Opinion: Palestinian Terrorists Aiming to Replace ISIS as 'Chief Butchers'? - Erick Stakelbeck, CBN News

Erick Stakelbeck -  CBN

Opinion: Palestinian Terrorists Aiming to Replace ISIS as 'Chief Butchers'?

By John Waage

CBN News Sr. Editor

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Both Arab and Israeli observers of the daily stabbing attacks by Palestinians in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities say the terrorists seem to be modeling their attacks after the beheadings conducted by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Palestinian cartoonists frequently celebrate the stabbings with cartoons on social media. One shows a woman wearing the Muslim hijab stabbing a pig dripping blood with a star of David on its back.

Last week in an interview with CBN News, Israeli Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz warned that some of the attacks in Israel look as if they came from the ISIS playbook.

Are Palestinian terrorists adopting ISIS's tactics? CBN News Terrorism Erick Stakelbeck addressed that and more on Newswatch, Oct. 19.

Click here to watch the CBN News interview: Erick Stakelbeck

"The fact that they're waving knives, coming to people's necks, trying to cut them or behead them -- I'm confident that at least some of these terrorists were not just indoctrinated but inspired also from ISIS," Steinitz said.

Palestinian journalist Bassam Tawil confirms the suspicion in a powerful article for the Gatestone Institute.

"They (the Palestinian terrorists) are trying to replace Islamic State jihadis as the chief "butchers" of humans in the Middle East," Tawil wrote.

"How can our leaders in Ramallah accuse Jews of 'contaminating' the Al Aqsa Mosque with their 'filthy feet' at a time when our youths burn a religious site such as Joseph's Tomb?" Tawil asked.

"The attacks are an attempt to erase history so that Jews will not be able to claim any religious ties to the land. This is exactly what the Islamic State is doing in Syria and Iraq," he added.

ISIS confirmed its support for the Palestinian attacks with the release of a video on social media Monday. A masked spokesman praised the Palestinian attackers as "lone wolves who refuse to be subdued and spread fear among the sons of Zion."

The ISIS media campaign, unprecdented in scope, calls for Palestinians to continue the attacks on soldiers and civilians, using "every means at their disposal, including knives, vehicles, poison and explosives."

With this as a backdrop, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet Thursday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Germany.

White House and State Department responses to the wave of violence have been tepid and laced with the usual moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinian leaders, who have in large measure sparked the violence as well as applauded it.

A more appropriate response would be to condemn without qualification the spread of terror throughout the Palestinian territories and the ISIS connection, including the incitement to violence and the celebration of it in the Palestinian media.

Democratic presidential candidates might also help by demanding a more robust response from their president.

Republicans in Congress could help by tracking the flow of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to the Palestinian Authority and forcing a public account of where our tax dollars are being spent.

Get with it, Washington, or your approval ratings will drop even further.