The New York Times has caught a lot of justified flak the last few days for how softly it has framed its profiles of the Islamic perpetrator of an anti-Jewish attack on a Michigan synagogue. “The Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was a Quiet Restaurant Worker.” At least Sunday’s print headline was better: “Recalling Attacker’s Last Days Before Driving Into Synagogue.”
Critics faulted the terrorist-sympathetic framing of the story, like another headline: “Family Members of Michigan Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike in Lebanon.” The story initially included insistence from sources that members of the man’s family killed in an Israeli air strike there were not members of Hezbollah.
As confirmation of the man’s Hezbollah links emerged, that denial was quietly excised.
