I’m not usually one to defend Reuters or the extreme double standards in Western press, but in this case I think the headline is fine and the community note is itself misleading.

There were two separate incidents. Suleiman first attacked a Muslim acquaintance over a personal dispute. He then took the metro to Golders Green and stabbed two random Jews dressed in traditional orthodox Jewish attire. The second incident has the most public interest because it was seemingly a hate crime targeting two strangers for their race/religion. But the community note implies that it was a single attack, and that the two Jewish victims were not targeted for being Jewish since he also stabbed Muslim.

Say the identities were different: a far-right Christian man got in an argument with a Christian friend at his home and stabbed him; he then traveled to a Muslim neighborhood, charged at an elderly Muslim man standing at a bus stop and stabbed him in the neck, then attacked and stabbed a 34yo Muslim man as he was leaving a mosque. Would it be wrong to have a headline “UK man appears in court over stabbing of two Muslim men in London?” I don’t think so.

If the headline was instead “UK man appears in court over stabbing of three men in London,” that would be journalistic malpractice and it would be rightly seen as a deliberate cover-up of anti-Muslim violence.