Thumbing their nose

An article titled Plan to mark out Jewish 'eruv' in Camden with fishing wire inspired readers to post comments such as "They're no more advanced than people who used to burn women suspected of being a witch."

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The following is an excerpt from a State department brieifng of May 10, 2016.
...the report that the video of a briefing from a couple years back with Jen Psaki was edited to remove questions and her answers about when the Iran negotiations began. What’s going on here?

MS TRUDEAU: Yeah, so we saw that report. We actually spoke to Fox about this yesterday, so thanks for that question. I’d back up. The – this is a daily press briefing from 2013. The transcript of that daily press briefing and video was always available – transcript was on state.gov; the video was available on other sites. There was a glitch in the State Department video. When Fox flagged it for us, we actually replaced it with a video from DVIDS, which is the military repository where a lot of news media gets its video. The whole video was there, and we also annotated it on our YouTube channel.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/05/257074.htm#DEPARTMENT

Below is an excerpt from the June 1 briefing.
..as many of you know, and as some of you have brought to our attention, a portion of the State Department’s December 2nd, 2013 press briefing was missing from the video that we posted on our YouTube account and on our website. That missing portion covered a series of questions about U.S. negotiations with Iran. When alerted to this, I immediately directed the video to be restored in its entirety with the full and complete copy that exists and had existed since the day of the briefing on the Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System website, otherwise known as DVIDS.

I also verified that the full transcript of the briefing, which we also post on our website, was intact and had been so since the date of the briefing. I asked the Office of the Legal Adviser to look at this, including a look at any rules that we had in place. In so doing, they learned that a specific request was made to excise that portion of the briefing. We do not know who made the request to edit the video or why it was made.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/06/257880.htm

In the same briefing, journalist Said asked Mr. Kirby, "John, are you bothered by the fact that this is really like a pattern by the Israeli Government, or even government – preceding governments as well, where they keep thumbing their nose at the international community."

The journalist could have been gramatically correct, either by using the expression "thumbing their noses" or "thumbing its nose."