The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto suggests that the accidental killing of American activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli tractor in March 2003 may have given the Palestinian who perpetrated yesterday’s tractor attack in Jerusalem the idea for turning a tractor into a deadly weapon.
Come on.
On a related note to my post yesterday about the battle over language in the Middle East conflict (“Arab” vs. “Palestinian”), now that we know the perpterator of the attack was Palestinian, we can say so.
And my colleague Dan Sieradski was exacting enough to point out that the deadly weapon used in yesterday’s attack was neither a bulldozer nor a tractor, but a backhoe loader. Given that it’s part tractor, I think we’ll still be safe if we keep calling it a tractor. And if someone calls it a bulldozer, we may just let it slide.
