Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu expressed his condolences Sunday to his Japanese counterpart and the people of Japan following the brutal murder of a Japanese citizen by a terrorist from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Friday.
“Last week, during Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Israel, I told him that the struggle against extremist Islamic terrorism is a joint struggle and only if we are united will we be able to emerge victorious,” Netanyahu said at the start of Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting.
“Israel stands alongside Japan and the Japanese people in this difficult hour.”
The prime minister also noted that International Holocaust Remembrance Day is being marked this week, as well as the day marking the Struggle Against Anti-Semitism. Netanyahu related both to the spread of terror to other populations as well.
He pointed out that last year there was an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, and that a wave of anti-Semitism currently is flooding parts of the world, particularly in Europe – but that history has shown that violence that begins against the Jews does not stop with the Jews.
“It is like a brush fire that spreads very rapidly to all societies and all citizens,” he said.
A series of combined terror attacks carried out over a three-day period in Paris earlier this month by operatives from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) aimed at a list of both Jewish and non-Jewish targets. Some four million people gathered together for a unity march in Paris to protest the attacks and those who carried them out, as demonstrators gathered simultaneously in solidarity with the victims in other cities around the world.
In the weeks that have followed, radical Islamist extremists have been picked up in connection with terrorist activities during police raids in Belgium, France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.