“I yelled ‘please help me,’ and they just spat at me,” Adele Banita told reporters.

An Arab terrorist had run out of a shop in Jerusalem’s Old City Saturday and stabbed to death her husband, Aaron, and a man who had left his apartment to help him.  Seriously wounded herself, she implored Arab shopkeepers and pedestrians to assist her and her two young children, one of whom was also stabbed.  The Arabs laughed at her and cursed her, she said.  One slapped her; another told her to drop dead.

The killings followed a drive-by shooting two days earlier of an Israeli couple, Eitam and Naama Henkin, on a road near Nablus, in what the NY Times calls “the occupied West Bank.”  The car was riddled with bullets, but the couple’s four children, in the back seat, were uninjured.  “A greeting of glory and pride to the heroes who perpetrated this brave attack,” tweeted a Hamas spokesman, and there were celebrations in Nablus.

Adele Banita doesn’t rate a mention in the NY Times’ account of the Jerusalem stabbings.  The headline: “Israel’s Netanyahu Vows ‘Harsh Offensive’ in Response to Wave of Violence.”

No photos of the victims, of course.  Instead, there’s a shot of Israeli police standing behind a barricade.  One is looking at the papers of an Arab woman, while a girl walks by in the foreground.  The caption: “About 3,500 Israeli police officers swarmed Jerusalem on Sunday, closing off some Arab neighborhoods.”  The second photo is a stock image of a squalid refugee camp, captioned: “A resident of the Jenin refugee camps said more than two dozen Palestinians were injured early Sunday after Israeli soldiers stormed the home of a man involved with the militant Islamist group Hamas.”  No confirmation required.

The only mention of the victims in the Old City comes in the tenth paragraph of the Times’ article, a couple of paragraphs after the report of still another terrorist attack.  This time, a 15-year-old Jewish boy was stabbed.  “Mr. Alon,” the would-be killer, “was shot apparently as he was trying to flee,” pursued by vindictive Israeli civilians shouting “shoot him,” the Times tut-tuts.

The story devotes four paragraphs to the opinions of 82-year-old political scientist Shlomo Avineri, whose sympathetic accounts of Marx’s social and political thought were required reading on the left in the late ’60s and ’70s.  Another political scientist piles on in the article’s final paragraph, fretting about Netanyahu’s falling “into the hands of the right wing.”  And, inevitably, Hanan Ashwari’s thoughts about Israeli malfeasance are duly reported.

Also, inevitably, the Gray Lady’s coverage of the Israeli “crackdown” and the prime minister’s threats was bested by the BBC.  The Beeb headlined its story “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two.”  It took two more tries before the network’s site reluctantly conceded, “Palestinian kills two Israelis in Old City.”  But the BBC then promptly reverted to the passive voice: “Israelis Killed in Jerusalem, Palestinians Banned from Old City.”

Moral equivalence.

The story is always about Israel’s response.  Jewish victims, when they are not nameless, are faceless and voiceless – like the “folks in the deli” murdered in Paris in January.