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. The Times framing seemed to suggest that having family members killed in Lebanon would make a synagogue full of children outside Detroit an understandable target. Many online commentators noted the (welcome) lack of similar attacks on mosques after the World Trade Center attacks on 9-11 or after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and wondered if the paper would have considered any such attacks justified in the name of blowback. The story itself tried to “both sides” the issue of terrorism, as if the actual danger to Jews and the hypothetical danger to Muslims were remotely compatible: The episode heightened fears among Jews in Michigan and across the United States. A wave of rising antisemitism in America has been exacerbated by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which has extended into attacks by Israel on Lebanon in an attempt to root out the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. It also prompted anxiety for members of the area’s large Arab community, who braced for extra scrutiny after they learned that the attacker was from Lebanon. “This tragedy comes at a time when communities everywhere are confronting rising hate and senseless violence,” said Mayor Mo Baydoun of Dearborn Heights, where the attacker worked at a popular Mediterranean restaurant. Abe Greenwald of Commentary, in “Turning Terror Into Context,” turned two of the badly focused Times headlines around. The headlines in question: “Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state” and “Lebanese Family Members of Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike.” Greenwald wrote: One could say that both headlines, and their accompanying stories, count as valid news. This is true, but it’s entirely beside the point. These stories are written and framed to blame Zionism and Israeli military action for an attempted mass-slaughter of American Jews.  If you check social media, you’ll find that’s precisely how they’re being used by Israel-haters and anti-Semites…. ….Where’s the headline reading “More Than 100 Children in Temple Israel Pre-K at Time of Attack”? Or how about this for a story on the terrorist’s family back in Lebanon? “Synagogue Attacker’s Brothers Suspected of Being in Hezbollah”?  News outlet JNS faulted a March 12 headline from live coverage about the Michigan synagogue that came under attack: “Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state.” “Seriously, you don’t hate the New York Times enough. A synagogue with a preschool is targeted. The NYT reminds readers it was ‘dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state,'” Honest Reporting, a media watchdog, stated. “The journalistic equivalent of: ‘well … what was she wearing?'” Jack Simony, director general of the nonprofit Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and a grandson of Holocaust survivors, told JNS that the Times should have focused more on the context of the Holocaust in the synagogue’s founding. And there was yet another puzzlingly soft Times headline that made news for the wrong reasons, concerning yet another anti-Semitic terrorist attack by radicalized Islamists, this time an IED thrown into an anti-Zohran Mamdani protest, being held outside the residence of New York City's Israel-loathing mayor and his pro-Hamas wife: “At 13, He Was Selling Sneakers. At 18, He’s Facing Terror Charges.”