In the month of October alone, Israel suffered 609 attacks. The world’s only Jewish state has suffered almost daily attacks from their Palestinian neighbors (mostly stabbings) after unfounded rumors of changes on the Temple Mount were circulated over social media. Yet, the big three–ABC, NBC, and CBS–found it hard to blame radical Islam for the surge in violence, as noted by the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters division:
In the three months leading up to the ISIS’s deadly Paris attacks, the ABC CBS and NBC evening news programs have mentioned terror attacks on Israelis 30 times. Twenty-five of those stories describe the perpetrators as Palestinian. But not one made any mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim” in reference to the attacks. Besides calling for the destruction of Israel, Hamas’ charter makes plain that it is a religious movement and that it’s political aims are inseparable from Salafist Islam. Hezbollah is equally rooted in the radical Shia faith of the Iranian mullahs. Both claim to be waging jihad again Israel.But news outlets conveniently tend to forget the connection between radical Islam and Palestinian attacks on Israelis, preferring to slap the political label on attackers, as when reporting “A Palestinian teenager fatally stabbed two ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday night, the Israeli police said, and wounded the wife of one of them. It was the second fatal attack on an Israeli family in three days.” Of course, given their sympathies, the networks don’t like to acknowledge that Israel is facing terrorists. They prefer to call killers “militants” or “fighters” nine times more often than they’ll say “terrorists.”
Amnesty International finally got around to condemning the Palestinians knife attacks before the Thanksgiving holiday, though the stabbings continued and it looks as if the violence isn’t going to subside for the foreseeable future.
As a result, Israeli mothers are enrolling themselves and their children into self-defense classes, specifically learning how to defend oneself from someone with a knife. Firearm permits are also increasing in demand after the Israeli government loosened restrictions on the licensing process. While not every Israeli has a firearm permit–the country doesn’t have a right to bear arms within their laws–some are arming themselves with whatever they can find in case they find themselves in a life or death situation.