Who needs a gun when a knife will work just as well and may even be more effective in terrorizing “infidels”?
That’s the message of the Islamic State’s multi-language magazine, the latest issue of which hit the Internet this week advising would-be jihadists around the world to use knives and blades in night time stabbing campaigns.
And it seems ISIS’ hate-fueled rant may have already paid dividends as stabbings took place in Brussels, Belgium and in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday.
ISIS issued the second edition of its magazine Rumiyah, meaning Rome. This magazine is published in English, Turkish, German, French, Indonesian, Russian, Arabic and Uyghur.
In the new PDF issue circulated widely on social media and Google Drive, an article assures would-be lone wolves that “one need not be a military expert or a martial arts master, or even own a gun or rifle in order to carry out a massacre or to kill and injure several disbelievers and terrorize an entire nation.”
Knife-wielding terrorists are advised to target smaller crowds or someone walking home from a night out or working the night shift, “or someone walking alone in a public park or rural forested area, or someone by himself in an alley close to a night club or another place of debauchery, or even someone out for a walk in a quiet neighborhood. One should consider canals, riversides, and beaches.”
Dispatching “infidels” with blades is not a method borrowed from any modern practitioners such as drug gangs or cartels, but from the history of Islam itself, says Dr. Timothy Furnish, a professor of history at Reinhardt University in Georgia and author of three books on Islam.
“The knife was a weapon with which the companions of Muhammad were well acquainted,” he told WND.
“Abdur-Razzaq as-San’ani reported in his hadith that a dagger, a type of knife, was the weapon used by Muhammad Ibn Maslamah in the assassination of the Jewish man Ka’b Ibn al-Ashraf, whom Allah’s Messenger ordered be killed,” said Furnish, whose latest book is “Sects, Lies and the Caliphate: Ten Years of Observations on Islam.”
“The overall objective of any just terror operation is to bring horror and misery to the enemies of Allah,” he added.
Fresh knife attacks in U.S., Europe add to bloody year of Muslim stabbings
This concept played out in real time Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, when a knife-wielding man stabbed two policemen in a neighborhood known as a “hotbed of jihadism,” the Telegraph reported.
The assailant, named by the Brussels prosecutor only as Hicham D., a 43-year-old Belgian national, lunged for the officers in a busy main road in Schaerbeek – the Brussels neighborhood where the terrorists behind the airport and metro attacks of March 22 had set up their bomb-making factory.
According to Belgian media, the knife attack took place during an identity check.
The prosecutor’s office confirmed that the man stabbed one of the police officers in the stomach and the other in the neck. Neither injury was considered life threatening.
Later on Wednesday, a man armed with a machete was shot and killed by police at the University of Colorado in Boulder after officials say he refused to drop the weapon.
“He was directed to put the weapon down and refused and it’s believed, in the interest of public safety, that he was shot,” Pribble told CBS Denver.
The suspect has not been identified.
Just over two weeks ago, a Somali refugee, Dahir Adan, went on a stabbing spree at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud, injuring 10, one critically, and WND reported that Minnesota continues to receive dozens of Somali refugees every week. ISIS released a statement after the Sept. 18 attack calling Adan “a soldier of the Islamic State.”
In late July, two ISIS operatives beheaded an elderly Catholic priest on the altar of his church as he was saying mass. And earlier this summer a 17-year-old Afghan refugee went on a stabbing spree in a train station in Germany that injured more than a dozen.
On Aug. 4, teenage Muslim Zakria Buhlan, a Somali refugee, went on a stabbing spree on the streets of London, killing an American woman and injuring several others.
In February, Mohamed Barry, a Muslim migrant from Africa, stabbed four people with a machete at the Nazareth Mediterranean Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, in what the FBI called a “lone wolf” terror attack. One man was left critically injured.
In its magazine article, ISIS explains in a footnote that it now eschews the term “lone wolf” and favors the use of “just terror operations” instead. That would be “just” as an adjective for “justice.” Al-Qaida calls lone operations “open-source jihad.”
‘Many people are squeamish’
The ISIS article, apparently the first in a series about terror tactics, focused on the benefits of knives to help potential terrorists with the “ocean of thoughts” that “might pour into one’s mind” when considering an attack.
“Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh. It is a discomfort caused by the untamed, inherent dislike for pain and death, especially after ‘modernization’ distanced males from partaking in the slaughtering of livestock for food and the striking of the enemy in war,” the un-bylined article states. “However, any such squirms and discomforts are never an excuse for abandoning jihad.”
ISIS suggested a “campaign of knife attacks” in which the attacker “could dispose of his weapon after each use, finding no difficulty in acquiring another one.”
“It is explicitly advised not to use kitchen knives, as their basic structure is not designed to handle the kind of vigorous application used for assassinations and slaughter,” the article states, further advising “to avoid troublesome knives, those that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing.”
In the first edition of Rumiyah, ISIS made it clear that all non-Muslims are legitimate targets.
“Muslims currently living in Dar al-Kufr [land of the disbelievers] must be reminded that the blood of the disbelievers is halal, and killing them is a form of worship to Allah, the Lord, King, and God of mankind,” readers were told. “This includes the businessman riding to work in a taxicab, the young adults (post-pubescent ‘children’) engaged in sports activities in the park, and the old man waiting in line to buy a sandwich.”
