JERUSALEM–When journalists go out on the streets to report, it is usually to record a newsworthy story. But what about when reporters search for violence? Look at the recent events in Jerusalem surrounding Al-Aqsa mosque. Rumors that extremist religious Jews were planning to enter Al-Aqsa and pray there sparked widespread calls for Muslims to take action to protect it. That, and other factors, led to a heightened state of security.

There are deep historic grudges over the ground near Al-Aqsa, called Temple Mount, which includes the dome of the rock, where some say the footprint of Adam and the dawn of human history can be found. It is far too complicated to understand in the abstract, let alone explain in a few sentences. Suffice to say that when tensions flare over this part of Jerusalem, it’s truly no laughing matter.

Even so, on the ground this past Friday in Jerusalem, the number of journslists was shocking. Camera crews, photographers, reporters–there was a little bit of everyone. At some points it seemed as though there were more journalists than police.

The question came to mind, while I was in the midst of this gaggle of reporters as one of them–why were we there? A colleague of mine recently said, “People in Israel are news junkies.” So maybe it was a response to demand. Or maybe the competition factor. Everyone else was out and nobody wanted to be left behind, just in case.

It’s the latter thought that started to disturb me as the hours went by. Tensions had been high in recent days (or maybe higher than usual, since Jerusalem is always a bit edgy). As I walked through the streets inside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem–the route to Al-Aqsa mosque and the source of the tension–I looked around every corner for drama worth reporting, worth taking a photo of. There were barricades to the side streets leading to Al-Aqsa, and some barricades in the middle of main walkways (cars don’t seem to drive through the old city). There were scores of police, and a few agitated Arabs. One old Arab woman yelled after going through a barricade that all the Arabs and Jews needed to get out of the city. To say the old lady was the height of the drama I witnessed would be putting it mildly.

As I stood in a side street waiting for a good shot of something, two British women tourists passed, and asked if I spoke English. They wanted directions, but we ended up talking about the events of the day. One of them said they’d heard there were people (which kind, I don’t know) holed up in Al-Aqsa in protest. I told her I’d heard there would be a large protest and prayer outside the walls of the old city later for all those who were denied entry to morning prayers at the mosque.

“There are about 1,000 rumors in this place!” she exclaimed to me, and we all laughed at the irony of it all. In that moment, reporters chasing such news didn’t seem so different from chasing rumors.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here to report the truth!” the woman said after I gave them my Epoch Times card and explained why I was there. Then she hesitated, and added a last thought. “At least one version of the truth, anyway.”

And as it turned out, she was right. The protest outside of the walls did happen about 2 hours later. It was peaceful, with scores of heavily armed Israeli police on one side, and scores of quiet Muslim worshipers on the other. They sat and listed to a slew of rhetoric in a speech made in Arabic that was so mundane my bilingual colleague found it too boring to translate in full. Then they prayed. Then they left. It was a day of good photo ops of interesting characters in a play.

On my way back to my newspaper bureau in Tel Aviv, I ran into another American at the bus stop, a young man from the Jerusalem Post. A brief, loud conversation on his cell phone revealed there was finally some drama happening. As he sprung up and started back in the direction of the old city, I ran after him, “Is something happening?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m just on my way back there,” he answered excitedly. “You can come if you want.” Suffering from fairly severe dehydration, I didn’t manage to keep up with him, but did see some of his footage later. Violence had erupted in some of the neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem (which is code for largely Arab neighborhoods); there was stone throwing, rubber bullets, some women threw planters and paint from rooftops, and about 12 Israeli soldiers were injured.

When I saw the video footage, I felt like I missed the story. Then I started to search the Internet for other coverage, and found a surprising imbalance in the mainstream media reports. During a day that was marked by large groups of people peacefully protesting not being allowed to go to Al-Aqsa, the media took the most violent slant by honing in on brief violence in a neighborhood in another part of the city. They had sent them out in search of blood, and didn’t stop until they found it.

It is a complicated part of the world, that’s true. And news is news, no matter which way you slice it. But after seeing the chain of events from the inner walls of the old city to the final product on the Jerusalem Post and other media’s websites, it’s questionable whether the news was the brief violence, or a day of mostly calm. In the end, the story I filed had a headline I thought was a more accurate depiction of the day’s events: “Jerusalem Protests Largely Peaceful.”

As media, the least we owe the public is the most complete story possible. Not just the most dramatic version of events.

Click here to read the original blog posting for the Foreign Policy Association

JERUSALEM–The past few days in Jerusalem have been uneasy ones. In a city that teeters on the verge of violence on a fairly regular basis, the height of the week long Jewish  holiday season of Sukkot added an element of unrest. The holiday draws a large number of Jewish visitors from around the world and has been called the backdrop for violence and fears of violence in the last week.

