Going for the gore

Another terror attack in Paris is what the Hebrew press is talking about, a day late, but amid the chatter about how we’re all going to be stabbed to death on a live online broadcast by the Islamic State, there are some other stories worth mentioning.

As expected, the top stories in Israel Hayom are the murder of a police officer and his partner in Paris on early Tuesday morning, and the ongoing saga of the Orlando shooter. Both Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth, as is common, have nearly the same lame headline in reporting on the fact that the Islamic State-affiliated attacker in Paris, 25-year-old Larossi Abballa, broadcast immediately afterwards on Facebook Live and proclaimed allegiance to the jihadist group.

“Atrocity on live broadcast,” is what Israel Hayom calls it. Yedioth Ahronoth goes for the slightly more inventive “Atrocity broadcast live on Facebook.” Do they coordinate this, or are they just equally talented at crafting uncompelling headlines?

Even if there isn’t salient reporting about the latest Islamic State attack in the Hebrew press, there’s no shortage of political cartooning on the issue. Israel Hayom continues its bludgeoning of US President Barack Obama over the Orlando shooting, with a picture of the banged-up president with the words Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando on his bruised eyes saying: “I don’t see radical Islamic terrorism.”

 

While Yedioth Ahronoth quotes the president’s tirade in which he calls Donald Trump’s insistence that the word radical Islam be uttered a “political talking point” (at the same time misquoting the president), Israel Hayom’s coverage highlights his remark “Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently?” While it’s implicit that Obama’s question is rhetorical, it’s curious whether the paper and its readers would answer in the affirmative.

Haaretz‘s Oren Wolf shows a car crash with a trapped passenger saying “Make sure it’s not the Islamic State.” Is this a commentary on how traffic accidents claim far more lives in Israel than terror attacks but get far less attention? Is it a commentary about how everything violent is attributed to the Islamic State in recent days? Perhaps it’s trying to convey how police everywhere’s handling of the Islamic State threat is a car crash.

Haaretz leaves its coverage of the Paris stabbing to the foreign outlets, but demonstrates its more global outlook with front page reportage on polls showing a majority in Britain in favor of leaving the European Union. But by far the most interesting piece was placed below the fold: Fatah news sites reported that a senior Hamas military wing commander with critical knowledge about the terrorist group’s tunnel network defected to Israel. Bassem Mahmoud Barakah of Khan Yunis fled to Israel with his wife and kids and a laptop full of intel and handed himself over to Israeli soldiers at the border, the paper cites the Palestinian news outlets saying.

When Israel Hayom finally changes the channel from terrorism to something besides terrorism on Page 9, it reports on the Knesset Ethics Committee supporting the ban on members of Knesset visiting the Temple Mount, and police denying a report that politicians are pressuring the high profile investigations unit to drop probes into other politicians.

The political commentators who ordinarily clog the Hebrew press, making it look like a page of Talmud, must have exhausted their punditry earlier this week, and feature little in Wednesday’s papers.

Do my eyes deceive me? The author of Haaretz’s daily editorial must have rolled a fatty and smoked it before writing a piece voicing support for a Likud politician’s bill decriminalizing marijuana.

The paper calls the bill proposed by MK Sharren Haskel “another step in the desired direction,” namely changing the drug laws “to suit the widespread reality in Israel in the 21st century, a reality in which many normative citizens smoke drugs in their free time.” (I take that back, nobody who smokes pot refers to it as “smoking drugs” unless sarcastically.)

The fact that the Ministerial Committee for Legislation decided to put off discussing the law for three months is “unfortunate,” the paper says, “particularly because [Public Security Minister Gilad] Erdan contributes to perpetuating the existing absurd situation in which Israeli police chase after joint smokers instead of dedicating themselves to more urgent and burning missions on the police docket.”

In its final blow, the paper calls the current legislation “boorish and conservative.”

“Smoking cannabis isn’t a crime,” Haaretz says. “Treating it like that is archaic and inefficient.”