Can ‘open source jihad’ be stopped?

It was Oct. 27, 2015, shortly after 10 am. Two terrorists from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber boarded an Egged bus in the East Talpiot area. One was armed with a gun, the other with a knife. They started shooting and stabbing passengers, including 76-year-old Richard Lakin, who died two weeks later from his wounds.

“We spent almost two weeks at Hadassah Hospital trying to save his life,” recalls Richard’s son Micah Lakin Avni, CEO of Peninsula Group Ltd., a publicly traded Israeli commercial finance institution. “During those two weeks, we had a lot of time to think.”

Avni, who spoke in late June at a conference hosted by the Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center legal rights NGO, spent most of those two weeks pondering what could bring two middle-class, seemingly normal 20-year-old Israeli Arabs to do something so evil. He wondered, “How is terror spreading so rapidly around the world?” And he searched the Internet.

“Two days after the attack, I saw a video on the Internet that the Hamas Student Union put out,” says Avni. “It was a reenactment of the attack. It went viral, was viewed by millions of people. … What could make two people do something like that? If you watch this stuff, it has an effect on your mind.”

A quick Wikipedia search of “List of Islamist terrorist attacks” reveals a significant spike in such attacks worldwide during the last decade. In 2005, there were 16 Islamist attacks, according to the open source Internet encyclopedia, mainly in Israel, Indonesia, and India. In 2015, there were Islamist 117 attacks, which took place all over the world — including in Afghanistan, France, Egypt, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

Avni quickly realized that while social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other networks — are not the platforms generating incitement, they are the pipes passing it along and facilitating the spread of incitement-laden information.