BBC reports on British student murdered in Jerusalem exclude the word terror

BBC reporting on the murder of a British student in Jerusalem eschews use of the term terror.

On April 14th a British exchange student was murdered in a terror attack in Jerusalem.

“The young British woman murdered on Friday in a terror attack in Jerusalem was named as Hannah Bladon, 21, an exchange student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. […]

Bladon died of her wounds after being stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife by a Palestinian terrorist while riding on Jerusalem’s light rail.

An off-duty police officer and a passerby wrestled the terrorist, a Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, to the ground before he could harm anyone else. Two other people were lightly injured when the tram made an emergency stop.”

A report on the attack appeared on the BBC News website some two and a half hours after it took place.

Originally titled “Jerusalem stabbing: British woman killed in train attack”, the report was amended numerous times and its headline changed as details emerged and the victim was identified – but the word terror does not appear in any of its thirteen versions.

An additional report on the same story appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘England’ page on April 15th under the title “Hannah Bladon Jerusalem stabbing: Family ‘devastated’ at attack“. The word terror is likewise absent from all versions of that article. 

When British tourists were murdered in Tunisia in 2015, the BBC accurately described the incident as a terror attack. When an attack in which some of the victims were visitors to Britain took place in London in March 2017, the BBC similarly used accurate terminology to describe it to its audiences.

However, when visitors to Israel have been murdered in terror attacks perpetrated by Palestinians, the corporation has consistently refrained from using accurate language to describe those attacks.  

Once again, the BBC’s double standards on terrorism, together with the redundancy of its inconsistently applied guidelines on ‘Language when Reporting Terrorism’, are glaringly apparent.

Related Articles:

Radio 4 gives insight into BBC avoidance of the use of the term ‘terror’ in Israel

BBC Complaints: terror attacks in Jerusalem and Tunisia are “very different”

 

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