From Copenhagen to Tehran

Iran and yet-another European terror attack make the front pages in the Israeli press on Sunday as a gunman opens fire in Copenhagen and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel weighs in on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech in Washington.

By the time the print papers went to press, the shooting outside a Copenhagen synagogue had yet to break, so the headlines in the Hebrew media are limited to the shooting outside a café, which was hosting an event about Islam and free speech featuring a lecture by a cartoonist known for caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. One person was killed and three injured, and police suspect that Lars Vilks, the cartoonist, was the target of the attack.

Yedioth Ahronoth speaks to an Israeli who was at the scene of the attack. He said, “Everyone was talking all evening about what happened at Charlie Hebdo [in Paris last month] and wondered if it could happen again. And behold, it indeed happened.”

“We all sat in the hall listening comfortably to the speakers, and suddenly I heard — in the direction of the hallway at the entrance to the hall — a loud sort of noise: boom, boom, boom! Like loud knocks, and then shouts from the direction of the entrance,” recounts Doron Zilberberg. “There was panic. People lay down on the floor, hiding beneath the windows. I thought they were exaggerating, but suddenly I saw one of the guards get up with a drawn pistol and run outside.”

With little information to go on about the prime suspect and his motives, Israel Hayom asks its readers in its lead: “Has Islamic terrorism also struck Denmark?” Only farther down does the paper report that all that was known about the suspect was that “he was dressed in black, was wearing a mask and spoke Danish.” (The suspect was later shot dead by police in the early-morning hours.) The paper also notes that Europe raised its terror alert levels after last month’s attacks in Paris out of concern for possible local terrorist cells that identify with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

Haaretz points out that al-Qaeda had previously put a $150,000 bounty on Vilks’s head following his publication of a cartoon depicting Muhammad as a dog in 2007. The artist was unhurt in the attack and was escorted out of the building by the police, along with the French ambassador who was at the event and was also unharmed.

Despite the incident in Copenhagen, the focus of the media’s attention remains on Iran, its nuclear program, and Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to a joint session of Congress in Washington. Haaretz reports on a classified Foreign Ministry document that states that the odds of the world powers reaching a nuclear deal with Iran are slim.

The P5+1 countries and Iran are locked in negotiations to reach an agreement by March 31, and the Foreign Ministry’s intelligence division believes the likelihood of that happening are low, contrary to remarks by Netanyahu that they’re on the verge of signing a deal detrimental to Israel’s interests. The internal report is based on an examination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speech to air force officers on February 8, in which he voiced opposition to a two-phase deal.

Wiesel’s defense of the prime minister’s decision to speak to Congress — and to attend the said speech as well — is the lead story in Israel Hayom. The paper interviews the Holocaust survivor and author almost exclusively about the issue. Wiesel says that “the Iranian nuclear threat is a large and real danger, not just to Israel but to the whole world. I don’t want them to have an atom bomb.” He goes on to say, after much plumbing of the depths, that Netanyahu “is the prime minister of Israel and as such he has a historic role, and many, such as myself, see his speech to Congress as a historic act.”

The paper’s columnist, Boaz Bismuth, points to Wiesel’s remarks as proof that Netanyahu is right and President Barack Obama is wrong. He says Obama is still trying to prove to the world that he deserved his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, and that ending the nuclear standoff with Iran would serve that purpose.

“By Wiesel’s estimation, Iran must not be nuclear, period,” he writes. “And in order to prevent it, we need to disassemble its nuclear facilities. Obama doesn’t think so. Netanyahu does. And only because of this Elie Wiesel decided to support the prime minister in his initiative to speak before Congress, even at the expense of conflict with Obama.”