• A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany’s New Hateful Reality

    The death threats started in 2015, when Walter Lübcke defended the refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel.On June 2, Mr. Lübcke was fatally shot in the head on his front porch, in what appears to be Germany’s first far-right political assassination since the Nazi era.

  • Right-Wing Terrorism Could Get Even Worse after Trump

    Right-wing terrorism has grabbed public attention in the Trump era, thanks to a series of bloody attacks on synagogues, black churches, and mosques. The violence itself is shocking enough, but President Donald Trump’s reaction to it—a mix of denial and equivocation—proved even more galling to many Americans. For white supremacists themselves, the Trump era is a golden one, reversing the steady marginalization the cause had suffered since the civil rights era. But for those hoping that right-wing terrorism will decline should Trump leave office after 2020, the reverse is more likely.

  • Twitter Takes Down Louis Farrakhan’s 2018 Anti-Semitic Tweet after Policy Change

    Twitter said Tuesday that it was requiring anti-Semitic hate preacher and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to delete a 2018 anti-Semitic tweet that compared Jews to termites. The move came as the social media giant introduced new rules prohibiting “language that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion.”

  • YouTube removes audio copies of neo-Nazi books

    James Mason’s neo-Nazi manifesto, Siege, has inspired a generation of neo-Nazis since it was first published as a single volume in 1992. The book sparked a violent online subculture called Siege Culture, devoted to Mason’s calls for independent terror cells to carry out a race war. YouTube has now taken down uploads of both Siege and the neo-Nazi book The Turner Diaries.

  • Israel help thwart 50 terror attacks in 20 countries

    Israel’s intelligence services helped prevent 50 terrorist attacks in 20 countries in the last three years, it was revealed last night. A report by Israel’s Channel 12 News said that the Mossad and Israeli Military Intelligence had helped prevent fifty terrorist attacks by providing foreign governments and their intelligence agencies with information that an attack was being planned either by ISIS or Iranian sponsored groups in their countries.

  • The Great Replacement, White Genocide Theories: Prevalence, Scale, Proliferation

    A new in-depth study of the Great Replacement and White Genocide, two racist conspiracy theories with hundreds of thousand followers – some of them violent — in Europe and the United States, has found that the proliferation of theses conspiracy theories was helped by their mainstreaming by elected officials, and the active promotion by alternative far-right media outlets.

  • Venezuelan government's death squads kill thousands: UN

    A UN report published Thursday has detailed the extrajudicial executions of thousands of young men by the special forces of the government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The report offers evidence that that the Venezuelan government’s death squads are carrying out Maduro’s broad strategy for neutralizing the opposition to his regime and eliminating political opponents.

  • U.S. Designates Chief of Hezbollah’s Intelligence Unit as a “Global Terrorist”

    The United States announced last Tuesday that it has identified Husain Ali Hazzima, a senior Hezbollah operative, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). Meanwhile, a new intelligence assessment released by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia revealed on Thursday that the number of Hezbollah operatives in Germany rose in 2018.

  • Transnational Organized Crime and National Security: Hezbollah, Hackers and Corruption

    American law enforcement efforts have become increasingly multifaceted as the government attempts to combat the continuing ingenuity and sophistication of transnational organized criminal groups. Eric Halliday writes in Lawfare that the U.S. government has announced several significant actions taken against transnational organized crime groups. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) promulgated a slew of sanctions against the financial networks of both Hezbollah and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). The Justice Department announced takedowns of drug trafficking rings spanning the U.S. and Mexico as well as a large-scale organized cybercrime ring composed of members from several Eastern European countries.

  • Why Terrorists Sometimes Apologize for Their Actions

    Armed groups often rely on violence and instilling fear to show strength and resilience. And yet, every so often, they are willing to apologize when things go wrong. The New IRA recently apologized for killing Lyra McKee, an investigative journalist, during a riot in Derry. The group’s targets, which they described as “enemy forces,” were officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. As scholars of conflict, we both study a variety of armed groups, from nationalist and separatist liberation movements to Islamist opposition groups. Ioana Emy Matesan and Ronit Berger write in the National Interest that over time, comparing anecdotes turned into a systematic investigation of armed attacks, in order to address an understudied question: Do rebel groups ever apologize for their mistakes? If such groups were ever willing to apologize for their actions, we wanted to understand when and why they would do so. We hoped it would help us find ways to negotiate resolutions during conflicts.

  • Populist Eurosceptic parties do not gain support in response to terrorist attacks

    New research has found that terrorist attacks in Europe don’t increase support for populist parties. In fact, people in Germany became more positive towards the EU after the 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack in that country, the researchers found.

  • Germany Has a Neo-Nazi Terrorism Epidemic

    Tanjev Schultz, a professor of journalism at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and the author of a prizewinning book about right-wing terrorism in Germany, says that in Germany’s public imagination terrorism tends to be associated with the left. Memories of the Red Army Faction and the series of political assassinations it undertook are still in the foreground of many Germans’ minds. Meanwhile, neofascistic terrorist attacks like the bombing of a Munich beer garden in 1980 have been largely forgotten. Peter Kuras writes in Foreign Policy that Schultz told him that this blindness to right-wing terrorism is one of the reasons that it took authorities so long to recognize that the 10 murders carried out by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) beginning in 2000 were the work of a terrorist organization. Indeed, as Jacob Kushner has documented in Foreign Policy, authorities largely tried to restrict the investigation into the group’s three core members, Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt, and Beate Zschäpe, despite the fact that there was strong evidence that they had substantial support from other right-wing extremists, as well as some indication that some of that support may have come from within the government.

  • Al-Qaeda Is Stronger Today than It Was on 9/11

    Despite a United States-led global “war on terror” that has cost $5.9 trillion, killed an estimated 480,000 to 507,000 people and assassinated bin Laden, al-Qaeda has grown and spread since 9/11, expanding from rural Afghanistan into North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, the Gulf States, the Middle East and Central Asia. In those places, al-Qaeda has developed new political influence – in some areas even supplanting the local government.

  • White Supremacists Increase College Campus Recruiting Efforts for Third Straight Year

    White supremacist propaganda distribution on college campuses increased for the third straight year, according to data released today by ADL. 2019 spring semester saw more extremist propaganda on campus than any preceding semester, with 161 incidents on 122 different campuses across 33 states and the District of Columbia.

  • Re-thinking Biological Arms Control for the 21st Century

    International treaties prohibit the development and use of biological weapons. Yet concerns about these weapons have endured and are now escalating. Filippa Lentzos writes in a paper issued by the U.S. Marine Corps that a major source of the growing concern about future bioweapons threats stem from scientific and technical advances. Innovations in biotechnology are expanding the toolbox to modify genes and organisms at a staggering pace, making it easier to produce increasingly dangerous pathogens. Disease-causing organisms can now be modified to increase their virulence, expand their host range, increase their transmissibility, or enhance their resistance to therapeutic interventions. Scientific advances are also making it theoretically possible to create entirely novel biological weapons, by synthetically creating known or extinct pathogens or entirely new pathogens. Scientists could potentially enlarge the target of bioweapons from the immune system to the nervous system, genome, or microbiome, or they could weaponize ‘gene drives’ that would rapidly and cheaply spread harmful genes through animal and plant populations.