Far from US, Trump’s ban rankles Israeli press

Grisly murders were once not run of the mill occurrences in Israel and they tend to generate outsized media attention. The horror exhibited in the Hebrew newspapers on Sunday about a quadruple homicide in a quiet town on the shores of the Sea of Galilee is accompanied by lachrymose prose. The faces of a mother and three children stabbed to death in Migdal are underscored by the fact that the murder took place on the Sabbath.

Whereas Israel Hayom refrains from reporting on the identity of the suspect — for a reason that’s unclear — Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz identifies the suspect taken into custody by the police as the husband of the woman, father to two of the children slain. The son of a neighbor was the third child killed. The tabloids run some of their typical cookie-cutter, sensationalist headlines that provide no substance and serve only to catch the eye. “The mother and children murdered,” is Israel Hayom’s, and Yedioth Ahronoth quotes a bystander or police officer or family member saying something that could apply to virtually any violent crime: “Such cute and pure children, why did he murder them?”

When it comes to gruesome details, however, Yedioth Ahronoth goes beyond the rest, running a large photo of blood splattered all over children’s toys and the floor of the family’s home.

Speaking of unspeakable horrors, US President Donald Trump’s executive order to close the borders to citizens of seven Muslim countries on Friday catches the attention of the Hebrew press on Sunday. Basing its coverage on The New York Times and Reuters, Haaretz reports on Muslims being taken off flights and questioned at airports as a 90-day ban aimed at “weeding out” Islamic radicals took effect. The order also closes the gates of America to refugees for 120 days, with the act referred to in Yedioth Ahronoth as “a particularly dramatic order.”

Israel Hayom apparently cares about Trump’s outrageous executive order slightly less than news that some areas of northern Israel got a dusting of snow over the weekend. Alongside its report on Trump closing off the border to Muslims from Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Libya comes his statement praising Israel’s construction of a wall as he gears up to build one on the border with Mexico. Netanyahu jumped in with a Twitter message of his own praising Trump’s wall, which more likely than not will be paid for by American citizens, not Mexico. As ever, Israel Hayom once again runs the picture of Netanyahu and Trump shaking hands in the latter’s gilt apartment in New York.

Chemi Shalev has little positive to say about Trump in his Haaretz column, which he kicks off by saying that the president “over the weekend became the hero of Muslim-haters across the world.” He lumps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in with the American hard-right, the Russian government and European racists for their support for Trump’s actions.

“His involvement in a subject so divisive and controversial internally in the US is shocking,” Shalev says, “but when he does it in a clear message when the actions of the US president are interpreted as a declaration of war against Muslims, it becomes a dangerous gamble.”

Yedioth Ahronoth’s reporter Orly Azoulay makes a bizarre argument in which she attempts to contrast Trump and former president Harry S. Truman, and says that if Truman had closed the gates of immigration as Trump is “there wouldn’t be Judaism in the US like there is today. “While her point is admirable, her argument is lacking substance. The Jewish population of the United States was already well over four million when the US entered the war in 1941. That number was increased by a negligible 35,000 and 40,000 by the Truman Directive, which opened the doors to displaced persons after the war.

There are many arguments to be made against Trump’s executive order and Azoulay’s falls short. “What Trump did now is a religious war. There’s apparently no one by his side who understands the consequences, but American Jews needs to understand,” she writes.

But her most misplaced comment, after demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of American Jewish history, is writing that American Jews need to enlist their “money, strength and influence” to combat this as they did with African-Americans during the civil rights marches.

Azoulay’s message to American Jews is broadcast here to Hebrew-speaking Israelis, not the correct audience.