• The Orlando shooting: exploring the link between hate crimes and terrorism

    Some are calling the mass shooting at an Orlando gay nightclub an act of terrorism. Others are calling it a hate crime against the LGBT community. President Obama declared it an “act of terror and an act of hate.” Can it be both? The Orlando tragedy demonstrates the importance of exploring difficult questions. For example, are terrorists who commit acts of hate and terrorists who target the government radicalized the same way? Are perpetrators motivated by far-right extremist views similar to those motivated by jihadist extremism? What factors helped push these perpetrators to violence, and what steps can be taken to stop it from occurring again? Answering these questions may help law enforcement identify, investigate, prosecute, and ideally thwart those who seek to turn to violence to achieve their goals.

  • “We don't have religious tests here”: Obama slams Trump’s call for singling out Muslims – including Muslim Americans -- for a different treatment

    On Tuesday, following a meeting with the National Security Council, President Barack Obama delivered remarks on the U.S. fight against ISIS. Obama used the second part of his speech for a pointed, and compelling, lecture on how, during the current political season, Americans should be careful to take the measure of politicians whose proposals evince no grasp or appreciation of the country’s core values and founding principles. This careful consideration is required because, in the name of securing the country against terrorism, there are simplistic, even absurd, nostrums being recklessly put forth as a panacea.

  • Germans should watch for signs of radicalization among their acquaintances: German interior minister

    The German and French interior ministers discuss cooperation between the two countries in the war in terror. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has encouraged Germans to share evidence of radicalization. He said that radicalization of potential terrorists takes places not only online, but also often begins in a person’s social sphere.

  • Report: Hezbollah has more rockets than 27 NATO countries combined

    Any future war between Israel and Hezbollah will take a devastating toll on civilians due to the Iran-backed terrorist group’s practice of embedding its military assets in residential areas, military analysts say. Hezbollah currently has a stockpile of over 130,000 rockets, more than the combined arsenal of all NATO countries, with the exception of the United States.

  • Terrorism and tourism: what cities should do to prepare for an attack

    Citizens of the U.S. and the world were deeply shocked and saddened when a gunman shot and killed about fifty patrons at an Orlando nightclub this past weekend. While the shooter’s primary targets were the people enjoying an evening out, a secondary object of such incidents is typically tourism, with the aim of terrorizing a population so much that people don’t travel there, thereby harming the economy. An examination of how cities and other destinations react to shootings and other situations that negatively affect tourism reveals that there are several important lessons about what cities can do to assure tourists they can maintain their safety. Destinations that take a greater leadership role and provide accurate, relevant, and timely information to their visitors are more likely to win in this zero sum game. Those that are unorganized or silent are more likely to lose. Ultimately, tourists vote with their pocketbooks, and a destination’s relative safety may determine where they take their next trip.

  • French police commander, partner killed by ISIS follower

    Larossi Abballa, a 25-year old French man who had served time for taking part in a jihadi recruitment network and claiming allegiance to IS, stabbed a Paris police commander and his partner at their home, in front of the 3-year old child, before being killed by a SWAT team which stormed their home. ISIS claimed the killing was part of a new campaign targeting French law enforcement personnel.

  • Orlando shooter may have struggled with his sexual orientation

    U.S. law enforcement is looking into a new angle to the Orlando massacre: Mateen’s sexual orientation. The former wife and acquaintances of Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed forty-nine people in an Orlando club, have said he may have struggled with his sexual orientation. Mateeen had been a regular at the Pulse, and tried to pick up men on gay chats and gay dating apps. “We are working to understand what role anti-gay bigotry may have played in motivating this attack,” FBI director James Comey said, adding: “But we are highly confident that this killer was radicalized and at least in some part through the Internet.”

  • 9/11 Report’s 28-page classified section will clear Saudi Arabia: CIA director

    CIA director John O. Brennan said that if the still-classified twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission Report are published, they will clear Saudi Arabia of any involvement in the terrorist attack. Brennan told Saudi-owned Arabiya TV: “I think the 28 pages will be published, and I support their publication. Everyone will see the evidence that the Saudi government had nothing to do with it.”

  • More than 8,000 arrested in Bangladesh in anti-Islamist crackdown

    Security forces in Bangladesh have arrested 3,245 people in the last twenty-four hours as part of broad campaign to put an end to a wave of Islamist violence against minorities, human rights activists, and pro-democracy bloggers. The total number of Islamists, and those suspected of Islamist sympathies, arrested since the campaign began last Friday no stands at 8,192, according the Bangladesh government sources.

  • More mass killings, violent repression in Africa as Islamist groups expand operations

    Africa dominates the list of states that have risen most prominently in the Peoples Under Threat index this year as conflicts involving Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and ISIS-affiliated forces affect more states, while numerous old conflicts are reactivated. While a significant rise in the Peoples under Threat index provides early indication of risk in the future, the mass killing of civilians is already under way in the African states at the top of the index.

  • Gunman kills 49, injures 53 in an Orlando, Florida club (updated)

    Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, a 29-year American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan, entered a night club in Orlando, Florida, at about 2:00 a.m., armed with an AR-15 assault-rifle and a hand gun, and opened fire. He killed 49 people and injured 53 – the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States – before being killed by police officers who stormed the club. Until the shooting early Sunday, the most lethal mass shooting in the United States was the 2007 Virginia Tech rampage, in which 32 people were killed and 30 injured.

  • What we know about Omar Mateen

    Omar Mateen, 29, was born in New York to Afghan parents. Since September 2007 he had worked as a security guard for G4 Security in Florida. The large security contractor provides security personnel to guard building, among them federal buildings. He underwent background checks in both 2007 and 2013. In March, British born Islamic preacher Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar gave a speech outside Orlando in which he called for the death of all homosexuals. “Death is the sentence. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence,” he said.

  • AR-15: The most popular assault-style rifle in the United States

    The gunman who killed dozens of people in Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and, yesterday, Orlando all used an AR-15 rifle. According to the National Rifle Association (NRA), the gun, which was designed by ArmaLite for the U.S. Army and originally produced by Colt in the 1960s, is the most popular rifle in the United States. Between 5 and 8.2 million assault-style rifles are privately owned by U.S. citizens, and 3.3 million of those were AR-15.

  • Major mass-shooting attacks in the U.S. since January 2009

    Between 2008 and 2013, the FBI used a narrow definition of mass shootings – limiting the designation “mass shootings” to incidents in which an individual “kills four or more people in a single incident… typically in a single location.” In 2013 the FBI changed its definition, moving away from “mass shootings” to identifying an “active shooter” as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” The FBI designated the incidents listed below as mass-shooting incidents.

  • Six things Americans should know about mass shootings

    The United States had 78 mass shootings during that 30-year period. The highest number of mass shootings experienced outside the United States was in Germany – where seven shootings occurred. In the other twenty-four industrialized countries taken together, 41 mass shootings took place. In other words, the United States had nearly double the number of mass shootings than all other twenty-four industrialized countries combined in the same 30-year period.