Gunmen killed 7 people at a funeral in a Greek Orthodox church in Karak, Jordan, on October 23, and no group claimed it. The Christian Post’s headline names the killers’ faith, which Jordan’s officials did not. The sentence has a subject, and the subject is a faith. ‘Islamic extremists kill Christians’ sets one religion against another before the reader reaches Jordan. The facts under it are thinner: the attackers were not publicly identified, no group claimed the shooting, and a Jordanian government statement, per the AP, said ‘unknown assailants’. The page itself backs off: its first paragraph says ‘suspected Islamic extremists’, citing ‘reports’, and its only source for the label, in the fifth paragraph, is an unnamed ‘religious rights source’ describing a video. The device is the verdict noun with a faith fastened to it. ‘Extremists’ was the minister’s word, and it sits in the article’s tenth paragraph. ‘Islamic’ was added between the official and the headline. The habit it rides is us and them: one unknown gunman’s faith is made to stand for everyone who shares it, while the mourners’ faith makes them the people of the page. The tell is the qualifier that vanishes on the way up: ‘suspected’ in the paragraph, gone in the headline. Each outlet named the killers in words its readers know. Reuters wrote ‘gunmen’ and gave ‘terrorist’ to ‘authorities’. Press TV wrote ‘Takfiri’. The Daily Wire wrote ‘Slaughtered By Terrorists’. Missing from the faith-against-faith sentence are the Muslims who answered it: the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar called it a ‘heinous terrorist attack’, King Abdullah II said bullets would not ‘divide Jordanians’, and the World Evangelical Alliance, quoted on the same page, warned against using it to ‘incite sectarian tension’.