On Sunday, there was brief rioting. On Monday, an Israeli security officer was stabbed and wounded. On Tuesday, stones were hurled at Israeli Defense Forces, police, and security personnel who were brought into the city to quell potential violence. The dynamite at the end of the fuse is what the Muslims call Haram as-Sharif and the Jews call Temple Mount. It’s a religious place of worship that has been under the control of the Muslims and the Jews alternatively for thousands of years. Today it is a Muslim mosque.

During the past few days in Jerusalem, I had the chance to experience–as an American and an outsider–the scene on the ground. On Tuesday afternoon, I sat outside of Damascus Gate to observe (this is one of the ways to enter the Old City and get to Temple Mount). Large numbers of security personnel, police, and Israeli Defence Force soliders had been called in to secure the city. On the surface, not much was happening, but there was an underlying tension crackling like a live exposed electrical wire.

A group of young Arab boys, riled up by the atmosphere of tension, hurled insults at an Israeli soldier guarding a blockade. The soldier was non-plussed, but an elderly Arab man with a wooden cane refused to let the bad behavior slide. He proceeded to scold the young boys and chase them with his cane until he succeeeded at striking a few blows with the end of it on one of their backs. It was hard to decide whether to be amused or not with such an archetype of social hierarchy playing out against the backdrop of potential rioting and violence. There men with the guns and the old man with the cane each tried to keep the peace in their own way.

Then there was a group of school children, again boys and about 8 years old, who seemed to be playing nearby on their way home from school. But they weren’t playing. Some of the boys were Arab, some were Jewish. There was taunting and bullying and soon the Arab boys picked up stones and threw them at the Jewish boys (who quickly ran off).

It made me wonder how children can learn violence at such a young age. While the potential for truly dangerous rioting boiled around them, they made a dangerous game of it. It looked as though they thought they were part of the ethnic and religious tensions, even though they were only children on their way home from school–school bags, textbooks and all.

On the way back from Ramallah in the West Bank later that day, my taxi driver refused to drive into the parking lot of the checkpoint, called the Kalandia Gate. He seemed afraid and I didn’t understand why. Hiding behind the wall encircling the checkpoint’s parking lot on the Ramallah side, I spotted two Arab men with professional cameras and several young teenage boys standing near them. I approached to ask if they were journalists, and they said yes.

One of the journalists warned me to cross the checkpoint “before it got worse”, so I did. All day people had been talking about the violence reaching a boiling point, and I wasn’t equipped or prepared to switch into reporter mode. 25 feet inside the wall of the checkpoint parking lot, something large and granite landed within arm’s-length of my head. It was a stone, and it was coming from behind me, from the spot I had just been standing. I’ll never know if the stone was meant for me and the person throwing it just had bad aim. The parking lot was littered with stones of all sizes, and an armored security vehicle barked rebukes at the boys.

Later that day, after getting back to the relative calm of Jerusalem away from the Old City, I found AP photographs on a news website of a young boy throwing stones at the Kalandia Gate toward the security vehicle. I recognized his t-shirt and realized the photographer who took the shot must have been one of the two who I had encountered earlier that day.

In that moment, it all seemed staged. Everything from the old man at Damascus Gate to the boys hurling stones toward me to the police and military personnel. But what seemed most staged was those two photographers I had come across–the two “journalists”. In my brief encounter with them, it seemed like they were there for one story and one story only–violence. The very presence of professional news photographers likely emboldened the young boys to act more extremely. But that’s not the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is the slant that the media coverage has taken overall. Jerusalem during Sukkot is a charming place full of festive cheer.

The plaza next to Jaffa Gate by the Old City that same evening, for example, was full of Jews singing and dancing and celebrating with calls of “Happy Holiday”! Even as helicopters hovered above, they still danced and sang. Even as police cars and ambulances sped by on the street far below, they still danced and sang. Throngs of people crowded the sidewalks and streets following a large parade held that afternoon for Sukkot. There were no explosions, but still the news the next day was of police reinforcements and tensions among city residents. The scene on the ground is always different, though. All I saw were police and soldiers standing around, and young boys who have been taught no better than to hurl stones.

PEN American Center will host what promises to be an engaging, eye-opening, and interesting event (regardless of one’s political ideology) about the U.S.’s so-called war on terror.

Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror” will include Matthew Alexander, Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Auster, Ishmael Beah, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Jenny Holzer, A.M. Homes, Jameel Jaffer, Susanna Moore, Jack Rice, Amrit Singh, and Art Spiegelman. Guests are writers, artists, lawyers, a former U.S. interrogator, and others.

Co-hosted by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), the event will look at acts of abuse and torture during the war on terror. Event participants will read from the recently-released secret documents that have brought these abuses to light—memos, declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees—and respond with thoughts about how the U.S. can move forward.

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.