• Fact Check: are only one in eight counter-terrorism referrals to Prevent made by Muslims?

    Paul Nuttall, leader of the populist UKIP, claimed that only one in eight referrals to Prevent, Britain’s counterterrorism program, comes from the Muslim community. There are at least four problems with this claim. First, suspicious extremist activities are reported to many different organizations – the police, MI5, the Channel program, anti-extremism websites, etc. – not only to Prevent; second, it is not clear how accurate these figures are: Channel notes that between 2012 and 2014, 56 percent of reports of suspicious extremist activity were likely recorded by Muslims; third, since the religion, age, gender, or ethnicity of the often-anonymous tipper are not published by the Home Office (and are often not available to the Home Office), it is difficult make a determination about the percentage of Muslims among the tippers; fourth, the number of referrals made to the Prevent program is not indicative of the success or failure of the counter-extremism strategy: The Manchester suicide bomber, and one of the terrorists in the Saturday London attack, were reported to Prevent and known to the authorities – and they still managed to carry out their deadly attacks.

  • Macron creates counterterrorism task force

    French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday announced the creation of a counterterrorism task force to tackle radicalization and terrorism in France. The task force will initially have twenty full-time specialists working in shifts, 24/7. A spokesperson for the office of the president said that the task force will be animated by this: “A single slogan in watermark: no blind spot will be tolerated.”

  • Brave Millwall fan saved many

    The fans of Millwall Football Club, a soccer club located in Bermondsey, South East London, have long prided themselves on their refusal to duck a fight, celebrating their intimidating reputation with the chant: “No-one likes us, we don’t care.” Roy Larner, a 47-year old Millwall fan, was at the Black and Blue steakhouse on Saturday night when the three terrorists, wielding knives, burst into the restaurant shouting “Islam, Islam, this is for Allah.” Larner did not turn away to run, however. “I took a few steps towards them and said, ‘F*** you, I’m Millwall’. So they started attacking me,” he told the Sun. Larner fought the three attackers with his bare hands, and bleeding profusely, followed them out of the restaurant, continuing to punch them. The police said that had it not been for the fact that Larner stood his ground and occupied the three attackers for a few minutes, the number of dead and injured would have been higher.

  • How can we better protect crowds from terrorism?

    As the recent terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom painfully show, the odds are in favor of terrorists. All they have to do is succeed once, no matter how many times they try. For public safety professionals to be fully successful, they have to prevent 100 percent of the terror attempts. It’s a number to aspire to, but even the most experienced countries fighting terror – such as Israel and the U.K.– can’t measure up to this standard. These days, it’s necessary to consider any place where crowds congregate as vulnerable “soft targets” for the attackers. Community policing, though, could help. Community policing means using the community as a resource to minimize the spread of radical ideologies. By informing and supporting law enforcement through proactive partnerships, citizens can become key players and reliable partners in what some call “co-produced” public safety. These strategies won’t provide absolute security. But they will help minimize attacks and get us closer to that golden 100 percent standard.

  • What we know so far

    Three terrorists drove a van into pedestrians before jumping out and stabbing people. Seven people were killed and forty-eight injured – twenty-one of them remain in critical condition. Police officers, arriving on the scene within eight minutes of being alerted, fired 50 rounds – a high number of rounds by British police standard – killing the three attackers. One bystander was hit by a police bullet, but is now in stable condition. Prime Minister Teresa May said there is too much “tolerance of extremism” in the United Kingdom.

  • “Enough is enough”: Theresa May

    Prime Minister Theresa May has warned that there has been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the United Kingdom, and vowed to step up the fight against Islamist terrorism after the London Bridge attack. “Enough is enough,” she said. May said the recent wave of attacks showed the United Kingdom was “experiencing a new trend in the threat we face.” She continued: “As terrorism breeds terrorism and perpetrators are inspired to attack, not only on the basis of carefully constructed plots after years of planning and training, and not even as lone attackers radicalized online, but by copying one another and often using the crudest of means of attack.”

  • Eight minutes on London Bridge: years of training led to lightning police response

    Eight minutes. That is the length of time from the start of the London Bridge attack to the three terrorists being killed by armed police. The Metropolitan Police Service is rightly being heralded for the speed, courage and effectiveness of its members in ending a terrorist atrocity. But the success in their response which prevented more people from being injured and killed is, besides individual bravery, about learning from previous terrorist attacks, training, and resources. The terrorism situation in the United Kingdom is clearly in flux. At the moment, the only pattern when it comes to terrorist attacks is that there is no pattern. Nonetheless, members of the police will continue to prepare to deal with worst-case scenarios, based on previous attacks, that they hope will never materialize.

