Pride and prejudice

The release (for real this time) of the name and motive of the main suspect in the Bar Noar gay club shooting attack leads all four papers, though their varied headlines reveal quite different approaches to the story.

Yedioth Ahronoth, never one to shy away from drama, blasts the quote “I did clean work,” across its front page. The paper puts the heavy lifting of connecting the various dots of the complicated case, which ended in a shooting rampage at a gay youth club in Tel Aviv in 2009 that killed two and injured 11, on its graphic department. And while the paper’s artists do great at telling the story by drawing lines between pictures of the different suspects, they are less stellar at pixelating the face of the state’s witness, who is left about as anonymous as Valerie Plame. The 13-page package on the story goes into excruciating detail, devoting a page each to the four suspects and the state’s witness and breaking the tale of deceit, sexual assault and murder wide open.

“I figured all in all they wanted to hit me,” the unnamed suspect who is thought to have been the target of the attack is quoted as saying. “I had no idea that there would be murder.” Yet the paper also reports he warned his ex not to go to the club that night.

Israel Hayom’s headline takes a similar route (“Murderous revenge”) but its slightly smaller amount of coverage is more focused on analysis and opinions. Collective responsibility fanboy Dan Margalit holds forth that the outing of the affair has given a black eye to the gay community, which was quick to wrongly blame the ultra-Orthodox and which harbors sexual deviants in its midst: “Members of the LGBT community are no more predisposed to criminality than others, but if they plan on artificially hiding the jealousy, intrigues, passions, conspiracies, prostitution, strong-arm tactics and corruption in their ranks, the time has come for them to grow up and understand that they can’t appear in the public eye as angels. A deep understanding of the terrible deeds that put them in a position of being ‘like everyone else’ is needed so they will come to a more balanced conclusion about their place in society.”

The gray leftist lady of Haaretz has the cut and dried (and long) headline of “Police: Youth club murderer sought revenge on community activist who sexually assaulted relative.” The paper’s two and a half pages of coverage include all the major details and a story that raises more questions about the gay activist accused of assaulting the killer’s relative, who reportedly told one of the people injured in the shooting not to talk to the cops. “He said it the moment I woke up, ‘Don’t talk to the police, it will only confuse matters,'” the injured man is quoted saying.

Never one to miss a scandal, Maariv goes with a completely different angle than everyone else, leading off with the storm the whole case has fomented within the ranks of the police. After top cop Yohanan Danino slammed the accidental release of names still under gag order during a press conference, cops shot back with their own taser-sharp criticism: “He puts responsibility on what happened at the press conference on district commander Bentzi Sau and on other top officers,” a top officer is quoted saying.” But where is he when decisions are being made? The chief travels all over the world. He was in China, the US, Germany, Poland, England, France and now Holland. This isn’t how you run an organization like the Israel Police.”

In happier news, Israel Hayom reports that despite a British boycott on an international soccer tournament for writers to take place in Haifa next week, the captain of the English writers team will show up to play by himself in a show of support for Israel. Jake Wallis Simons, author of the “English German Girl,” tells the paper that despite his team’s pullout, he thinks a cultural boycott is a bad and dangerous idea. (The fact that the Hebrew version of his book is a bestseller here probably doesn’t hurt either.)

Ten minutes of watching Israel’s parliamentarians, though, and he might change his mind. Maariv reports on all the childishness and embarrassing things coming out of Knesset members’ mouths and Facebook feeds in the last few weeks, topped off yesterday by a picture of shirtless Yesh Atid MK Boaz Topolovsky about to take a nap in his office posted to Facebook. Not everyone is laughing, though (even at Shai Piron’s penetration zingers). “Unfortunately, MKs sometimes turn into pathetic beings,” former speaker Reuven Rivlin is quoted saying. “All due respect to MK Topolovsky… but it’s a shame that he feels he needs to broadcast ‘light waves’ to get attention. This phenomenon was inherited from the last Knesset, and it’s very unfortunate. In my opinion, if MKs don’t know how to set boundaries for themselves, they need to be set for them through an ethical code.”

In Haaretz, Avi Shilon writes about Jewish attempts to counter the Nakba, saying the government should not be trying to redefine all the people who emigrated from Arab lands as refugees: “If the government truly intends to try to reach an agreement, and not just to pose a counter to the Nakba, the equation between Palestinian and Jewish refugees has some value. It’s just a pity that along the way the state is misleading its elderly citizens twice over. Once is by enticing them to file a claim under the pretext of documenting their heritage. The other is by encouraging them to believe that filling out this form will help them recoup the value of their property, when the real purpose is to obtain a bargaining chip in the negotiations.”

In Yedioth, Alex Fishman calls for Jerusalem to stay out of the fighting in the north, which is not worth the trouble getting involved. Instead they can all die and Odin can sort them out!

“Let them commit suicide in peace,” he writes. “While the weapons to Lebanon are dangerous, they do not constitute an existential threat, not like the Iranian bomb.”