• Liberal Professors’ Deadly Delusions about Curing Terrorists

    Last Friday, Usman Khan, a 28-year-old British national who was released from prison on parole in December 2018 after serving eight years for terrorism offenses, killed two people a machete near London Bridge. Earlier in the day, at the same site, he had attended an alumni celebration event hosted by the organizers of Cambridge University’s Learning Together program, having been invited to share his experiences as a former prisoner.Simon Cottee writes that the question raised by Khan, who was killed by police as he fled the scene of his attack, is about redemption and whether it’s either right or prudent to give convicted terrorists a second chance. “I have some degree of sympathy for this view [that everyone should be given second chance], but it needs to be massively tempered with a keen sense of not just what is right but also what is prudent” he writes.

  • Lessons on Terrorism and Rehabilitation from the London Bridge Attack

    Can prison rehabilitation programs work, and is it sensible to try and rehabilitate seriously radicalized individuals convicted on terrorism charges? These are questions not just for the U.K., in the wake of the second London Bridge attack over the weekend, but for the entire world.

  • London Bridge Attack: I Told Ministers We Were Treating Terrorist Prisoners with Jaw-Dropping Naivety. Did They Listen?

    Usman Khan, a 28-year old terrorist who on Friday killed two people on the London Bridge before being killed by the police, served time in jail for “terrorist offenses” and was monitored by the British police. Ian Acheson, who, in 2016, at the request of then-Justice Minister Michael Gove, led a team of investigators who wrote a detailed and highly critical report about the way radicalized Islamist terrorists are managed in jail and after their release, writes: “What we found was so shockingly bad that I had to agree to the language in the original report being toned down. With hindsight, I’m not sure that was the right decision.”

  • Are We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism?

    The newly released U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence specifically highlighted the problem of increasing terrorist attacks perpetrated by individual who are not affiliated with any organization and who are motivated by white nationalist propaganda readily available online. “Policymakers and practitioners need to find new and creative ways to undermine far-right ideology, breaking down its conspiracy theories and severing its ability to recruit new followers, including amongst returning servicemembers,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware write.

  • Survey of 18 European Countries: Hardcore Anti-Semitic Attitudes Remain Pervasive

    About one in four Europeans polled harbor pernicious and pervasive attitudes toward Jews, according to a new global survey on anti-Semitism commissioned by ADL (the Anti-Defamation League). While anti-Semitic attitudes held mostly steady in Western Europe, the poll found hateful notions about Jews are rising in Eastern and Central European countries polled.

  • Antisemitism Unbound

    On Monday, 25 November, the U.K. Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, published an article in The Times in which he describes Jeremy Corbin, the leader of the Labour Party – parliamentary election will be held 12 December – as “unfit for office” because of his inability, or unwillingness, to tackle the growing problem of anti-Semitism in the Party’s ranks. Today, 27 November, The Times’s editorial commented on the urgent and unprecedented intervention by the Chief Rabbi. This intervention “is the result of the Labour leader’s inability to comprehend his culpability for an institutional problem,” The Times writes.

  • When Does Terrorism Have a Strategic Effect?

    Not all terrorism is created equal, Daniel Byman writes. “Some attacks are merely blips on the terrorism radar screen, grabbing headlines for a few days before life resumes as before. Other attacks, however, shake the world.” Over-reaction to an act of terrorism can have as many negative consequences as under-reaction, so leaders must avoid initiating dramatic policy shifts such as going to war or changing allies without thinking long and hard about the consequences of such shifts.

  • Deadly Mali Accident Highlights France’s Counterterrorism Mission in Africa

    Thirteen French soldiers were killed Monday in a helicopter crash in Mali. The accident has drawn attention to France’s on-going involvement in counterterrorism operations in the Sahel region – a vast, arid, and largely unpopulated region south of the Sahara which covers an area the size of Europe and which has seen an alarming increase in Islamist terrorist activities.

  • Radicalizing in The Name of Islam – Analysis

    Analysis of all mass murderers’ motivations, ideologies, and radicalization is crucial, but it has been neglected for offenders claiming to act in the name of Islam. However, a data-rich study by sociology professor Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers a window into Islamist terrorist radicalization.

  • Caliph Abu Unknown: Succession and Legitimacy in the Islamic State

    Three days after the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State released a short message, announcing the new “emir of the Muslims” as Caliph Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. Haroro J. Ingram and Craig Whiteside write that “The Islamic State’s leaders are confident the gambit will succeed because the replacement caliph was selected using a process first executed in 2006, and subsequently repeated in 2010 and again this year.”

  • Nazi Symbols and Racist Memes: Combating School Intolerance

    The number of Americans between the ages of 15 and 21 who saw extremist content online jumped by about 20 percent, to 70.2 percent from 58.3 percent, between 2013 and 2016, according to a new study. As more such material spills from the web to young people and into classrooms nationwide, educators increasingly find themselves under pressure to combat this new front of hate. Many educators say they feel ill-equipped to recognize what students absorb from the web, much less to address it.

  • What ISIS Will Become

    Most Americans first noticed the Islamic State in 2014 – it was called ISIS then — but the group had been around in different forms for about a decade. Many of the group’s commanders and fighters were the same people who had fought U.S. troops under the name of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In the past year, its leader has died and it has lost the last of its territory, which at its peak was roughly the size of Britain. So what’s next?

  • U.S. Warns That Turkey's Syria Offensive Giving IS “Time and Space”

    U.S. defense intelligence officials are offering a sobering assessment of the impact Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria — and corresponding moves by the U.S. and other powers — will have on efforts to destroy the Islamic State terror group.

  • Would Terrorists Set Off a Nuclear Weapon If They Had One? We Shouldn’t Assume So

    For decades, the nightmare of nuclear terrorism has haunted the corridors of power in Washington and the imagination of Western popular culture. While this was true even before September 11, 2001, in the days since, a consensus has formed from which few dare deviate: Terrorist organizations are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and if they are successful, they will use them in an attack as soon as possible. But how valid is this “acquisition-use assumption,” Christopher McIntosh and Ian Store ask.

  • Deaths from Terrorism declined, but the Number of Countries Affected by Terrorism Is Growing

    Deaths from terrorism have decreased by 15.2 per cent in 2018 to 15,952 globally. This is the fourth consecutive year of improvement. Terrorism situation has improved in 98 countries in 2018, nut the situation in 40 deteriorated. Deaths  from terrorism  in Europe fell by 70 per cent, with Western Europe recording its lowest number of terror incidents since 2012. There has been an increase in far-right terrorism in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania for the third consecutive year, with the number of deaths increasing by 52 percent in 2018. This trend has continued into 2019, with 77 deaths to the end of September 2019. The global economic impact of terrorism was$33 billion in 2018, a decrease of 38 percent from the previous year.