On October 6, The Telegraph reported that 2015 US court documents called Lubna Speitan, who proposed the Green Party’s ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, a close friend of convicted al-Qaeda plotter Minh Quang Pham. She says they are still friends. Read it as a sentence. Its subject has no name, only a vote. Its object is a terrorist. A single linking verb joins them, and two words sit in quote marks, which tell a reader someone said them. In the Telegraph text syndicated on Yahoo, the third paragraph names the source: 2015 US court documents, plus Speitan’s own answer that the two are still friends. The word that text gives the documents is close friends. The phrase in the headline’s quote marks does not appear in the body. The tell is a quote mark around words no one in the story is shown saying: the phrase borrows the look of evidence. A plain sentence would say a 2015 US court filing called her a close friend of Pham, and she says they still are. The Jewish Chronicle, reporting the same filings, adds there is no suggestion she knew of any criminal activity, and that she is understood to have known him only at college. That caveat is not in the Telegraph text. Beside the day’s other headlines, the jump shows. The Guardian leads on Labour figures ruling out work with the Greens; the BBC on a co-leader calling Zionism racist. Neither headline names Pham. The motion passed 1022 to 813, and the party says Speitan holds no post. Once a vote about Israel reads as a security scare, the argument over the motion no longer needs an answer, and the Telegraph’s own text sets the story inside the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.
