Reuters draws moral equivalence between slaughter of Fogel family and Israeli attempts to identify murderers

A year ago, we would have perhaps begun this post with an expression of dismay in response to the zeal with which Reuters correspondents seek to demonize Israel and the deeply dishonest manner in which they go about it.  No longer.  After covering nearly 600 Reuters stories on the Middle East conflict and documenting the agency's compulsive contempt for truth and decency, nothing surprises us anymore.

So it is with a story written by Reuters correspondent Mohammed Assadi and edited by Jerusalem Bureau Chief Crispian Balmer on Israel's ongoing investigation into the murder of the Fogel family on March 11th.

Assadi, a proven liar and patent propagandist for the Palestinian Arabs, and Balmer, who could not bring himself to characterize the recent Jerusalem bus bombing as terrorism (though even the Palestinian Prime Minister described it as such), attempt to draw a moral equivalence between the unspeakable butchering of the Fogel family and attempts to discover the identity of the murderers.

(Reuters) - Israeli troops briefly detained about 100 women in the West Bank early on Thursday as part of an ongoing investigation into the murder last month of a young Jewish settler family, locals said.  The women, many of them seized with their husbands, were released after police took their fingerprints and DNA samples [...]

Israeli officials blamed Palestinians for the murders. No Palestinian group had claimed responsibility and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has described the killing as inhumane.
Israeli investigators have repeatedly descended on Awarta since the killing and the head of the village council, Qais Awwad, said troops entered houses overnight, taking away women aged between 20 to 80 in armored trucks to a detention center.

Actually, Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was reported, by both the Washington Post and The Guardian, to have taken responsibility for the attack.

But the despicable journalistic chicanery in this story, which reflects Assadi and Balmer's lack of professional integrity as well as their irrationality, centers on the employ of a quote from one of the Palestinian women taken in for fingerprinting:

Sumayyah Shurrab, 30, said she had to take her 11-month old child with her. After fingerprint and DNA checks she was taken back to Awarta.
"They told me they wanted to compare them with finger prints they found in the settlement," she said.
"This was a very inhuman act," she added.

Got that? The fingerprinting and DNA check of a suspect in the mass murder of a family is an "inhuman act".  Whereas the mass murder itself is... er, according to Reuters citing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, merely "inhumane".

But it gets worse.  Abbas didn't say the murders were "inhumane".  He said they were "inhuman":

“This act was abominable, inhuman and immoral,” Mr. Abbas said in a rare interview with Israel Radio that was conducted in Arabic.

So Reuters has deliberately misquoted the Palestinian President in order to minimize the universally-recognized barbaric nature of the crime while featuring a quote from a suspect to suggest that it is the investigative practices that are actually barbaric.

A truly Orwellian inversion brought to you by the immoral media company more Palestinian than the Palestinians.