On the heels of a bombing in Manhattan, an op-ed by the mayors of New York, London, and Paris labeled militant violence “vanishingly rare.” But the only thing vanishing was that tone-deaf phrase — it’s now gone.

After LifeZette first highlighted the op-ed, The New York Times edited the column by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, London Mayor Sadiq Kahn, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. And America’s newspaper of record took the blame:

“What newspaper editor would add, on his or her own, such a significant claim to a piece written by three mayors?”

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“An op-ed essay on Tuesday about relief for refugees included the phrase, ‘In our experience, militant violence is vanishingly rare,'” reads an editor’s note at the bottom of the op-ed online. “Because of a miscommunication, the phrase, which was added by an editor, was published without final approval of the authors.”

Reaction to the edit was harsh.

Seth Barron, project director of the Manhattan Institute’s NYC Initiative, wrote in City Journal that the change added to the “Orwellian nature of this joint, denialist editorial by the mayors of New York, London, and Paris.”

Paul Miregoff, writing for the conservative blog Powerline, expressed doubt over the official explanation in the editor’s note.

“This implausible statement raises more questions than it answers,” he wrote. “What newspaper editor would add, on his or her own, such a significant claim to a piece written by three mayors? For that matter, what editor would employ an odd locution like ‘vanishingly rare’? I wonder whether this is a translation from French.”

Miregoff imagined the mayors, or their ghost writers, swapping different texts of the column back and forth as they arrived at the final version.

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“But to try to pin the outrageous ‘vanishingly rare’ claim on an editor seems like too much,” he wrote.

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Perhaps more likely is that de Blasio and his counterparts simply did not realize just how out of touch the phrase “vanishingly rare” made them seem, so close to a bombing that injured 49 people in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. De Blasio, after all, could not bring himself to admit that the bombing was terrorism until two days after the Saturday evening blast.

By then, all doubt — if there was any — had been removed. Ahmad Khan Rahami, who came to the United States in 1995 from his native Afghanistan after his father had been granted asylum, now has been charged with federal terrorism offenses. Authorities accuse him of planting bombs in New York and New Jersey and contend that he started in June acquiring materials to make explosive devices, buying citric acid, circuit boards, ball bearings, and electric igniters on eBay.