Andrew Sullivan, Mediacrity, and HonestReporting among others have remarked on the BBC’s cowardly decision to remove the word “terrorist” from its early coverage of the London attacks. Sullivan links to this article by Tom Gross:

The world’s premier broadcast network appeared to throw away its own ridiculous “BBC Producer’s Guidelines.” BBC online reports, for example, had headlines such as “Terror of passengers stuck on tube” and “London Rocked by Terror Attacks.”

But then the BBC came to its senses and realized that these bombings were not terrorist attacks at all:

Presumably hoping that no one would notice, the BBC subtly and retroactively altered its initial texts about the bombs on both its British and international Web sites. Unfortunately for the BBC, however, previous versions of its webpages remained easily accessible to all on Google, and enterprising British bloggers, long-fed up with the BBC’s bias, recorded the changes.

If not terrorism, then what?

Early on Friday morning another BBC webpage headlined “Testing the underground mood,” spoke of “the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen.” But at 12:08 GMT, while the rest of the article was left untouched, those words were replaced by “the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen.”

From “terrorist atrocity” to “peacetime bomb attacks”: Is removing the stigma from terrorism morally different from glorifying it? C’mon BBC: It’s time to come right out and call them “martyrdom operations.”