Yesterday, early evening Israeli time, the Guardian‘s Jerusalem correspondent Peter Beaumont reported on two Palestinian terror attacks since Sunday. The first incident, on Sunday evening, involved a fatal attack on a 39-year-old woman in Otniel in the West Bank. The second, on Monday, involved the stabbing of a pregnant woman in Tekoa.
Here’s the original headline, per the Guardian’s tweet of the article.
The headline was subsequently changed to “Palestinian with knife attacks Israeli woman in West Bank settlement”.
Before the change, some derivation of the word “settlement” or “settler” was used no less than eight times between the headline, strap line photo caption and first two paragraphs of the article.
Of course, this isn’t merely a random word count.
As most followers of this blog understand, Guardian readers have been conditioned by years of tendentious articles and inflammatory op-eds and letters to view not only the physical settlements themselves as “illegal”, but the Jewish men, women and children who live on the ‘wrong side’ of the 1949 armistice lines as representing a ‘provocation’ and an obstacle to peace.
In June, 2014, we prompted corrections at both the Independent and Guardian to false claims that the three Israeli teens abducted by Palestinian terrorists that month were “settlers”.