Terror Attack in Israel? CNN Can't Find the Words

                                                                                                                                                                     photo: Thomas Coex, AFP/Getty Images

On Friday, a Palestinian man rammed his car into five Israeli border policewomen and then ran over an Israeli riding a bicycle on Shimon HaTzadik Street near a light rail station in Jerusalem. The attacker got out of his car assaulting the pedestrians with a knife before police stopped him by shooting at him. The victims were taken to the hospital with moderate to light injuries and the attacker was also taken to the hospital. One other person was treated for shock.

CNN’s headline:

"Driver hits Israeli border police, authorities call it terror attack"

According to CNN, itself, Israelis aren’t the only ones who call it an attack.  The short article includes this:

"Hamas applauded the attack.

'Hamas movement blesses this heroic act and considers it a natural response to the Occupations (sic) crimes,' Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman posted on Facebook."

Of course, even more difficult for CNN is the term, terror.

During this November’s spate of terror attacks in Jerusalem, CNN reported in an outlandish manner on the brutal killings at a synagogue in the Har Nof  neighborhood. Their first headline read “Deadly attack on Jerusalem mosque” and their follow up story changed the headline to “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead in Jerusalem,” simply counting the killers who had hacked the rabbis to death among victims.

For news from Israel it’s usually most reliable to go directly to Israeli news sources, for instance to Times of Israel or Ynet News.  In their stories, you not only get the actual details about the attack but other connected information such as the fact that this street was “also the site of a November 5 hit and run terror attack that killed one border police officer and injured 13 others. The area has seen no less than five terror attacks this past year.”

By contrast, the only other information included in the CNN article is a seemingly gratuitous reference to the number of Palestinians killed during this summer’s conflict.

CNN used to call itself “the most trusted name in news” and it’s good to know that this slogan has been retired.

Now they call themselves “America’s best news team” but many American outlets did a better job than CNN reporting from Jerusalem this week.