• Can birthright citizenship be taken away?

    University of Illinois labor and employment relations professor Michael LeRoy is an expert on immigration and employment law. In a recent interview, LeRoy discusses the implications of President Trump’s bid to potentially end birthright citizenship in the U.S.“After the Civil War, Northern lawmakers had a basic choice: Do we enact laws to end slavery, or do we go beyond and enact laws to achieve America’s ideal that “all men are created equal”? They said yes to both propositions, and part of this idea included birthright citizenship,” LeRoy says.

  • Scotland Yard on Labour Party anti-Semitism: “There may have been a crime committed”

    Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into allegations of anti-Semitic hate crime in the Labour Party. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said it “appears there may have been a crime committed.” The police said in a statement that special officers had spent two months assessing a leaked Labour Party dossier detailing 45 cases of alleged anti-Semitism and are now working with the Crown Prosecution Service on the investigation. The dossier contains over 80 pages of anti-Semitic statements of Labour Party members, including Holocaust denial.

  • Pittsburgh trauma surgeon: “Stop the Bleed” training saved lives after shooting, but stopping the need must be next

    I am a trauma surgeon who cared for many of the critically wounded victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. As we raced to find the source of blood loss in one of the most severely injured patients, one of my trauma surgeon partners, a U.S. Army veteran of multiple tours, joined me in the operating room to assist. His first comment upon seeing the injuries that we were managing struck me. He said he last saw such destruction from military weaponry when he was serving in Afghanistan.

  • Israeli leader says he has warned EU nations of Iranian plots on European soil

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling Iran the “most potent force of militant Islam,” says he has warned Europe of possible Iranian attacks on its soil. Netanyahu did not provide details, but cases involving alleged Iranian plots to attack Iranian opposition groups or figures in both France and Denmark have emerged in recent months.

  • White House MIA on midterm elections security

    The United States is less than a week away from the 2018 midterms, but the Trump administration has not put together a substantive, coordinated effort to fight disinformation or possible election interference. Law enforcement, homeland security, and intelligence officials held one 90-minute meeting at the Justice Department late last month and left without any answers. No one from the White House attended. In the absence of White House leadership or an overarching strategy, some agencies have taken individual actions. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has stepped forward and convened her own meetings with agency leaders on election security issues.

  • Ideologically motivated far-right extremists have killed close to 500 people since 1990 – and 10 percent were targeted based on religion

    The mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh exemplifies an increasingly deadly form of domestic terrorism committed by far-right extremists: the targeting of institutions and individuals due to their religious affiliation. Unfortunately, it’s not new for far-right extremists to vilify non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon and non-Protestant religions. Judaism has endured most of their ideological rage and conspiratorial paranoia. For more than a century, extreme far-right ideologues have peddled anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories. Their dogma claims, falsely, that globalist Jews have infiltrated the government and other U.S. institutions, and that Jews and non-whites pose an existential threat to the white race.

  • Extremist violence through the mail

    Federal and state law enforcement agencies acted quickly and decisively to apprehend the Florida man who mailed letter bombs to prominent Democrats, to supporters of liberal causes, and to CNN. There is a long history of extremists and terrorists using the mail system to deliver bombs to targets, though it has not been a common tactic.  Others have placed bombs in mailboxes or put bombs in packages designed to look as if they had been delivered by mail or delivery service.

  • Britain’s Jews hold vigils amid rising anxiety about Anti-Semitism

    A poll last year found that almost a third of Britain’s 290,000 Jews have considered leaving during the past two years due to growing anti-Semitism. More than a third admitted that out of fear, they conceal any public signs indicating they are Jewish. While much of the media focus following the Pittsburgh massacre has been on the threat to Jews from white supremacists, for British and European Jews, hostility and the threat of persecution and prejudice is more complex. They say the threat to Jewish life comes from multiple sources, and not only from the nativist far-right, but also from the radical left whose anti-Zionism spills, they argue, into anti-Semitism and whose opposition to globalization and disdain of bankers can echo the memes of diehard opponents on the right. Manifestations of Judeophobic sentiments in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party are another source of worry.

