Hotline sting

There have been a lot of failures associated with the New Year’s shooting attack in Tel Aviv. There was the deadly shooting itself, which was an intelligence failure and failure of humanity, the fact that the killer got away, a response failure, the police’s delay in releasing a picture of the killer, a management failure, and the fact that it took the police a week to find him after causing a panic in Tel Aviv, despite the fact that he was hiding out in his family hometown in northern Israel.

But the latest failure, which came out on Wednesday and leads all three major Hebrew-language dailies Thursday morning, may be the worst of all. Mere minutes after the attack, two sisters saw a bloodied Nashat Milhem get on a bus out of Tel Aviv, which they reported to the police, who promptly ignored the tip.

“Details which emerged yesterday over the escape of Nashat Milhem after the shooting attack he carried out in Tel Aviv raise question marks in the police’s conduct in the case,” Haaretz writes, in the understatement of the (admittedly young) year.

There’s no understating things at Israel Hayom though, where the front page of the tabloid features side-by-side pictures of Milhem walking freely and drinking a beer after the attack and an illustrative shot of a police call center accompanied by the headline “The mayhem – and the failure.”

Quoting Israel Radio, which first reported the story, the paper recounts the tale of the sisters who saw a suspicious man with bloodstains and heavy backpack get on their bus. The bus driver dismissed their concerns by telling them that he was scarier than the suspect, and then gave the suspect directions for where to get a bus to Wadi Ara, which the sisters heard. Only later than evening, after police decided to publish pictures of the suspect, did they realize it was Milhem.

“That night, when Ofir got to work and told her boss what happened, he quickly called the 100 police hotline. According to him, the hotline heard him out and said they would get back to him. When they didn’t get back to him by midnight, the owner called again, and they told him to call the 110 hotline. He called, and waited half an hour on the line and then gave up,” the paper recounts.

The paper goes on to report that the sisters and their boss tried calling the police several more times on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, but everybody they spoke either kicked the can down the road or told them their account didn’t matter.

One might think the affair would bring out a little soul-searching among the force, but then one might not be familiar with the police.

Yedioth, whose A1 headline reads “The scorn of the police,” has them pretty much sticking with their dismissive attitude and calling the report the Hebrew approximation of “a tempest in a teapot.” (Or as Cleveland.com might translate it, “a storm in a cup,” which is a clear biblical reference to Ezekiel), and maintaining that the girls’ information had no value.

So if you already knew what the sisters had to tell you, that he was in Wadi Ara, Yedioth’s Yossi Yehoshua asks police in a column, why did you drive Tel Avivians crazy by telling them there could be a killer on their loose in their city? Yehoshua’s column, sprinkled with no fewer than eight mentions of the word “failure,” is a scathing rebuke of the police’s conduct in the affair, especially when they already vowed to clean up their act following the failure to relay information on the kidnapping and murder of three teens in the West Bank less than two years ago.

“The police had more than two weeks to prepare for this media event, and it seems that they responded like it fell on them in the middle of the day and they failed with the media – just like on the day of the attack on Dizengoff. Whoever claims that the media is ‘looking for failures’ needs to check again what happened with the unit he leads,” he writes.

Of course, the police aren’t the real bad guys here. That appellation is reserved for Milhem himself, who it turns out, liked to film himself drinking, smoking and ranting about his hatred for Jews and Obama.

Haaretz reports that according to Shin Bet material released Wednesday, Milhem wasn’t just an unhinged loner but a terrorist who saw himself as part of the Islamic State death machine.

“The Shin Bet said that he used terms similar to those used by IS. According to an indictment, before leaving Tel Aviv, Milhem hung up an IS flag, and another flag stating ‘There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet” on a building in Ramat Aviv, a neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Other content discovered on the phone was used by Milhem to mentally prepare for the attack, according to the Shin Bet. Videos on Milhem’s cellphone, located by officials in Ramat Aviv, show Melhem detailing his hatred for ‘the enemies of Islam’ – Shiites, Christians and Jews,” the paper reports.

The strange brew of beer, drugs and religiously inspired murderous hate is not as peculiar as it might seem, writes Reuven Berko in Israel Hayom.

“Indeed, in Islamic State terror attack sites in France, England, Africa, Afghanistan and of course Iraq and Syria there are needles, pills and hallucinogens that these heroes of Islam get messed up with before cutting off heads, burning churches and mosques, raping women, killing, displacing masses from their homes and blowing up artifacts,” he writes. “It turns out that within the mix of murder, drugs and mayhem in the petri dish of those newly religious are found a list of hardened criminals from Europe, Russia and the Arab world. These prison-dwellers are ‘enlightened’ and join groups like IS and its ilk. The murder and crime remains the same, and the ‘believers,’ wild-haired, crazy-eyed stoners, can now behead the infidels, rape and murder, now with the permission of God, Muhammed and Islam, and they hope, like ‘our’ Nishat Milhem, to meet Allah and Muhammed and have sex with 72 virgins in paradise.”