Maybe I’m just getting a little overly-sensitive or cranky in my old age. I don’t think I’m a right-winger. And as someone who has worked in journalism his entire adult life, I’m certainly not a media-basher.

But the headline slapped me upside my head and made me, well, annoyed. It was an article in today’s Sun about Shlomo Nativ, a 13-year-old Israeli who was brutally killed by a Palestinian man wielding a pickax on April 2. The headline was, “Palestinian Kills Israeli Settler, 13.”

Now it’s true that Bat Ayin, where Shlomo lived, is a settlement located in the Judean Hills of the West Bank. I’m not going to start getting into that whole thing.

My point is, this was a 13-year-old boy. He was a boy. This was a terrible, senseless tragedy. I would never call a boy a “settler,” even if some Palestinians would.

The article starts off by mentioning this horrific act, but then gets bogged down in the fact that it was the Netanyahu administration’s second day on the job, and as a conservative government pondered how it may or may not respond. It’s not until the eighth paragraph that you get the terrifying details about what happened in Bat Ayin. Then, the article quickly transitions into a financial probe regarding Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Look, I’m not an advocate for holding onto lands conquered in the Six Day War, and I’m certainly not in the habit of criticizing other publications. But this is not good journalism, and it’s not sensitive, humane reporting about a tragic situation.

Maybe I’m getting mired down in semantics but, again, this was not a settler. It was a boy.

This is so typical.  You should subscribe (and join) CAMERA.  They track these type headlines.  They gather statistics on how these headlines routinely dehumanize Israelis and deemphasize Palestinian culpability.