by Grace Lim

Japanese authorities revealed on Friday that almost 300 copies of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl had been mutilated in public libraries in Tokyo and other nearby cities. The landmark book portrays the experience of a young girl during the Holocaust, and is read all over the world. This book and other related Holocaust books were found with pages ripped out, rendering them unreadable.

The motivation behind the vandalism is still a mystery, as authorities continue the search on who did it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based Jewish human rights group, issued a press release that reporters quoted in their stories.

“The geographic scope of these incidents strongly suggests an organized effort to denigrate the memory of the most famous of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis in the World War II Holocaust,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center’s associate dean.

“Only people imbued with bigotry and hatred would seek to destroy Anne’s historic words of courage, hope and love in the face of impending doom,” Cooper added.

BBC coverage of the event said that there has not been Jewish settlement in Japan, and the country has “no real history of anti-Semitism.” It also quotes an Israeli expert on Japanese history and culture who said that the book has been “exceptionally popular and successful in Japan.” This article emphasized the innocence of the Japanese at large, suggesting that this must be an isolated incident.

On the other hand, the New York Times report alluded to some Japanese magazine articles and books that deny the Holocaust ever happened, or that assert there is a Jewish conspiracy behind some historical events. The article refers to a 1979 book that incorrectly claimed the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima meant “kill the Emperor” in Yiddish. The Times’ coverage suggests that there is some anti-Semite background in Japan, and that the Japanese are capable and culpable of such acts of vandalism.

English-language Japanese media also used accusatory tones in covering the story. Japan Today points toward a “rightward shift” in Japanese politics that could be blamed for the incident. The article accuses nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of making provocative comments about Japan’s wartime past, statements that prompted allegations of revisionism from China and South Korea. The Japan Today story also mentions a 1995 magazine article by a Japanese doctor who said the Nazi gas chambers used to exterminate Jewish people did not exist. The publisher of the magazine that published the article discontinued publication and fired the editor.

The BBC thus seems sympathetic toward the Japanese, whereas American and Japanese news media are unwilling to overlook the country’s former imperialism and its damnable behavior during World War II.

Until the is solved, it might be too soon to cite anti-Semitism as the motivation behind the mutilation of the books. But it’s also understandable why Jewish activist groups are calling the act a “hate crime.” What motivation other than anti-Semitism explains the event?

Still, as journalists we’re told to get both sides of the story, even if both sides are hard to discern. The Times and Japan Today have the right idea: shining some light on the history of anti-Jewish sentiment in Japan may help to expose the truth.

by Rosalie Murphy

Last week, publisher Penguin India signed an out-of-court settlement and agreed to stop circulating The Hindus: An Alternative History, a scholarly study of ancient India by University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger. In six months, Penguin will remove and destroy any remaining copies of the book from store shelves

A copy of the settlement agreement leaked this week named the offended party as the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Committee, a right-wing group committed to defending the Hindu faith. It also revealed the law Doniger broke: Section 295A in the Indian Penal Code, written in 1860, which forbids “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.”

The Times of India – the newspaper with the largest circulation in the world, printed daily in India – published seven stories about this in the first 48 hours of the news’ breaking on Feb. 12. The Times described in detail the plaintiff’s ties to the Hindu Nationalist movement Hindutva and to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which stands to gain many parliamentary seats and possibly the Prime Minister’s seat in March’s national elections – all essential to understanding the story. By Feb. 16, the Times ran a story discussing the free speech issues this case raises. The Hindustan Times and The Hindu also published bold opinion pieces decrying the book’s destruction.

But outside India, media clearly prioritize what the Times’ interview with the plaintiff did: “Penguin Books India has agreed to recall and pulp all copies in India of The Hindus: An Alternative History by U.S. scholar Wendy Doniger, raising concerns over freedom of expression in the world’s largest democracy” [italics mine]. The Guardian, the BBC and the Chicago Tribune address similar questions. Yet these foreign papers largely ignore the political situation framing this case. Perhaps international readers aren’t interested in Indian politics, but ascendant nationalist feeling (especially in the form of the BJP) seems critical to understanding the Hindutva movement.

There are, of course, exceptions – The New York Times ran two comprehensive political pieces – but generally, international reports have contextualized this case using free speech laws, but skim over the elements of Indian politics that are critical to understanding Hindu nationalism. Calling the Shiksha Bachao Andolan simply “conservative Hindu activists,” as the Chicago Tribune did, may be true, but it ignores the length and breadth of the group’s attempts to limit free speech – The Hindus isn’t the first book to be forbidden. Also, if these stories call us to concern about freedom of speech in India, international readers should understand the mechanics by which speech might be limited: via the BJP’s Hindu nationalism, for example, or the growing influence of conservative groups like the SBA, not simply the law.

If the international media want to worry us, they should give us concrete political reasons to worry. Vague statements about “conservatism” aren’t enough.

