Terror Attack In Jerusalem (Not "Terror Attack")

One woman has been killed and 40 injured in a bombing in central Jerusalem today. The bomb was reportedly left in a bag on the street just outside the bus station.

When the shock began to wear off, I wondered how the media would try and twist this to belittle and justify Palestinian attacks on Israelis. After all, if "illegal settlers" aren't the victims, you'd have to be very creative to find another way to blame Israel for this.

Two patterns have emerged in the coverage. The first, predictably, is to avoid the word "terror" and even "attack". Most likely as well as other media outlets, The Independent, Reuters, and CNN all had this to say: "Police described the explosion as a 'terrorist attack' - Israel's term for a Palestinian strike", as though it was a military exercise.

Which is a funny thing to say considering that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's statement on the bombing was "I harshly condemn this act of terror".

The second pattern is to portray the bombing as part of a "cycle of violence", and I'm pretty sure most of the media have done this. For example the Guardian completely twisted the events of the last few days, not explaining that the reason civilians died in Israel's strikes on Gaza was because they were used as human shields by terrorists; and calling Hamas' firing of 50 rockets into Israel in the space of a couple of hours "sporadic".

A BBC interviewer asked Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief David Horowitz if the bombing would have been a response to the strikes on Gaza. Horowitz had to explain that the murder of the Fogels was followed by rocket attacks on Israel which was followed by Israel striking legitimate terror targets, unintentionally killing some civilians who were on the site where rockets had been fired from.

Melanie Phillips points out that with this huge upsurge in violence from the Palestinians,

"It therefore takes a particular degree of bone-headed malevolence to view this latest attack instead as a ‘tit-for-tat' response to Israeli violence. But then, the BBC and other British and western media have all but ignored the rocket attacks, and minimised the Fogel massacre. As usual, Israeli victimisation is thus denied in an obscene moral equivalence – which invariably turns Israel from a victim attempting to defend itself into the aggressor."

Incidentally, only two weeks ago there was another explosion in Jerusalem in which one Israeli was wounded.

Shortly after today's bomb, terrorists in Gaza fired another barrage of rockets into Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel sent into Gaza over 200 trucks of aid.

I pray for the speedy recovery of all the victims.