Now the knives are out

Five days ago, a wave of stabbing and other attacks that had seemed to wane suddenly reared its head again. On Sunday, as readers of this column will recall, papers reacted to the uptick with little more than a ho-hum, the spate of attacks playing second fiddle to other stories. Despite the wave persisting, Monday’s papers were even less interested in the spurt of knifings.

Come Tuesday, though, a day after two police were attacked in Jerusalem, one of them seriously hurt, and suddenly the torrent is at the top of every paper’s agenda. Go figure.

It could be the fact that Tuesday’s stabbing was the first attack in which a victim was put in life-threatening condition, it could be the papers depressingly admitting that the so-called terror is not going way, or it could be just that there isn’t any more important news.

Whatever the reason, while all three papers are on the same page regarding the fact that the rising violence is top news, their coverage diverges based on their own particular bents.

Thus Yedioth Ahronoth’s populistic hyperbolic headline “Terror around the clock,” which is really much more scaremongery than necessary; Israel Hayom backing The Man with the headline “Cops on the front line;” and Haaretz focusing just as much on the attacks as the backlash they sparked in East Jerusalem, with the city shutting down a bunch of Arab stores in East Jerusalem in a seemingly punitive move.

“[Jerusalem] Mayor [Nir Barkat] is again making use of the carrot and the stick, as if East Jerusalem residents are children who need to be taught and not grown adults living in their view – and in the view of every government or international body aside from Israel – under occupation. Today, in the hours after the attack, you could identify an increase in collective punishment,” Haaretz’s Nir Hasson writes in a column that bears a depressingly stark resemblance to one he penned two years ago.

“It’s impossible to discount the possibility that the steps Barkat is so proud of have brought about a decrease in small-time violence in some neighborhoods in the eastern half of the city. But that’s doesn’t make them legal or ethical.”

A more immediate way to decrease violence, or increase it depending on who you ask, is to shoot the guy who is stabbing you, as one policeman did Monday, earning the moniker in Yedioth of “a double hero.”

“I was caught off guard,” the border policeman is quoted telling the tabloid from his hospital bed, where the paper notes he is constantly surrounded by relatives, fellow cops, soldiers and others. “We didn’t see him and didn’t hear him. Suddenly, I felt a stab in my neck. I fell, got up and immediately saw him attack the female cop and stab her and I did what needed to be done.”

As for that poor policewoman, a mother of two, the paper notes that she is in very serious but stable condition.

Crowning the cops “the human wall of Jerusalem,” Israel Hayom columnist Haim Shine thanks them and blames the uptick on violence on those “lying” politicians and columnists who claim that only a return to the 1967 lines will stop the terror attacks.

“Arab-Palestinian terror on Israeli soil will never stop,” he writes. “It has its ups and downs. For 120 years already the Zionist vision and its implementers have been battling decisively against evil terrorists. Whoever thinks they can remove the Jews from their homeland via terror doesn’t understand a thing at all about the significant history of the Jewish people’s rise in their land after 2,000 years of worldwide Diaspora.”

The paper also reports that the cop that shot the terrorist has been to this rodeo before, having been stabbed while guarding a police station in 2005. Taking that rodeo to a macro-level Haaretz analyst Amos Harel notes that this new wave of attacks has seen relatively little success thanks to the fact that Israeli forces and policymakers seem to know what they are doing, with last year’s terror spurt on their resumes.

“The army is responding faster than it did last year; it has already begun bolstering its forces in the West Bank, and police are expected to follow suit in Jerusalem,” he writes.

“Individual soldiers and policemen are also responding more effectively and ending the attacks rapidly, thanks to improved training by both the army and police following last year’s attacks. And Israeli civilians are better protected, thanks to the installation of cameras almost everywhere and of concrete barriers at West Bank hitchhiking posts. All this won’t stop the wave of lone-wolf terror attacks, but it should reduce Israeli casualties.”

But who needs experience when you have big talk. Papers’ coverage of the arrest of a suspect in a series of bombs in New York and New Jersey includes columnists seeing good news for Donald Trump, for better or worse. In Trump-backing Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth uses the capture of Ahmed Khan Rahami to stump for his favorite golden-haired mogul and his anti-immigrant stance.

“This is exactly what Trump is talking about – about the danger that among migrants from Muslim countries are terrorists, and on the fact that America is not winning against terror. So what should an American think? On one hand, the media tells him that Trump is loudmouthed and says things that are very wrong, definitely not politically correct, and on the other hand, these events prove that maybe sometimes he is right,” he writes. “There’s no doubt that the fact that Obama continues, even after eight years and hundreds of attacks around the globe, to refuse to say the words “Islamic terror” plays into the hands of Trump, who suddenly is giving examples of places, like Israel, where profiling works and reduces damages.”

On the flip-side of that is Yedioth’s Orly Azulay, who notes with abject horror how Rahami’s reign of attempted terror will give Trump an edge, predicting that in the next 50 days he’ll “dance on blood” until he becomes a winner.

“If Ahmed Khan Rahami didn’t exist, Donald Trump would have had to invent him. The youth of Afghan descent has strengthened the campaign of fear Trump has run since the beginning. Fear of foreigners, of Muslims, or immigrants,” she writes. “Hillary Clinton has much more experience than Trump fighting terror and managing policies, but he has the right vocabulary for a jittery public. Only he can say: We’ll fight them, we’ll exterminate them, we’ll deport them, we’ll take their visas. Never mind that behind the words he has no plan or smidgen of an idea how to actually do that.”