Sunday the rabbi was brought in for questioning

Hide your black hats, hide your beards, because they’re arresting everybody out here. Or at least those with rabbinical ordination and a penchant for hate speech.

Sunday morning finds Jewish religious clerics in the crosshairs in all three major Hebrew-language dailies, as the war on Jewish terror turns toward taking aim at the rabbinical rousers behind a rabble of hate.

The focus on the Abu Beryl al-Baghdadsteins comes after Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Saturday night that the Shin Bet security service needs to focus not only on hilltop youth but on all the hateful hate preachers behind the hate.

“We need to also investigate rabbis whose demands bring irresponsible youths to do all sorts of things. The rabbis whose words bring the youths to do things – they also bear responsibility,” Ya’alon is quoted as saying in Israel Hayom, buried toward the end of a poorly written story.

Yedioth Ahronoth names four rabbis at the top of the list of targets for the Shin Bet, quoting a senior Justice Ministry official saying that “there is no immunity for rabbis.”

The paper reports that the focus on the clerics is a “major policy shift” for the organization, a move not even taken after the 1995 assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by right-wing extremist Yigal Amir.

“It was clear that the prosecuting authorities were not interested in going after the rabbis who wielded influence, who in turn hid behind quotations from scripture. In addition, legal advisers told the government back then that they should be patient with the inciting rabbis, and even that it was preferable for the extreme right actors to blow off steam via words, instead of taking legal action against them,” the paper reports, giving a little history lesson.

In the tabloid’s op-ed page, though, Sever Plotzker doesn’t take much heart in the turn toward prosecuting the Reb Yids of hate, positing that the Shin Bet went easy on Jewish inciters after the Baruch Goldstein Hebron massacre and after the Rabin murder and will continue to do so now.

“If after Goldstein and Amir they didn’t go after the ideological inciters who gave a hand to the killers, then of course they and their followers will not be charged now either,” he writes. “The Shin Bet will make do with uncovering an extremist underground, the prosecution will make do with pressing charges against a few kids, the Religious Zionists will make do with more barren soul-searching, and the public will make do with loud and hollow condemnations. What was will be. The extremists will strengthen.”

The rabbis do find some succor in the least likely of places – lefty broadsheet Haaretz, where reporter/analyst Chaim Levinson mounts an unlikely defense of the West Bank preachers.

“Today’s Jewish terror doesn’t happen because of the rabbis. It is a protest against the rabbis, staged by young Jewish extremists. They protest by their attire, their language, their sidelocks and their attitude to the current reality. They regard the rabbis as too moderate and willing to compromise. They consider rabbis Dov Lior and Yitzchak Ginsburgh – whose names are whispered in the television studios as the arch-terrorists of our generation – as moderates because they don’t back violence,” he says. “The problem with the Jewish extremists of today is not the places they study, but the fact that they don’t study. If they were students in Lior’s much-maligned Nir Yeshiva in Kiryat Arba instead of wandering the hilltops of the West Bank, probably they wouldn’t have gone out and set fire to a family home in the dark of night. The proof is crystal clear: None of Lior’s students are involved in the current terror activities.”

It’s not just right-wing extremists and their rabbis who find themselves under the gun with the advent of a new week, but also groups on the opposite end of the political spectrum, as papers cover the expected ministerial approval Sunday of a law requiring NGOs with foreign funding (read: traitorous traitors who hate Israel and want to push the Jews into the sea because they love the Islamic State and Nazis) to be labeled as such.

In Israel Hayom, commentator Haim Shine backs the measure, saying the governments funding these NGOs hate Israel and are trying to hurt the IDF by showing crocodile concern for human rights.

“It’s about time the law deals with the management of these groups. A normal country would not let foreign governments meddle in its affairs via local agents. The law being considered strikes a balance between the right of free speech and the right of a democracy to defend itself. The demand that it be made public that most of the funding comes from a foreign state, and that there be protocols enacted about affixing tags to their visitors to the Knesset, is a moderate demand,” he writes.

In Yedioth, though, columnist Ben-Dror Yemini posits that the legal measure is not the way to deal with the issue, which he admits is a real one. Firstly, he says, getting governments to stop funding certain groups should be the job of diplomats, not Knesset lawmakers, and secondly, if that should fail and Israel needs to pass legislation, it needs to be for everyone, not just lefties.

“As of now, the proposal being considered today by the government is not the answer. It’s nothing more than a scare tactic against NGOs caught up in it… If we’re talking about transparency, why just groups that get funding from foreign governments? Businesses also have foreign interests, sometimes much more dangerous ones. And the same transparency and same rules that fall on B’Tselem also need to fall on Im Tirtzu, whether its funding is governmental or not,” he writes.

Joining the people behind the bill in showing a surprising lack of self-awareness about the effects of limiting free speech, Haaretz’s hummus-hating Rogel Alpher calls in an op-ed for a “fascist” billboard put up by Im Tirtzu, accusing activists of being “foreign agents,” to be torn down from its perch in the last bastion of liberal thought, central Tel Aviv.

“Whoever put up the billboard thought that we are incompetent doormats who have no desire to fight for our homes. We need to lay down a line in the sand and prove that he is wrong. The mayor of Tel Aviv, Ron Huldai, also needs to act quickly and determinedly to take down the billboard,” he writes. “We can’t let the fascism of Im Tirtzu settle Tel Aviv. Once Tel Aviv falls, nothing will stop the rise of the extreme right.”