In keeping with a United Nations report launched in June, Israel has destroyed greater than half of all spiritual and cultural websites in Gaza. The UN’s Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, stated of the findings that assaults on cultural websites, together with museums, mosques, and archaeological landmarks, hinder Palestinian self-determination and can have impacts for generations to come back. Though it’s identified that the destruction of cultural and non secular websites serves to erase historic connections to the land, the problem is never the main focus of nuanced reporting, based on human rights journalist Mischa Geracoulis.
In her new ebook Media Framing and the Destruction and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2025), Geracoulis, who’s the managing editor of the media literacy group Mission Censored, argues that the way in which by which assaults on heritage are offered to the general public is crucial to linking these assaults to atrocity crimes, together with genocide and struggle crimes.
Narratives that have interaction in sufferer blaming surrounding cultural heritage exacerbate dehumanizing remedy in Gaza, Artsakh (often known as Nagorno-Karabakh), and past, she explains in her textual content, which examines how information narratives round heritage assaults inform humanitarian responses.
“There’s simply been so little protection,” Geracoulis stated in an interview with Hyperallergic, characterizing Western media reviews on cultural destruction in these areas. “It’s been extra of an absence of protection than simply obvious errors.”
Geracoulis pointed to a failure of main media organizations to border the destruction of cultural websites in each Gaza and Artsakh as human rights violations. Framing, referring to the journalistic perspective of sure occasions, entails each the journalist’s perspective and what’s included or excluded from a narrative. Her new ebook, which is geared primarily towards college students and lecturers, is a part of Routledge’s sequence on media and humanitarianism.
The media protection that does deal with heritage assaults, Geracoulis stated, typically parrots propagandized official rhetoric. Geracoulis factors to oversimplified Western information narratives as informing lackluster efforts to halt cultural destruction or additional dehumanization of the oppressed.
Checking the framing of a narrative, Geracoulis stated, is equally vital to plain fact-checking. Relying closely on official spokespeople to report on the destruction of cultural heritage would possibly painting a actuality completely different from “on the bottom” reporting, Geracoulis informed Hyperallergic. As an alternative, journalists ought to present historic and geographic context and solicit data from the bottom.
Geracoulis’s household emigrated to the US within the early twentieth century as a direct results of the Armenian Genocide from 1915 to 1923, throughout which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians have been exterminated beneath the Ottoman authorities. After the genocide, Ottoman-allied Azerbaijan razed Armenian heritage from Nakhichevan, a territory given to the nation by the Soviets, from which it expelled Armenians. By 1924, 10,000 medieval Armenian cross-stones, known as khachkars, situated within the largest historical Armenian gravesite, have been reportedly diminished to three,000. Khachkars include devotional depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, and each is exclusive. The Azerbaijani navy has reportedly been filmed deliberately destroying these stone crosses in Artsakh.
Azerbaijan seized the previously autonomous Armenian territory of Artsakh in 2024, displacing greater than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the area. In 2022, Azerbaijan violated its ceasefire with Armenia and Russia by blocking the Lachin hall, the one street connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. The blockade prevented the movement of requirements, prompting the previous chief Worldwide Legal Courtroom prosecutor to warn {that a} genocide was being dedicated. Turkey and Azerbaijan, that are carefully allied, deny the Armenian Genocide. (Biden turned the primary US president to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide in 2021.)
Geracoulis additionally traces the dearth of accountability for the Armenian Genocide as paving the way in which for Azerbaijan’s ongoing destruction.
Among the many landmarks in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s navy, based on the UN, was the Nice Omari Mosque, the oldest on the strip. A quote from an nameless Israeli official cited in NPR’s reporting said that the mosque “contained a tunnel shaft utilized by militants,” an accusation continuously made by the Israeli navy when it targets civilian hubs and heritage websites. The UN report fee additionally documented allegations of artifact looting from the Pasha Palace Museum, constructed within the thirteenth century and residential to artifacts of native archaeology, the Israa College museum, and a warehouse belonging to the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem.
Whereas worldwide human rights responses to those assaults is perhaps restricted, media organizations can affect governments to behave on crimes of cultural destruction, Geracoulis writes.
At finest, main media can activate what Geracoulis dubs the “toolbox of worldwide relations.” However narratives that body victims as complicit in aggravated assault on their cultural heritage promote a view of humanitarian help and different actions as unwarranted. Cultural heritage needs to be “a part of an ongoing dialog, not … novelty information objects,” that frames atrocity with extra nuance.
“Language and tales round cultural heritage have geopolitical implications,” Geracoulis writes. “As a result of battle is usually justified by historic narratives, and since cultural heritage is tied to id and homeland, tales round cultural heritage could also be purposed to both official or exploit geopolitical goals.”
