French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy argued that the current wave of Palestinian terror, rather than being unique to Israel, bears “more resemblance to the latest installment of a worldwide jihad” inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in an opinion piece published yesterday in The Algemeiner.
It is highly doubtful that “intifada” is the right term to apply to acts that bear more resemblance to the latest installment of a worldwide jihad of which Israel is just one of the stages.
Levy observed that Palestinian political and religious leadership has played a significant role in fueling the terror:
It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about “Palestinian youth no longer subject to any control,” after seeing the series of sermons published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in which preachers from Gaza, facing the camera, dagger in hand, call upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they can, to inflict as much pain as possible and to spill the maximum amount of blood; doubly painful to hear that refrain from Mahmoud Abbas himself, at the outset of this tragic chain of events a few weeks back, describing as “heroic” the murder of the Henkins in the presence of their children, and then expressing indignation at seeing the “dirty feet” of Jews “defiling” the Al-Aqsa Mosque and declaring “each drop of blood” shed by “each martyr” who dies for Jerusalem “pure.”
Levy further denounced efforts to rationalize the violence by attributing it to “political and social desperation,” or to portray it as a cycle that falsely equates Israeli soldiers, officers, and civilians who act in self-defense with their Palestinian assailants.
Levy concluded by noting that the knife, which has been the chief weapon employed in this new wave of violence, has long been the hallmark of Islamist terrorists:
Intolerable, finally, the minor mythology growing up around this story of daggers: The weapon of the poor? Really? The weapon one uses because it is within reach and one has no other? When I see those blades, I think of the one used to execute Daniel Pearl; I think of the beheadings of Hervé Gourdel, James Foley and David Haines; I think that the Islamic State’s videos have clearly gained a following, and that we stand on the threshold of a form of barbarity that must be unconditionally denounced if we do not want to see its methods exported everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
Muhanad Alukabi, the terrorist who killed one person and injured eleven others as he shot and stabbed victims earlier this week in Beersheba, had previously told a co-worker that he believed in ISIS.
Earlier this week, ISIS released five videos praising Palestinian terrorists and calling on them to “Bring back horror to the Jews with explosions, burning and stabbings,” Vocativ reported. According to Vocativ, the hashtag posted alongside the videos, #نحر_اليهود, which translates to #The_slaughter_of_Jews, has been tweeted over 18,000 times since Sunday.
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