Here’s a little incident atop Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism’s most sacred site and third holiest place of Islam:

A young Jewish mother with husband and child are harassed by veiled Muslim women shouting, “Allahu akbar!” – God is great – and “Death to the Jews!”  The  outraged Jewish mother shouts back, “Muhammad is a pig!”

When the story appears in the Washington Post, guess who gets more copy – more precedence, higher priority.  The anti-Semitic harangues of Muslim women against Jews?  Or the counter-affront to Muslims by the Jewish mother?

The answer is easy for readers of the Post and its coverage of Israel.  The incident atop Temple Mount is woven by Jerusalem bureau chief William Booth into an Israel-bashing dispatch – the latest Booth piece to slam Israel (“Israel’s new, young Jewish extremists – A 20-year-old mom is known for provocations in bid to remake nation,” page A6).

What happened on the sacred soil of Temple Mount is utterly reprehensible on both sides – whether it’s shouting “Death to Jews” or blackening the prophet Muhammad as a pig.  But Booth doesn’t treat it as such.  His interest is almost entirely to blow up a Jew maligning Muhammad as symbolic of rising Jewish extremism in the Holy Land.

From a journalistic standpoint, it’s perfectly defensible to highlight Israeli stains.  But where is the coverage of unrelenting Palestinian corruption, incitement, and misrule in Gaza and/or in the West Bank?  That’s the real journalistic flaw in the Post’s coverage.  It’s what’s glaringly missing – whether it’s Hamas torturing Fatah members in Gaza or Mahmoud Abbas countering in kind against Hamas activists in the West Bank.

And both of them trotting out the vilest narratives against Jews.

Half a page devoted to “Jewish extremists” – but kid-glove treatment of the Palestinian side.

Objective journalism calls for coverage of all sides through the same penetrating lens – an objective sadly lacking in the pages of the Post and the dispatches of Jerusalem correspondent William Booth.

Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers.