The calm after the storm

Snow and slaughter clutter the front pages as the Hebrew media report on the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the stormy weather that dumped snow on Jerusalem and the highlands of Israel and the West Bank.

The terrorist attack against the French satirical magazine which comically portrayed the Muslim prophet Muhammad dominates the headlines, with Yedioth Ahronoth calling it “terror against freedom of speech” and Israel Hayom “massacre in Paris” and “homegrown Islamist terror.” While the tabloids run photos of the masked gunmen in the street outside the newspaper’s offices, moments after they shot and killed 10 journalists and two policemen and injured 10 others, Haaretz opts to show the rallies of support in the wake of the attack, with tens of thousands in the streets of France.

Haaretz reports that three suspects, two of Algerian descent, were identified by police as connected to the attack. It adds that the three reportedly belong to an Al-Qaeda cell in Yemen. Israel Hayom reports that French sources said the suspects previously spent time in Iraq and have connections with terrorist groups operation in neighboring Syria. Yedioth Ahronoth recounts that the gunmen approached No. 6 Rue Nicolas Appert, asked if it was the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and were told it was at No. 10. They then saw a caricaturist entering the building and rushed toward her.

“They threatened me, spoke perfect French and said that they are from al-Qaeda,” Yedioth Ahronoth quotes Corinne Rey recounting. “I pressed the code to the building, and they ascended to the second floor.”

Surprisingly, only Haaretz runs images of the controversial Charlie Hebdo magazine covers showing the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Only Yedioth Ahronoth, however, runs an editorial cartoon in response to the slaughter of 10 fellow cartoonists and satirists, as many political cartoonists worldwide did in response to the killings.

The cartoon shows an armed Islamist with a striking resemblance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi springing from a cartoonist’s drafting table in Paris. The cartoonist wrote on Facebook, “They’re also killing caricaturists.”

Haaretz’s Amos Biderman runs a cartoon about snow in Jerusalem, and a short op-ed in which he says that radical Islamists have “beaten us big time in the battle for freedom of expression.” He throws up his hands in resignation and says “Now there is no cartoonist or publisher who would dare start up with them. They’re all trembling in fear,” his own self included. “Everyone’s afraid, but there will always be those kamikazes, like the journalists at Charlie Hebdo,” Biderman writes. “Perhaps we should start studying sharia law.”

If Biderman’s remarks were meant to be satirical, they fall flat.

Israel Hayom pundit Boaz Bismuth writes that the attack on Charlie Hebdo, which wasn’t the first, was only a matter of time. He calls it Paris’s 9/11 attack, and says that “jihad permitted itself a ‘license to kill’ in the heart of hearts of the West. Passport checks, incidentally, aren’t relevant. Like a Trojan horse, jihad is already deep inside, in Paris, in Brussels, in Madrid.”

On the local storm front, Haaretz reports that 17,000 homes, mostly in central Israel, lost electricity because of the storm, which lashed the country with high speed winds, rain, and low temperatures. Photos of a snowy Jerusalem grace the front pages of Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom, but in the end the capital got only a few meager centimeters of hail and loosely packed flakes.

Yedioth Ahronoth says that Jerusalem was disappointed by its few centimeters of snow, compared to the northern city of Safed, whose veteran residents said they don’t recall a snowfall like Wednesday’s (the city got 68 millimeters of precipitation).

Israel Hayom notes that Wednesday’s precipitation was only part one of an ongoing storm that will pound the region for the coming days. One of its weather reporters got the hard-hitting scoop from a four-year-old about his anticipation for the snow.

“I waited almost all day for the snow and when it fell it was very fun for me to play in the snow and to throw snow at one another,” Ilya Shalom Aviv is quoted telling the paper. “I really love to see everything white outside. I’m dying to build a huge snowman.”