A controversy has arisen in Bosnia over the building of a new Orthodox church in Srebrenica, a town where a large number of Muslims were killed back in the 1990s during the civil war.

I won’t argue the merits of the issue, whether the church should or should not be built, whether it is too close to the burial ground of the victims, etc. My knowledge of the topic is too scanty to warrant my having an opinion.

Nor will I rehash the arguments over whether the killings in Srebrenica constitute a “massacre” under the circumstances of the civil war. That ground has been adequately covered here in the past.

What I’d like to point out is the media’s characterization of the construction of the church as “sowing discord”. You will never see the building of a mosque described in that fashion in any Western MSM outlet. To say such things about mosque-building is all but against the law.

The building of mosques in Western cities and towns — sometimes in places where there are no more than half a dozen Muslim families — is inevitably hailed as “enriching the local community” and “a testimony to the city’s growing diversity” which highlights “the area’s tolerance for other cultures”. This is the party line, and nothing is ever written about “discord” or “provocation” where mosques are concerned — much less any mention of “a bridgehead for a violent ideology with aspirations to global hegemony”.

But the rules are different for churches. Sincere Christian believers are automatically suspected of bigotry, religious intolerance, hatred towards the “other”, and much worse.

Here’s the story from France 24:

New Srebrenica Church Sows Discord

AFP — On a forest-covered hill near Srebrenica, a white bell tower rises into the sky, giving the first glimpse of a new church being built near the scarred Bosnian town, which this week marked the 18th anniversary of the worst massacre in post-war Europe.

But instead of bringing peace and calm, the Orthodox Christian church has sown fresh discord in the ethnically mixed town, which still bears the deep scars of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

For the local Bosnian Serb population, the church, built just a few hundred metres above a memorial centre for the victims of a genocide, is a necessity.

For the victims’ families and the international community, the new church is pure provocation.

According to Hatidza Mehmedovic, a Bosnian Muslim and head of an association grouping Srebrenica women who lost loved ones in the 1995 massacre, the “mere fact that the church is being built does not bother us”.

But the church “is at a spot where there are no believers and just near the site of a mass grave” where victims of the massacre were found, she said.

Mehmedovic’s husband and two sons, killed in the atrocity, are buried at the memorial cemetery at Potocari, just outside Srebrenica.

Aleksandar Mladjenovic, a local Orthodox priest who has been supervising the construction work, told AFP that the builders had reduced their work at the site ahead of the July 11 anniversary of the massacre “to avoid tension”.

On a warm July evening, only the chirping of birds and the fluttering of a Serbian flag on the bell tower break the silence around the church, in the small village of Budak.

Nearby is a flat, freshly mown field surrounded with a barbed-wire fence: this is the site where in 2007 forensic experts exhumed the remains of some 130 victims of the Srebrenica massacre.

“They are building (the church) at this spot as a provocation to the dead and the victims’ families,” said Mehmedovic.

Hat tip: Fjordman.