28-Dec-14: You there with the knife. What are you waiting for?

Slogan at the close of the Arab "how-to" video

The slogan at the end of a viral video doing the rounds the last couple of days in the Arabic-speaking world is "What are you waiting for? Rise up and stab." It's an instructional video clip that tries to show how to kill or at minimum cause grievous injuries by attacking an unsuspecting victim with a knife. And it's aimed at Israeli victims.

According to a syndicated JTA report today

"The video shows two masked men wearing black-and-white checkered keffiyahs demonstrating the different stab positions. The video demonstrates how to turn the knife after stabbing and how to stab someone quickly and walk away. It ends with the statement, “What are you waiting for? Rise up and stab.” 

If only this were a sick joke. But it's not. Knifings are a favored form of terrorism among jihad-minded Palestinian Arabs. On Friday, two Israel Police officers were attacked by a hit-and-run assailant on foot who stabbed them both in an alleyway of Jerusalem’s Old City, near Lion’s Gate. A security video camera captured the frenzy and horror.

Screen-shot from the security video [source]

In the last several weeks, we have reported here on these other knifing attacks on Israelis, and many more before them:

• 05-Dec-14: Another knifing attack, this time at Qalandiya Checkpoint, and the attacker is a child
• 4-Dec-14: Knifing attack on shoppers in an Israeli supermarket: the aftermath
• 02-Dec-14: Yesterday's knifing attack at Gush Etzion Junction: prologue and epilogue
• 01-Dec-14: Knifing attacks north and south this morning
• 13-Nov-14: More knife attacks but this time the attackers are intercepted

There's an aspect to this that people far from the scene may not fully appreciate: none of these attackers, whether wielding a knife or an ax or a meat cleaver or a firebomb are wearing uniforms or signs on their forehead saying "terrorist". They are sometimes women, sometimes children, sometimes men who have worked side by side with the unsuspecting Israelis they attacked. Israeli society, and the lives of the people who make it, go on. There's an obvious tension that attacks like these are calculated to make worse; but life does go on, the trains and buses do run, and Arabs have access to the same resources and facilities as non-Arabs do. Go to any Israeli hospital on any day at any hour to see just how true that is. And it remains true even though we Israelis know - and see - the hideous incitement to hurt us and our children that goes on hour after hour in that other universe close by.

And another aspect: it's never been difficult to identify the people who stand behind the "How to stab a Jew" school of digital media. Their intentions are quite public in the Arab societies where they live and operate. There are authorities in those places who are fully aware of the incitement, and of the encouragement to try their hand and stabbing and killing Israelis and Jews. There are also foreign supporters who provide the money and the backing that makes all of this possible, Jordan Media Institute is an outstandingly clear example. As we explained earlier this month ["10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred"], JMI is the beneficiary of ongoing generosity from a range of foreign countries, well-funded NGOs and commercial operations, with most of whom we have been in contact in the last two weeks.

The apathy of several of those bodies is something we are preparing to expose in the coming weeks.

Terrorism always depends on people with money to allow it to go on. Identifying and exposing those people - naming them, shaming them - is critically important to blunting the attacks of the men, women and children with the knives and other implements of destruction.