After Israel assassinated Islamic Jihad leader Baha Abu Al-Ata on Tuesday morning, mainstream media outlets throughout the world made the assassination of one of the world’s cruelest terrorists their leading headline.

But as expected, American and European mainstream media outlets refuse to associate Al-Ata with terrorism. If this sounds familiar, it might be because the mainstream media also whitewashed the terrorism of another Jihadist mastermind who the US killed last week –  Abū Bakr Al Baghdadi with the Washington Post going as far as labeling him an “austere Islamic scholar”.

And despite the backlash, it appears as though the mainstream media hasn’t learned its lesson. This can be seen in the Agence France-Presse (AFP) headline who referred to Al-Ata simply as a “Palestinian” while going to great lengths to avoid calling him a “terrorist”.

Meanwhile, as Camera reported, the New York Times has completely scrubbed the word “terror” from their coverage of Al-Ata. According to their report:

‘An editorial decision was made to remove the passage explaining Islamic Jihad’s classification as a terrorist organization, and to replace this description with vague, watered-down language that mitigates the nature of the terrorist group, portraying it as one that merely takes “a harder line toward Israel” than Hamas.’

Other mainstream media outlets only gave one side of the conflict (the Islamic Jihad side) while ignoring the fact that over 200 rockets have been fired into Israel leaving 50 wounded. One example of this is the Philadelphia Enquirer:

And although most other mainstream media outlets did note that he was a leader of the Islamic Jihad, they almost all stopped short of referring to him as a “terrorist”, even though the Islamic Jihad is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department.