Six Jewish Israelis were filmed spitting at the entrance to Saint James Monastery in Jerusalem’s Old City, stirring a predictable frenzy of outrage among the usual suspects in corporate media. Expect outlets like CNN and MSNBC to parade this incident as a blatant example of “toxic nationalism,” while completely ignoring the context or the reasonable questions about how often such behavior happens on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why is it that the mainstream media hones in on acts like this, as if to reinforce a stranglehold narrative that Jews are violent oppressors? Meanwhile, you can bet your bottom dollar that similar incidents involving Palestinians would be portrayed with a soft-focus lens, if even reported at all. When was the last time you saw headlines about rioters attacking Jewish sites get the same outrage? Reports from Fox News will fall into a pattern of simply denouncing these acts without diving deeper into the complexities at play. This lazy journalism perpetuates a simplistic narrative that only serves to further divide both communities instead of fostering understanding.

Let’s be real: if we want to have a genuine conversation about the tensions in Jerusalem, we need a media that isn’t hell-bent on sensationalism but rather on truth-seeking. Expecting the establishment media to call out hypocrisy and genuinely address the roots of this kind of behavior is as absurd as asking a raccoon to stop rifling through your trash. It’s not going to happen.