Sheesh. The person who did it could not read Arabic. When does it stop being disrespectful and start becoming plain human error; if they make a mistake writing Thai? Hieroglyphs?
i don't think it's the single event but the constant disregard for middle eastern cultures to the point where nobody even checks that a written text is correct.
imagine if everywhere you went you saw english test like "helo, how you are?" and all sorts of weird grammatical issues, spaces wrongly inserted. if this was your entire life in the west you'd feel pretty alienated too, especially when people were doing so as an act of 'inclusion'
I don't see errors like that because English is the lingua franca of business in the Western World, while Arabic is not. For your example to make sense you'd have to imagine an Arabic language paper doing the same for a publication based in, oh I don't know, Cairo or something. But, the thing is, I don't expect reciprocal cultural fluency of the West in the Middle East, nor should I. Moreover, I don't resent them for it. Someone made a mistake at The Guardian - a foolish one that shouldn't have made it past an editor - but it's not "constant disregard for middle eastern cultures" that this happened.
For what it's worth, I can read Arabic script (but don't speak the language) and I caught the error.