Last Wednesday, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, who lived in Chicago, decided to go out and murder some Jews in Washington, D.C., as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Rodriguez’s victims were a young couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.

Any normal reporting of these events would follow a standard script: identify the alleged murderer and victims, provide the personal details about them that are known, and include a few outraged quotes from political leaders, law enforcement professionals, and affected community members.

Any discussion of the alleged murderer’s motive would be handled delicately, in order to ensure that the facts being reported don’t imply sympathy for the perpetrator or serve as inspiration for copycat attacks.

It’s Journalism 101, and most of the work is in the research and very little in the writing.

Unfortunately, when the victims are Jews, different rules apply.

Enter the Associated Press (AP), a once-proud news outfit that has lost its moral compass, with a Thursday morning scoop about the murders that was both dangerous and callous.

After noting (three times, in fact) that Rodriguez yelled “Free Palestine” after the shooting, the AP’s writers decided that further “context” was warranted — specifically that “Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza has killed more than 53,000 people, mostly women and children, according to local health authorities, whose count doesn’t differentiate between combatants and civilians. The fighting has displaced 90% of the territory’s roughly 2 million population, sparked a hunger crisis and obliterated vast swaths of Gaza’s urban landscape.”

The piece then went on to note, “Israeli diplomats have a history of being targeted by violence, both by state-backed assailants and Palestinian militants over the decades of the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict that grew out of the founding of Israel in 1948. The Palestinians seek Gaza and the West Bank for a future state, with east Jerusalem as its capital  —  lands Israel captured in the 1967 war. However, the peace process between the sides has been stalled for years.”

In an earlier version of the piece, it was stated that “Lischinsky had bought an engagement ring and was just days away from proposing to Milgrim on a planned trip to Jerusalem.”

That detail was relocated to a separate story, presumably because some AP editor had the sense to recognize that it might be distasteful to note that this couple were about to celebrate an important milestone in the city that the AP’s writers wished to note Palestinians claimed as their own.

A “below the fold” photo featured the victims standing before a wall with a Magen David and “Israel” written several times, and next to an American flag and an Israeli flag.

Immediately beneath the photo were the following three “Related Stories”:

• “Gaza’s main hospital is overwhelmed with children in pain from malnutrition,” with a photo of an emaciated young child;
• “Two of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza are encircled by Israeli forces, staff say,” with a photo of a smoke-filled urban hellscape; and
• “Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile defense plan was inspired by Israel’s multitiered defenses,” with a photo of Iron Dome missiles knocking out enemy rockets.

One might wonder what any of the additional “context” or the “related” clickbait have to do with the murder of two innocent victims, but to say the quiet part out loud: we’re talking about Jews here.

If any other person was murdered on the basis of religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other personal characteristic, such a treatment would be considered unseemly at best and outright hateful at worst.

It would be abhorrent and irresponsible, for example, if journalists had narrated white supremacist Dylann Roof’s massacre of worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church with justifications about why Black people were killed.

Or perhaps by giving Pulse nightclub mass murderer Omar Mateen his soapbox by noting that the United States was, in fact, bombing Afghanistan, the country from which his parents came — perhaps with some clickbait stories around the horrific toll on civilians caused by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Additional details in support of a murderer’s claimed motive aren’t merely irrelevant to the story being told — they also lead to the inference that the author believes that the violence is somehow justified, and that the victims are at least to some degree responsible for what befell them.

And yet, when Jews — one American and one German/Israeli — are murdered for being Jews, those rules are suspended.

By Thursday evening, after the damage had already been done, the AP disappeared the story from public view entirely, including from the original author’s own credited pieces. In the new version of the story, she was credited as merely one of more than a dozen contributors.

A helpful mea culpa didn’t acknowledge that the news service had globally syndicated an outrageously tone deaf original article earlier in the day — but rather, the kind of foot fault that only professional journalists could care about: “An earlier version incorrectly said that the suspect in the shooting had been charged with shoplifting in Chicago.”

The Associated Press prides itself on its history — and, as a not-for-profit, hustles donations based on its “mission to advance the power of fact-based journalism.”

Perhaps it ought to try living up to its own press.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.

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