Over the weekend, dozens of Israeli settlers descended on the West Bank villages of Qusra and Jalud — tear gas and stones thrown at a family's home, an ambulance attacked, and, per Al Jazeera, an NBC news crew assaulted. That's the event, in one sentence. The rest of this is about the vocabulary, because the same group of men collected four different names in forty-eight hours, depending on who was holding the microphone. * Netanyahu's pick: a "handful of rioters" — who, he added, do injustice to the "law-abiding settler public." A phrase doing double duty: condemn the actors, insulate the category. * AP's headline: "Netanyahu condemns rioters after weeks of West Bank settler violence." Look at the grammar. The active verb belongs to the condemner — the story arrives as something Netanyahu did, not something settlers did. Two weeks of families surrounded inside their own homes enters as "unrest," and when dozens of men barricaded themselves inside a Palestinian family's house with the residents still in it, AP's copy describes what followed as "violent clashes." A clash needs two sides. A home invasion has one — plus a family. * Here's the strange part: the strongest word in AP's own story isn't AP's. It belongs to Trump's ambassador. Mike Huckabee — nobody's idea of a pro-Palestinian activist — called the settlers "terrorists," and AP itself noted, in a remarkably self-aware aside, that this is "a word U.S. officials usually reserve for Palestinian militants." So the wire service can see the double standard clearly enough to footnote it. It just files the observation under other people's word choices. * Al Jazeera didn't wait for permission: "settler pogroms," in the headline, plus the detail that makes every condemnation ring hollow — by its reporting, the Israeli police district covering the West Bank made zero arrests, video evidence notwithstanding. Israel's own President Herzog called the weekend a "red line." A red line, apparently, that comes with no handcuffs. (Yes, Al Jazeera has its own flag on the map — Qatari state ownership, which we've flagged before. That doesn't make "pogrom" wrong. It's just worth knowing who finds this word easiest to say.) * When the US ambassador is reaching for a harder word than the news wire, the wire's softness stops being caution and starts being a choice. "Rioters" is the word you use when the condemnation is the story. "Terrorists" is what the ambassador said. And somewhere between those two words, a family spent the weekend barricaded inside its own house — an experience no one who lived it would call a "clash."