The pressure of the atmosphere around you, the average intensity of the sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, the force of gravity, genetics, nutrition, whether Mommy loved you—there’s a limitless number of variables in the equation that produces an individual. That constellation of particulars determines the way your body is constructed, how it looks and whether your personality attracts or repels.

Religious movements are like that too.

Which means it’s daft to imagine that religious belief has nothing to do with context. It has everything to do with context.

A piece about Iraqi prison breaks in Thursday’s New York Times does a good job of illuminating this fact. The American invasion stoked ethnic, sectarian and anti-imperialist grudges that now fuel conflict across the old Mesopotamian arc. Perpetrators of violence that thwarted U.S. interests were killed or captured; the hothouse environment of prisons like Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib nurtured religious radicalism that has now been loosed, spore-like, as a consequence of security breeches enabled by the instability and corruption of the American-backed regime. On-the-ground reporting brings these abstractions to life:

Abu Aisha was a car mechanic before 2003 but found new purpose in fighting the Americans.

Shaker Waheeb, perhaps the most dangerous Al Qaeda figure to emerge [in Syria] recently, was one of those captured. Mr. Waheeb was studying computer science at a university in Anbar when the American invasion of Iraq led him to quickly change paths and fight the Americans.

Perhaps more importantly, the article never loses sight of the thread of religiosity that runs through the tangle of relationships among Al Qaeda, Sunni resistance movements in Syria and the Shiite governments in Baghdad and Damascus. The politically fraught and deeply theological partnership between the U.S. and Israel goes unmentioned but looms in the background of the story nonetheless, as does the regional rivalry between Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and the Shiite government of Iran.

From one angle, the Times story is an unfortunate reiteration of the conflict narrative that typifies most reporting on Islam outside U.S. (and that accounts for the relative dearth of non-conflict-related reporting on the lives of American Muslims). But, given the grim reality of the violence spreading across a region that everywhere bears some mark of our military or industrial power, it remains important for Americans to understand how the globalization of their interests shapes religion and politics in far-flung places. To that end, anyone who perseveres to the lasts grafs of the Times piece will understand what makes this bit of reportage distinct from FoxNews fear mongering:

Ahmed al-Dulaymi, 31, who fled from Abu Ghraib, is working as a farmer in Diyala Province

“Many of my friends were good people, but because of the government’s actions, my friends have become dangerous people and leaders in Al Qaeda,” he said. “Injustice is what gives birth to Al Qaeda.”

The New York Times today reported on fresh sectarian violence in Baghdad, jihadists coming home to stoke unrest in Cairo and the take-him-home-to-mother charms of pledges to a newly minted Muslim fraternity with chapters on college campuses in Dallas and San Diego.

That roundup nicely captures both the virtues and deficits of reporting around Islam in the nation’s paper of record: We get close to the action and hear the voices of everyday people in Iraq and Egypt, but tight news budgets at the Times (and finicky appetites among news consumers) mean that life apart from warring and victimhood is left out of the ongoing journalistic narrative about Muslims in broad swaths of the non-Western world.

Which casts the otherwise welcome story about Alpha Lambda Mu, with its abstemious brothers focused piety and pushups, in a less flattering light. What’s the fraternity’s Shia-Sunni mix? Are there pledges from Pakistan and India in the same house? Any community service activities in conjunction with, say, Alpha Epsilon Pi—a Jewish fraternity—which has a chapter at San Diego State? The Times story sheds no light on these matters.

Many young Muslims might be wary of trusting a reporter who asked these questions, but their answers would usefully illuminate the struggles of second-generation immigrants to overcome tensions that often lead to conflict abroad but that are much more easily overcome in the relative social stability of the U.S.

Which begs another question: Where is Al Jazeera America when you need it? While the Times was leading with the pieces from Baghdad and Cairo, a weather report from the northeast was topping headlines at AJA. Not an unreasonable editorial decision, but also not a choice that makes best use of the organization’s enviable network of far-flung reporters.

In that and many other respects the fledging outlet is ideally suited to broaden the relatively narrow news media frame of the Times’ international reporting and to make the kind of deeper connections that would have enriched the Alpha Lambda Mu story. But despite dismal ratings since its launch in the second half of 2013, the network has resolutely stood by an editorial policy that its defenders have described as nonpartisan but that its sympathetic but shrinking audience might call anodyne.

Rather than make bold moves to establish a distinctive brand, AJA’s management in the near term is leveraging the deep pockets of the network’s Qatari ownership in order to optimize its placement in the chock-a-block American news spectrum. This wait-and-see strategy is obviously a luxury that few of AJA’s competitors can afford. But if you’re leading with snow plows in Philly on a day when the best-known news brand in the country runs a string of stories that reveal a golden opportunity for you, might be that you’re doing more waiting than seeing.