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Analysis

The Telegraph: Blaming Israel for Palestinian violence is racist: it denies that Arabs are moral agents, by Alan Johnson

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There were some odd media reactions this week to the murder of four Jews at prayer (and the heroic Israeli Druze first responder Zidan Saif who tried to rescue them) by two Palestinians perpetrators in Jerusalem.

• The Canadian Broadcast Company tweeted “Jerusalem police fatally shoot 2 after apparent synagogue attack http://ift.tt/1AaVAdn

• The CNN headline read ‘4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead in Jerusalem’ without noting that the two Palestinians were the terrorists. (CNN later apologised. See the memes here.)

• The Guardian altered a Reuters dispatch about the massacre in Jerusalem to remove any reference to Palestinians.

• In the Left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the writer Amira Hass wrote about “the despair and anger that pushed the Abu Jamals to attack Jews in a synagogue (emphasis added).”

Of course not all reporting was of this character. But still, what explains the exculpatory impulse, also widespread on social media?

Read the article in full at The Telegraph.