TEL AVIV – The car-ramming and stabbing attack at Ohio State University on Monday looked eerily familiar to Israelis who have fallen victim to the exact same terror tactics since the recent wave of Palestinian violence began last fall.
Somali-born student Abdul Razak Ali Artan, whom the Islamic State group claimed as its “warrior,” plowed his car into fellow students before attacking them with a butcher’s knife. He wounded 11 people before being shot dead by police.
Copycat jihadists from all over the world are taking a leaf out of Palestinian terrorists’ handbook, with groups like IS encouraging its supporters to carry out Palestinian-style terror attacks. Recent videos released by the terror group show calls to carry out vehicular, or car-ramming, attacks against pedestrians. IS also posted instructional videos last week on the most effective stabbing methods.
Dr. Joshua Gleis, an international security consultant and political risk analyst, said Monday’s attack at OSU was “100% the same thing” as the recent Palestinian terror attacks in Israel.
“And it is going to be copied even more so moving forward, because it is incredibly simple to do and there are no red flags for owning a car or a kitchen knife,” Gleis, who is president of Gleis Security Consulting, told the Algemeiner. In September, Gleis predicted “a rise in mass stabbings and vehicle-rammings by those with Islamist leanings, because they see how effective such methods are in places like Israel.”
Mimicking Palestinian terrorism is nothing new. Palestinians are credited with re-introducing the world to the suicide bomb in the 1990s, only this time instead of being in a military context Palestinians carried out suicide attacks against civilians.
As the New York Post noted, in most cases the international media fails to label car-ramming and stabbing attacks as terrorism where Israel is concerned, with headlines often focusing on the authorities’ response and not the actual attack, for example, “Israeli Soldiers Shoot, Kill a Knife-Wielding Palestinian.”
Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson also said it would be “interesting” to witness the world’s reaction to the shooting of the OSU assailant.
“When Israeli police shoot Palestinians in the act of car ramming or stabbing, there is an outcry from Palestinians and international ‘human rights’ groups accusing Israel of ‘extrajudicial executions’ and threats to take Israel to the Hague for war crimes,” Jacobson wrote on his Legal Insurrection blog. “Unfortunately, when it comes to terrorist tactics, what happens in Israel doesn’t stay in Israel.”
The NY Post echoed similar sentiments, calling Israel a “terror lab.”
“Welcome to Israel, the terror lab where the latest innovations are tried, practiced and (sometimes) perfected before being exported,” the article read.
Citing statistics from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the “car and knife intifada,” which began last fall, has seen Palestinians committing 167 stabbings, 116 shootings, 48 vehicular attacks and one vehicle bombing, killing 42 people and injuring 602.
“Yet, despite the frequency of attacks in the early days last year, and although a new form of terrorism was born, assaults at the heart of Israel’s cities rarely made it to speeches of world leaders tallying global terrorist incidents,” the article said.
The article continued by expressing the hope that American and European counter-terrorism experts will coordinate and learn from Israel’s “regrettable but priceless” experience.
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