Saw IS at Sinai

The journey from an unverified claim by an unnamed US official saying that a Russian jet that crashed in Egypt over the weekend may have been brought down by a bomb, and that the bomb may have been the work of the Islamic State TERROR GROUP or local sympathizers to the group, to an unqualified “THE ISLAMIC STATE BLEW UP A PLANE!!!” is apparently a very short one, at least for Hebrew-language tabloids.

Thus Israeli readers are greeted Thursday morning with the news that the jihadi group is definitely responsible for the plane crash, with only those who get into the smaller print realizing that there may be some reservations to go along with that alarmist assessment.

At least that’s the case with Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom. Haaretz goes with the less sexy but truthier headline “Fears grow that Islamic State downed the Russian plane in the Sinai.”

Despite the prime coverage, no paper takes note of any possible effect on Israel, which borders the Sinai.

In Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth works off the assumption that it was the Islamic State that planted a bomb on the plane, and predicts that Russia and Egypt will both hit back at the group hard, especially Moscow, which is now engaged in fighting in Syria.

But he also notes that the most far-reaching effects will be felt by regular travelers, though he’s not sure any heightened security measures are taken will make much of a difference.

“Remember the bombing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in 1988. In the wake of the attack against Flight 103 security was increased at airports. But that did not stop an attack on a French passenger plane over the Niger desert 10 months later. Aviation attacks are flashy. Terror groups don’t hesitate to bomb planes when they can. Al-Qaeda yesterday, Islamic State today,” he writes, apparently indicting Osama bin Laden for the Lockerbie bombing.

A Russian plane was not the only thing that crashed in Thursday’s papers, but also possibly the candidacy of newly appointed spin doctor Ran Baratz, who was tapped as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new media czar, only for journalists to quickly uncover some not nice things he wrote, including a recent Facebook post about President Reuven Rivlin, a plane and, you guessed it, The Islamic State.

Yedioth does little to hide its giddiness over the sordid affair, blasting some choice quotes from the Facebook post in giant letters over half a page.

“The man who explained that President Rueven Rivlin is ‘meaningless,’ that MK Avigor Liberman ‘zigzags without shame,’ and that John Kerry has the mental capacity of a 12-year-old is the man chosen by Netanyahu as director for national public advocacy,” the paper’s news story reads.

The paper quotes Baratz responding to the furor by brushing it off as just a bit of a laugh.

“Things I wrote jokingly as a private person have no connection to my government role. I’m an opinionated man who uses humor and satire and mixes it In with criticism.”

Yedioth columnist Micky Almog smells blood and goes for the kill against Baratz, slinging a caustic (and sometimes childish) screed that rips the flackmeister a new one over his caustic and childish statements.

“Another sin according to Dr. Baratz is that the president flies economy class because he doesn’t fear for his life, which is so much like, how much of a sissy can you be, Rivlin? Nobody wants to shoot you? What are you worth? You go around armed, right Dr. Baratz? You have on the front of your jeans a phone holster and on the back a pistol holster. And when the moment comes, and it will come, you’re going to pull it out,” he writes. “But no, not the uninformed statements, not the militant machismo, not the violent cynicism of those who don’t understand that it’s easy to be a pessimist, but you need balls for optimism. This is what hurts most. That my prime minister, and yes he is my prime minister – I didn’t vote for him but still believe in democracy and thus he’s my prime minister – that this is the man in whom my prime minister is giving my voice, all of our voices, to speak in our name to the world. This man, with his words leaking poison, his voice is my voice now.”

If Baratz somehow survives this affair and makes it into his new office, he’ll have his work cut out for him, as Ari Shavit notes in Haaretz. Writing in the broadsheet’s op-ed page while on a speaking tour of US college campuses, he notes the damage Netanyahu and other right-wingers are doing to Israel’s standing in the US Jewish community, once the breadbasket of goodwill for the Jewish state.

“Everywhere I see what only the blind cannot see. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not the only problem, and the new anti-Semitism is not the only threat. The real challenge facing the Jewish state and the Jewish people is the fact that many young Jews are turning their backs on an Israel they perceive as radically nationalist and religiously extreme,” he writes.

“How can you persuade a 19-year-old woman from Berkeley who seeks to change the world that Israel is her second home, when Israel sends a message of the exclusion of women? How can you convince a 20-year-old from Duke University that Israel isn’t Goliath when he sees Jewish zealots on TV every day? I’m trying. I’m doing the best I can. Sometimes I even succeed. But every day, wherever I go, I see the abyss whose edge we are standing on.”