By Andrew L. Jaffee

Just Monday I documented an article by CNN which used the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas. But the news giant then redacted all use of the T-word, re-wrote the story, yet kept the article’s URL the same. This morning, the AP released a story via Yahoo! News entitled, “Israel kills top Hamas figure, escalating campaign,” in which it wrote:

… Israel launched the offensive to crush militants who have been terrorizing southern Israel with rocket fire from Gaza. It began after more than a week of intense Palestinian rocket fire that followed the expiration of a six-month truce. …

Wonder of wonders, the AP seems to be laying the blame for the current conflict at the feet of Hamas. Will the AP hold its ground, or will some editor step in to sanitize the writer’s terminology? I saved the original story to disk plus took a screen-shot of the quote shown above. Stay tuned…

Update 01/02/09: Yahoo! News has redacted the AP story using the word terrorizing, but left the link unchanged. Here’s a screen-shot of the original Yahoo! News story.

USAToday has kept a version of the AP story using the word terrorizing on its website. Good for USAToday.