• A Global War on Terror Memorial Is Unnecessary

    Chris Yeazel writes in War on the Rocks: “I am a veteran of the “Global War on Terror,” and believe that constructing a memorial to the war I fought in is unnecessary. The effort is well-intentioned and sincere, but risks creating a sense of false closure for the American people regarding a series of conflicts that remain far from over. Perhaps more importantly, veterans could have a positive impact on the lives of many Americans if we redirected the energy dedicated to constructing such a memorial towards other causes.”

  • U.S. faces long-standing biological threats challenges

    GAO officials testified before a House committee on their efforts to identify and strengthen U.S. biodefense. GAO has also released a report highlighting the agency’s findings. Despite President Trump signing off on the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovations Act (PAHPA) on Monday, GAO says that there is still a lot of work to be done.

  • Israeli cyber intel helped foil attacks in “dozens” of countries

    Israeli cyber intelligence has helped thwart “major” terrorist attacks in “dozens” of countries, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a cyber-security conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Israel shares information about cyber-threats and attacks with 85 countries, he explained.

  • Small increase in far-right extremist violence in Germany

    The BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, said that violent crimes driven by xenophobia rose slightly in Germany last year. In a new report, BfV says that there were 24,100 right-wing extremists in Germany — 100 more than in 2017 — of whom 12,700 were considered “violence-oriented.”

  • Tehran has set up network of terror cells in Africa to attack U.S., Western targets

    As part of its broad response to the increasing severity of the Western economic sanctions, Iran has been setting up a sprawling network of terror cells throughout Africa. The cells, operated by the Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps which is responsible for overseas operations, aim to attack U.S. and other Western targets, at the time and place of Tehran’s choosing, in retaliation for the sanctions – let alone a military strike by the United States or Israel.

  • Hezbollah operative collected sensitive information about Toronto Airport for potential future attack

    An operative for the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah collected “detailed information” about Toronto’s Pearson airport, according to a report released by Canada’s air safety agency on Tuesday. The Hezbollah operative also scouted New York’s JFK airport and U.S government facilities, as well as identifying Israelis in the United States who could be targeted by the Iranian-sponsored terrorist group.

  • International community unprepared to deal with catastrophic biological event

    The risks of a global catastrophic biological event are growing, intensified by an increasingly interconnected world, terrorist and state interest in weapons of mass destruction, global political instability, and rapid advances in biotechnology. International leaders and organizations today are unprepared to react with the kind of effective, coordinated response needed to investigate and identify the pathogen, prevent the spread of disease, and, most importantly, save lives.

  • How the "White Replacement" conspiracy theory spread around the globe

    From pockets in small town Minnesota to Christchurch, New Zealand, a racist conspiracy theory has taken hold—sometimes to deadly consequences. The “great replacement,” also known as “white genocide,” is summed up by its name: a secretive cabal of elites, often Jewish, is trying to deliberately destroy the white race through demographic change in importing immigrants and refugees. Luke Darby writes in GQ that obsession with racial purity obviously goes far back, but the modern iteration of “white genocide” comes almost directly from The Turner Diaries, a racist novel self-published in 1978 by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, writing under the pen name Andrew Macdonald. The book is set in a dystopian America where white people have been disarmed and oppressed by non-whites. The book culminates in a white nationalist revolution led by a group called The Order, who go on to plan a global genocide against non-white people. There’s another layer to the panic over demographics: the fear that birth rates for white people are falling all across western nations. The idea was partially popularized in a 2012 book by French philosopher Renaud Camus, and it’s articulated in another white nationalist trope, the “14 Words”: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

  • The complex issue of returning Islamic State fighters

    Australian researchers say the government needs to look beyond stripping citizenship from Islamic State fighters seeking to return to Australia as an approach to dealing with terrorism. The researchers argue the federal government must do more to build the Australian public’s understanding of the issue or risk providing a narrative that further feeds IS’s rhetoric.

  • Several German pro-immigration politicians receive death threats

    As the investigation of the killing of pro-immigration politician Walter Lübcke intensifies, Cologne’s mayor and several other German politicians who support generous refugee admission policies have had their lives threatened. Two of these politicians, in 2017, have already been attacked by knife-wielding far-right extremists.

  • The danger of labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization

    President Donald Trump announced in April that he supported designating the Muslim Brotherhood, a prominent international Islamist movement, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). This decision has proven to be highly controversial due to the lack of legal justification for the designation, the repercussions for U.S. regional interests, and the absence of any strategic gains from adopting such a policy. Joe Boueiz writes in the National Interest that experts, pointing to the integral role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the countries that they operate in, worry that the FTO designation could elicit a strong anti-American backlash and prompt those who rely on the Brotherhood’s social services to view America as an enemy.

  • How deeply has Germany’s murderous far right penetrated the security forces?

    On June 2, Walter Lübcke was found dead in his garden with a bullet wound in the head. In his home town of Kassel, in the heart of Germany, the affable 65-year-old politician was a well-known member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center right party who had welcomed immigrants when she opened the country’s doors to refugees in 2015—and who had weathered a storm of hatred on social media as a result. Josephine Huetlin writes in the Daily Beast that at first, police insisted there was no political connection to the murder, and several investigators dismissed the possibility the killer came from the far right. But this week they arrested a suspect with neo-Nazi associations and a history of racist crimes. Now, the federal prosecutor’s office has taken over the case, which means it will be treated as an act of extremism and, in effect, of terrorism.

  • Terrorist sympathizer who placed bombs in South Carolina roadways sentenced

    A man and his daughter were driving down a rural highway in Anderson County, South Carolina, on 30 January 2018, when they noticed something odd—a glowing wicker basket in the middle of the road. On 4 and 15 February, the bomber placed other bomb-like devices in the area. Two more devices were found in the subsequent days. The FBI’s investigative and scientific teams cracked the case, and in February 2019 the culprit was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

  • Brain scans reveal cognitive triggers for extremist violence

    Scanning the brains of men who support a terror organization associated with Al Qaeda reveals insights into the psychology of radicalization and terrorist violence. Arguments and attempts at persuasion that rely on rational and seemingly reasonable attempts to pull people away also will have limited impact because the part of their brain associated with deliberative reasoning has deactivated.

  • “Preventing and countering violent extremism” can work

    “Welcome back to your motherland!” was heard recently in Kazakhstan, which has repatriatedsome 500 men, women and children who had been living in the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Kazakhstan isn’t alone. Countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia, and beyond, are grapplingwith whether to accept the thousandsof people who left home to join the Islamic State. Stevan Weine and Eric Rosand write in Just Security that Kazakhstan, however, is one of only a handful of countriesthat have accepted their citizens being held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeast Syria or by the Iraqi government. In fact, most have so far refused to repatriate their citizens (including children born in the conflict zone). The reasonsinclude security concerns and pushback from nervous publics who don’t want them back in their communities.