  • Diplomat: Hezbollah is now more powerful than most NATO members

    The Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah is “now more militarily powerful than most North Atlantic Treaty Organization members,” a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations says. In violation of UN Resolution 1701, which was adopted to end the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah has acquired an estimated 150,000 missiles — more than the combined arsenals of 27 NATO nations — with a range capable of striking “anywhere in Israel” and the ability to “launch 1,500 of them a day,” Ron Prosor wrote.

  • The Islamic State group has weaponized children

    In claiming responsibility for the attack in Manchester at an Ariana Grande concert on 22 May, the Islamic State group has sunk to a new low. As shocking as this attack was, it follows a tradition in which terrorists target children or venues specifically to maximize killing the greatest number of young people. Moreover, the average age for IS suicide bombers and executioners is skewing younger and younger, and they appear to be normalizing the use of children across its affiliates. For example, the terrorist group Boko Haram has used children against soft targets, civilians and marketplaces. IS has gone from using children to inspire adults, to manipulating children and their parents to fight alongside adults, to targeting children instead of adults. They do not consider what they have done to be truly evil, although we know it to be.

  • Terrorism worldwide at all-time high

    Worldwide terrorism is at an all-time high, with the cost of violence to the global economy rising to $14.3 trillion last year. The impact of violence in the United States reached $2.5 trillion. Worldwide, deaths from terrorism increased by 80 percent from last year. The intensity of terrorism also increased, with eleven countries last year losing more than 500 people each to terrorist acts. Only five countries experienced that kind of death toll the year before. The majority of terrorist activity was concentrated in five countries: Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.

  • Germany failing to use language and dialect recognition tech to ID asylum-seekers, extremists: Critics

    Critics in Germany say that the country’s immigration agency has failed to use a language recognition software which would have helped immigration agents identify the country of origin of asylum-seekers who have no other ID documents. German authorities could have also identified Islamist and far-right terror suspects earlier if available language recognition software was used, these critics say.

  • French units in Iraq hunt down, kill French jihadists to prevent them from returning to France

    France is giving Iraqi forces fighting ISIS specific information about French jihadists in ISIS ranks so the Iraqi military could target and kill them. Small units of French special forces operating in Iraq are looking for these French nationals, and the French have enlisted the help of Iraqi units in this effort. The goal is to make sure that these French nationals do not come back to France to pose a terror threat there.

  • Six reasons why stopping terrorism is so challenging

    Based on my work in the field, six issues stand out to me as major challenges for developing effective policy on countering terrorism: 1) For most places and times, terrorism is an incredibly rare event; 2) While terrorism is rare, mass casualty attacks are even rarer; 3) A growing number of terrorist attacks are being foiled as plots; 4) Terrorist organizations are extremely diverse which makes generalizations even more difficult; 5) Attributing responsibility for a terrorist attack is often ambiguous or impossible; 6) while researchers are making great progress in developing a framework for the scientific study of terrorism, the study of counter terrorism is still in its infancy. In sum, the terrorist threat in the United States is episodic, sporadic and inconsistent. Too often policies react to fear rather than real threat estimates. For example, there is no empirical evidence to support President Trump’s recent decision to ban citizens of six majority-Muslim countries from travel to the U.S. in the name of preventing terrorist infiltration. Successful policy requires collecting the best information possible, honestly accessing it and avoiding over reaction.

  • The rising homegrown terror threat on the right

    Dealing effectively with far-right violence requires that we treat its manifestations as domestic terrorism. I consider domestic terrorism a more significant threat than the foreign-masterminded variety in part because it is more common in terms of the number of attacks on U.S. soil. The number of violent attacks on U.S. soil inspired by far-right ideology has spiked since the beginning of this century, rising from a yearly average of 70 attacks in the 1990s to a yearly average of more than 300 since 2001. I would argue that this trend reflects a deeper social change in American society. The iceberg model of political extremism, initially developed by Israeli political scientist Ehud Shprinzak, can illuminate these dynamics. Murders and other violent attacks perpetrated by U.S. far-right extremists compose the visible tip of an iceberg. The rest of this iceberg is under water and out of sight. It includes hundreds of attacks every year that damage property and intimidate communities. The significant growth in far-right violence in recent years is happening at the base of the iceberg. Changes in societal norms are usually reflected in behavioral changes. It is thus more than reasonable to suspect that extremist individuals engage in such activities because they sense that their views are enjoying growing social legitimacy and acceptance, which is emboldening them to act on their bigotry.

  • FBI warned MI5 that Salman Abedi was planning terror attack in U.K.

    The FBI informed MI5, the British intelligence agency, that Salman Abedi was planning an attack on U.K. soil — three months before he blew himself up a concert hall in Manchester. The FBI told MI5 that Abedi was part of a North African Islamic State cell based in the north west of England, and which was plotting attacks in the United Kingdom. Abedi was placed on a U.S. terrorist watch list in 2016 after U.S. intelligence, while monitoring Islamist groups operating in Libya, noticed his communications with one of the groups.