  • Target USA: Key takeaways from the Kremlin’s “Project Lakhta”

    On 19 October, the Department of Justice announced charges against Elena Khusyaynova, a St. Petersburg-based accountant, for working as part of a conspiracy to wage “information warfare against the United States of America.” According to the FBI, Khusyaynova worked as the chief accountant for “Project Lakhta,” a Russian interference operation targeting citizens in the United States, EU, Ukraine, and Russia. The new charges confirm many assessments of the conduct and strategy behind Russia’s Internet Research Agency, and also highlight several key aspects of the Kremlin’s ongoing influence campaign in the United States.

  • $1 million award from DOJ to anti-terrorism education effort

    A team of UMass Lowell students, graduates and researchers working to stop young people from joining terrorist organizations has been awarded $1 million from the U.S. Department of Justice to support that goal. Operation 250 - named for the number of Americans believed to have left the U.S. to join the Islamic State group (ISIS) when the venture launched in 2016 - was created by UMass Lowell students to teach youths, parents and educators how to recognize and avoid falling prey to radicals’ recruitment methods.

  • “Terrorism does not terrorize”: Study

    The impact of terrorism on post-traumatic stress may be less significant than we thought, argue the authors of a significant new study. A major review of over 400 research articles studying the association between acts of terrorism and mental health has reached the significant conclusion that “terrorism isn’t terrorizing” – at least not in a way that causes increases in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) greater than would be expected from any other distressing event.

  • Study finds marked rise in far right’s use of anti-Semitic attacks on social media

    Continuing what began during the 2016 presidential election, the members of far-right extremist groups and the so-called “Alt Right” have stepped up “online propaganda offensives” in the runup to the upcoming midterm elections to attack and try to intimidate Jews and especially Jewish journalists, according to a new study. The most popular term used by Trump supporters “by one or two orders of magnitude” was “Soros,” referring to George Soros, the Jewish billionaire that anti-Semites use to blame for anyone who resists conservatives.

  • White supremacists' anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiments often intersect

    Robert Bowers, the suspect in Saturday’s deadly shooting spree in Pittsburgh, appears to have hated Jews for a variety of reasons, but one anti-Semitic trope in particular seems to have motivated him in the days prior to the shooting, and may have even played a role in his decision to unleash his hateful attack: the common white supremacist conspiracy theory that Jews are behind efforts to impose mass immigration on the United States, with the goal of harming or destroying the white race.

  • Conspiracy theories about Soros aren’t just false. They’re anti-Semitic.

    Blaming Jewish outsiders for dissent and social unrest isn’t new. On Monday eight days ago, a pipe bomb was sent to the home of George Soros, the billionaire whose Open Society Foundation supports many liberal causes in many countries. Soros’s name has also become a central element in conspiracy theories around the world. Talia Lavin writes in the Washington Post that it is no surprise that Soros would wind up as a target of a bomber who appears to have been an avid consumer of conspiracy theories. Soros has become the subject of “escalating rhetoric on the right… which posits Soros as a nefarious force, fomenting social dissent and paying members of a migrant ‘caravan, that has been the subject of intense right-wing fearmongering leading up to the November midterms. And that rhetoric draws on old, and deep-rooted, anti-Semitic ideas that have been deployed by the right for decades.”

  • What history reveals about surges in anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments

    In its early years, the United States maintained an “open door policy” that drew millions of immigrants from all religions to enter the country, including Jews. Between 1820 and 1880, over 9 million immigrants entered America. By the early 1880s, American nativists – people who believed that the “genetic stock” of Northern Europe was superior to that of Southern and Eastern Europe – began pushing for the exclusion of “foreigners,” whom they “viewed with deep suspicion.” As scholar Barbara Bailin writes, most of the immigrants, who were from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, “were considered so different in composition, religion, and culture from earlier immigrants as to trigger a xenophobic reaction that served to generate more restrictive immigration laws.” The political climate of the interwar period has many similarities with the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic environment today.