French warplanes have launched thirty airstrikes on more than a dozen Islamic State targets in Raqqa, the capital of the self-proclaimed caliphate. The raids were France’s first – but likely not the last — retaliation to Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris. The French Ministry of Defense said in a statement that the sites attacked by the French planes had previously been identified on reconnaissance flights. The bombing raids were launched simultaneously from bases in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan in coordination with U.S. forces.

The vast majority of Muslims almost certainly feel moral revulsion and outrage about the violence perpetrated by ISIS in Paris last Friday. However, the truth of the matter is that ISIS leaders and supporters can and do draw on a wealth of scriptural and historical sources to justify their actions. Traditional interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law, approved aggressive jihad to propagate Islam. They permitted the killing of captive enemy men. They allowed jihadis to enslave enemy women and children, as ISIS did with the Yazidi women in Syria. ISIS’ claim of Islamic legitimacy can be countered only by a viable alternative interpretation of Islamic law. But for an alternative view of Sharia to emerge and take root through modern consensus, Muslims must first acknowledge and confront the problem of having acquiesced to a traditional interpretation of Sharia and ignored alternatives that would condemn ISIS as un-Islamic. Whenever ISIS collapses or is defeated, and for whatever cause, the world can only expect a new ISIS to emerge every time one disappears until we Muslims are able to discuss openly the deadlock in reforming Sharia.

President Francois Hollande declared three days of national mourning, beginning Monday. France will observe a moment of silence on Monday at noon. Hollande said the Friday’s terrorist attack constitute “acts of war” against France. At least one of the attackers was a French citizen: He was born on 21 November 1985 in the suburb of Courcouronnes, about twenty miles south of Paris. He had been known to police since 2004 and was flagged as an extremist in 2010. One gunman was found with a Syrian passport in his pocket, born in 1980. He had not previously been known to French police. This terrorist arrived in Greece with a group of sixty-nine Syrian refugees, and was allowed into France on 3 October. It is not known whether the terrorist is Syria, since Syrian identity documents are being bought and sold on the black market.

The Pentagon confirmed earlier today (Friday) that a U.S. airstrike in Syria targeted Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS terrorist known as “Jihadi John,” who appeared in several grisly ISIS propaganda videos showing the beheadings of eight hostages. U.S. military sources said there was a “99 percent certainty” that Emwazi had been killed in the drone strike. Analysts say that Mohammed Emwazi had no meaningful role in ISIS’ leadership structure, but that symbolically, his death would show that Islamic State is an organization that is suffering and that it would undercut recruitment.

The Berkeley City Council members said in a meeting last week that Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), an initiative of the DHS which, through regional and national agencies, disseminates to local law enforcement information on possible terrorist threats, has the potential of criminalizing innocent people. Members of the council agreed that in order to prevent hurting innocent people, the council should adopt a Police Review Commission recommendation to modify Berkeley Police Department orders on Suspicious Activity Reporting. The modification aims to make sure that SARs can be filed “only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct.”

A new report by Amnesty International reveals the vast scale and chillingly orchestrated nature of tens of thousands of enforced disappearances by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad over the past four years. The report reveals that the state is profiting from widespread and systematic enforced disappearances amounting to crimes against humanity, through an insidious black market in which family members desperate to find out the fates of their disappeared relatives are ruthlessly exploited for cash. The scale of the disappearances is harrowing. The report documents at least 65,000 disappearances since 2011 — 58,000 of them civilians. Those taken are usually held in overcrowded detention cells in appalling conditions and cut off from the outside world. Many die as a result of rampant disease, torture, and extrajudicial execution.

Facing criticism, the FBI has decided to delay the release of “Don’t Be a Puppet,” an interactive program aiming to help teachers and students identify young people who show signs of flirting with radicalism and violent extremism. The program was scheduled for release Monday (yesterday). Civil rights advocates and American Muslim leaders, invited by the agency to preview the program, harshly criticized it for focusing almost exclusively on Islamic extremism. They noted that practically all the mass school shootings – and most of the violence perpetrated by extremists — in the United States had nothing to do with Islamic militants.

The U.K. police and intelligence service, ahead of the publication this coming Wednesday of legislation on regulating surveillance powers, have urged the government to give them the power to view the Internet browsing history of British computer users. Senior officers were pressuring the government to revive measures which would require telecommunications companies to retain for twelve months data which would reveal Web sites visited by customers. The police and intelligence agencies argue that such measures are necessary because the scale of online activity has made traditional methods of surveillance and investigation less useful.

To allow a better understanding of how terrorist organizations network and function over time, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has launched the Big Allied and Dangerous (BAAD) online platform. The tool features updated, vetted, and sourced narratives and relationship information and social network data on fifty of the most notorious terrorist organizations in the world since 1998, with additional network information on more than 100 organizations. The research team plans to expand the database and online platform to include more than 600 terrorist organizations.