Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Amidst the ongoing manhunt for the perpetrators of Saturday’s bomb attack in New York City, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday praised Israel’s “unbelievable job” of identifying potential terrorists through profiling, and claimed that US law enforcement agencies are “afraid to do anything” — even when they know who they are looking for — “because they don’t want to be accused” of targeting Muslims.

In a “Fox and Friends” telephone interview, Trump also said that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama “don’t want to say ‘radical Islam;’ they don’t want to talk about radical Islamic terrorism.”

This was not the first time Trump cited Israeli methods as a model for emulation. In June, as reported by The Algemeiner, he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” program: “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country…You look at Israel and you look at others, and they do it and they do it successfully.”

Following that statement by Trump, a top Israeli government official characterized profiling as a necessary security measure.

Speaking with foreign journalists, Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz, a veteran member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said security agencies must “build a profile of characteristics as to where the danger comes from and locate it.”

“It is not the whole population, but sometimes when there is a specific form of terrorism, you can seek out Islamic terrorism only among Muslims,” Katz said.

On Saturday evening, 29 people were wounded when a bomb went off on a street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Earlier the same day, an explosion ripped through a garbage can near a Marine Corps charity run in Seaside Park, New Jersey.

And on Sunday, five pipe bombs were discovered near a train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. On Monday morning, a naturalized American of Afghani descent — 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahami — was arrested by police in Linden, New Jersey, in connection with the bombs.

Meanwhile, ISIS claimed responsibility for the mass stabbing attack at a mall in Minnesota on Saturday, in which nine people were wounded. The attacker — 22-year-old Somali Dahir A. Adan — was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer.

On Sunday, an international security consultant and political risk analyst told The Algemeiner that lone-wolf Islamist terrorists around the world — including in the US — were drawing inspiration from Palestinian attacks against Israelis.