Conspiracy theory is all about finding signs among the innocuous. And when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, every word and image of media coverage is parsed and dissected by both sides in search of any signal of bias or favor.

So when Newsweek.com made a coding error on a recent map, critics pounced. Our mistake: Our map showed the state of Israel, rather than the West Bank and Gaza, as Palestinian territory--when we meant to only highlight the Palestinian areas. The graph accompanied our recent cover story on radical Islam, and assigned religious freedom scores to Islamic countries, based on data from the Hudson Institute.

“The fact that you labeled Israel as a ‘Palestinian Territory’ calls to question your whole credibility when it comes to Islam,” wrote one reader. “Either you are too stupid to know basic geography … or you deliberately exposed your true agenda.”

Newsbusters posted a screenshot of our original map and said, “Perhaps Newsweek hired some nice Jihadis to create its website.” Another commenter on that site added that he “hopes the editor gets a personal visit from someone in the Israeli embassy.”

NEWSWEEK sincerely regrets the error, which we corrected immediately. For the record, the mistake was simply that--a bad mistake.