Reuters bakes a cake with a recipe for trouble

Reuters' Jeffrey Heller serves up a report today on a statement by Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu at the latter's weekly cabinet meeting. Netanyahu referred to recent violence at the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem and issued an appeal to Israeli Arabs to not be provoked by lies that Israel intends to dig under the Temple Mount.

In his story, Heller refers to the violence but exclusively within the context of Palestinians confronting Israeli police. There is for example, this line:

"Tensions in Jerusalem have risen over the past few weeks after Israeli police and Palestinian protesters clashed near al-Aqsa in the walled Old City on the eve of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur late last month."

And this line:

"In last month's violence, small groups of Palestinian stone-throwers confronted Israeli forces, and Israel banned the Israeli Arab head of a fundamentalist Islamist movement from Jerusalem, saying he was inciting violence."

Nowhere in his story, does Heller indicate that immediately antecedent to clashes with police, these same Palestinian Arabs had taken to stoning Jews who had come to tour the Temple Mount. One might think this tidbit essential to fully assimilating the cause and implications of the clashes but for Heller and Reuters, it is discardable scrap.

Heller does add to the mix, the spicy canard that the last Palestinian intifada (violent uprising) resulted from Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000. A canard we debunked here.

And of course, it wouldn't be a "Heller" cake if for good measure, the correspondent neglected to toss in the stale and rancid filler "Arab East Jerusalem" which we have discussed here and here.