought, find three Jews in the world who would agree on what it meant to be Jewish, yet there were apparently fifty million of these people who knew exactly what it meant to be German, though many of those on deck have never set foot in Germany.

Alan Furst, Dark Star, (1991), p. 380.

Who is a Jew? What is a Jew? Who decides who is a Jew? These questions lie beneath the surface of a Washington Post story that reports on the controversy of women worshiping at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The article entitled “Women challenge Orthodox practice at Israel’s Western Wall” links the political dynamics of the pressure being brought by American Jews upon the Israeli government to accommodate non-Orthodox Jewish worship at what the Post calls “Judaism’s holiest shrine” with an Israeli local news item. Yet the story could have fleshed out the religion ghosts — telling a non-Jewish, non-Israeli audience why this is the something more than a turf battle over worship space.

Because this article is written from an American secular Jewish perspective  — the Post states its support of the protesters in its lede — only half the story is told. The presuppositions of the author — call them biases or perspectives or relative truths — prevents a reader from understanding the political and religious calculus here. It begins:

JERUSALEM — A long-running battle over worship at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest shrine, was rejoined Thursday as Israeli police arrested five Jewish women who wore prayer shawls at a morning service, contrary to Orthodox practice enforced at the site. The arrests came two days after disclosure of a potentially groundbreaking plan that could allow for non-Orthodox services to be held in the area on an equal footing with those conducted according to Orthodox tradition.

Note the verb being used in second clause of the lede sentence: “enforced”. The Post is characterizing the dispute as one of power — he who has power can enforce his will. What trajectory would the story have taken it different verb were used stating that Orthodox practice is not merely enforced but required by law? The story then moves to quotes from the women activists and an “ultra-Orthodox heckler”, before moving to the political, summarizing the history of the dispute, taking it up to recent discussions in the cabinet:

[Prime Minister] Netanyahu asked Natan Sharansky, chairman of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, to come up with a plan for worship at the Western Wall that would accommodate the non-Orthodox branches of Judaism that are dominant overseas. The move signaled an increasing awareness in the Israeli government that the confrontations over ritual at the Western Wall are driving a wedge between Israel and Jewish communities abroad.<

Sharansky’s solution presented to American Jewish leaders was to build a platform “south of the main prayer plaza; men and women could pray together there, and women could lead services.” [Read more...]

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Christians wary on Easter (sort of) in Syria

April 1, 2013 By
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Every religion writer has experienced those awkward moments each year when an editor walks over to your desk and says, “Hey, it’s almost Easter (or Passover, of Christmas, or Ramadan, or …) and we have to have some Easter stories. What do you have going on that we can call an Easter story?”

The key is timing. The newspaper wants something — with glorious art! — that can run on the morning of said holy day or even before. Of course, how do you cover the real Easter/Christmas/Passover/Ramadan/etc. stories, and get glorious art, when they haven’t happened yet? Technicalities.

So you start trying to find ways to link big stuff in the news, subjects your editor will care about, with the holiday in question.

That’s what I sensed, the other day, when I read that New York Times story that ran under the headline: “A Wary Easter Weekend for Christians in Syria.”

When I read that, I thought to myself: “Wait a minute! Don’t the Times editors realize that, for most Christians in Syria, this isn’t Easter?”

I mean, on Sunday, a Protestant loved one of mine who lives in the Middle East wished online friends and family a blessed Easter, then noted that they would celebrate the most important holy day in the Christian calendar in early May, with most Eastern Christians in their region. He said that, even though he is an evangelical Protestant and Protestants follow the modern Gregorian calendar that, this year, put Easter on March 31. The Eastern Churches, following the older Julian calendar, will celebrate Easter/Pascha on May 5.

So what happened? It was like there was an editor in the Times newsroom saying, “Oh, it’s almost Easter. And Syria is really in the news. What will Easter be like in Syria this year?”

Great idea for a story, by the way. As a religious liberty and human rights guy, I’m not knocking the idea for this news feature.

Thus, the story opened:

DAMASCUS, Syria – Torches flickered outside the church. Little girls wore their sparkly Easter best. Children bearing lanterns filed out through the heavy gilt doors, as worshipers carried an icon of Jesus and a cross covered with carnations.

But the Good Friday procession at St. Kyrillos Church here in Syria’s capital did not follow the route it had taken for generations. No drums or trumpets announced its presence. The marchers made a tight circle inside the iron-gated courtyard, then headed back into the church, a hedge against the mortar shells like the one that hit a hospital across the street recently. At pauses in their singing, gunfire rattled, not more than a few blocks away.

Easter weekend is usually the year’s most festive for Syria’s Christians, but this year, it is infused with grave uncertainty. Christians here say they primarily fear the general chaos enveloping the country as the war enters its third year. But like members of Syria’s other religious minorities, many Christians also fear what they see as the rise of extremists among the mainly Sunni Muslim rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

This is all perfectly valid material. However, it still left me thinking, “What kind of church is this St. Kyrillos (insert the rest of the name here) Church?” You see, that’s a pretty important piece of the story to leave out, especially in the historic lands of Eastern Christianity.

The story goes on. Then, finally, toward the end of the story readers are told:

[Read more...]

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