Jews on the Rampage!

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“Jewish Settlers Rampage Through West Bank Village,” reads the Reuters headline, but the story is rather less sensationalistic in describing what provoked the riot:

Dozens of Israelis from a Jewish settlement where a Palestinian killed a youth last week rampaged on Wednesday through a West Bank Arab village, smashing car windows and damaging homes, residents and medics said.

“Killed a youth”? You have to read all the way down to the eighth paragraph to get a more vivid description:

Last Thursday, a Palestinian wielding an axe killed a 13-year-old youngster and wounded a boy, aged seven, in Bat Ayin. The attacker, who was not identified, fled.

We wondered how Reuters covered that incident at the time, so we dug up this dispatch, whose headline is “Palestinians Kill Israeli in West Bank Settlement: Police”–a good deal more anodyne [harmless; inoffensive] than the “rampage” one:

A Palestinian with an axe and a knife killed a 13-year-old Israeli boy and wounded a seven-year-old boy in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank on Thursday, two days after a right-wing government took power.

That would be a right-wing government in Israel. Apparently in Reuterville, taking an ax to the neighbor boys is a perfectly natural thing to do when they elect a right-wing government.

Go to OpinionJournal.com for the original post (scroll one-third of the way down the page).