Jihad

America’s biggest partner in Africa faces a host of internal crises—and its approach to security only makes matters worse.

On January 19, the Pentagon released its new National Defense Strategy. The second paragraph of the 14-page declassified summary painted a dire picture. “Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding,” the Defense…

The Islamic State's smattering of remaining strongholds in Iraq and Syria are under siege. At the height of the self-declared caliphate’s power in mid-2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men controlled large swaths of both countries. Today, the jihadists hold only a few towns straddling the Iraqi-Syrian…

For many years General Franco’s regime used the slogan “Spain is different” to attract tourism. Spain had sun and great beaches, unlike, say, Germany and Belgium, but the country was also a dictatorship and lagged economically and socially. We were indeed different from the rest of Europe. Today,…

For many years General Franco’s regime used the slogan “Spain is different” to attract tourism. Spain had sun and great beaches, unlike, say, Germany and Belgium, but the country was also a dictatorship and lagged economically and socially. We were indeed different from the rest of Europe. Today,…

In a primetime speech Monday evening, President Trump is expected to announce the deployment of several thousand more American troops to Afghanistan. We doubt this will be enough to win the war, but it is better than the alternatives offered to the president. A complete withdrawal would have been…

A presidential decision on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, long delayed and the subject of bitter dispute inside the White House, may finally be at hand. Key members of the Trump administration’s war council met with the president on August 10 at the summer White House in Bedminster,…

A presidential decision on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, long delayed and the subject of bitter dispute inside the White House, may finally be at hand. Key members of the Trump administration’s war council met with the president on August 10 at the summer White House in Bedminster,…

On Monday evening, a terrorist blew himself up in the foyer of Manchester Arena as the audience was filing out of an Ariana Grande concert. At least 22 people were killed and 59 wounded in the blast. British authorities have identified Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old whose parents are from Libya, as…

Paris

Paris

Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and…

Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and…

Minneapolis

France, struggling to regain a sense of normalcy after the Bastille Day atrocity in Nice, was stunned again by the murder of a priest in Normandy. It's just the latest in a string of attacks over the course of the last several years, which have left the French government struggling to find new…

At 2:35 a.m. on June 12, Omar Mateen called 911 from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. For 30 minutes he'd been on a killing rampage and he wanted the world to know why. He spoke for less than a minute.

Barack Obama’s habit of avoiding Islamic nomenclature and highlighting American gun violence whenever Muslim terrorists strike is surely, in part, a product of his fear of anti-Muslim xenophobia in the United States. Before the rise of Donald Trump, Americans on the right might have scoffed at that…

The system was blinking red for months prior to the June 12 terrorist attack in Orlando. Since early 2015, the FBI has repeatedly warned the American public that the threat of violent attacks is growing and that there are too many potential terrorists to track. Then Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old…

Two weeks ago, al Qaeda-linked jihadists attacked the Splendid Hotel in Burkina Faso and murdered 28 people, including an American missionary. It was the work of al Qaeda’s Algerian franchise, one of the world's deadliest jihadist groups, albeit one less known to Westerners. Al Qaeda in the Islamic…

The Obama administration is set to release another 17 detainees from Guantánamo Bay. The New York Times reports that the defense secretary has notified Congress of the iminent transfers:

President Obama needs to accept that our current conflict is as much against the idea of radical jihadism as it is against the physical presence of ISIS. Furthermore, by failing to define the religious-political ideology underpinning the enemy, the president contributes to an environment where all…

President Barack Obama says his administration will continue releasing terrorists from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so long as those released are less dangerous than the jihadists currently fighting against the U.S. and its interests.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, went to the Senate floor yesterday evening to explain that the U.S. is engaged in a war with radical Islam. "We are at war," Sasse said. "Washington ignores what it cannot escape."

Ben Sasse, a Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, went to San Bernardino last night to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama's speech to the nation on terrorism.

President Obama used the terror attack in California this week to push gun control. In his weekly address, Obama called the massacre an "act of terror" but then pivoted to talking about American gun laws.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama thinks that gun control would help deter terrorists. Earnest made the comments today at the White House's daily press briefing.

ABC reporter Brian Ross called yesterday's California massacre "hybrid workplace jihad" this morning. Watch here:

One of the most durable arguments for not responding as forcefully as possible to al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and jihadi groups in general is that they do not pose an “existential” threat to America.  Indeed, this lies at the core of the Obama administration’s strategy for the Middle East.  As the…

There are a few tentative observations to be gleaned in the aftermath of the Paris attacks:

After meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, President Barack Obama reiterated his vow to close Guantanamo. The president said that he could Americans safe and release the terrorists held there.

In remarks today in Paris, France, Secretary of State John Kerry justified the terror attack earlier this year that targeted the magazine Charlie Hebdo in January. This latest attack, by contrast, was different, said Kerry. 

For years, the British government and a network of anti-Guantanamo activists have agitated for the release of Shaker Aamer. Now their wish was finally granted. Aamer has been released from Guantanamo. He is receiving a hero’s welcome in the UK, where much of the media has treated him as an innocent…

One of the more puzzling manifestations of the conflict ­between radical Islam and the West is the presence of Islamist communities in places like Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France: They are unwelcome in their Muslim homelands—indeed, they are in exile from them​—​and yet they harbor an…

The Islamic State is teaching boys, some as young as 8 years old, how to behead "infidels." The Associated Press has a video report on the matter:

Hillary Clinton made a statement today on the terror attack in Tennessee, which reportedly claimed the lives of four Marines. The Democratic presidential candidate compared today's attack to the racially-motivated murder of 9 Americans in a Charleston church last month:

"Oh, you Jews! Allah has permitted us to kill your brothers on French soil and here on the soil of the Islamic State.” So says the speaker in an Islamic State video released in March, which allegedly shows a Palestinian Mossad agent being shot dead by a child executioner. Standing next to the boy…

Last week’s horrific events in Charleston demonstrate, unfortunately, that there are violent homegrown extremists in this country. The extent to which they present a danger to the citizens of the United States is a serious issue worth considering.

The New York Times is out with a warning: "Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.," the headline reads.

The new novel Les Événements (The Events), by the French author Jean Rolin, tells the tale of a France that has descended into a chaotic and multifaceted civil war involving jihadist, nationalist and Marxist militias, in various and fluctuating combinations, as well as remnants of the regular army.…

CNN is reporting:

It's been a full week since The Scrapbook inveighed against the assault on free speech, so we have a new parade of horribles to shake our head at. The precipitating event this time was the killing of two armed assailants at an event in Garland, Texas, that was displaying Muhammad cartoons. It…

Last month the Kosovar Center for Security Studies (KCSS), a think-tank in the Balkan republic, published a “Report Inquiring Into the Causes and Consequences of Kosovo Citizens’ Involvement as Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq.” The survey was financed by the U.S. Embassy in Pristina, the Kosovo…

The biographies of the individuals responsible for the beheadings of James Foley and Daniel Pearl are eerily similar.

ISIS continues its war on civilization by burning:

In remarks  at the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, President Obama warned that one can't profile a terrorist, or predict who will become one. It's not determined by people or any particular faith, the president said.

In response to the Islamic State’s horrific burning of a pilot, the Jordanian government has released from prison one of the most influential al Qaeda-allied ideologues in the world. Sound strange? It is.

President Obama told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims reject radical Islam. He made the comments in response to a question about the White House avoiding using the phrase "Islamic terrorists."

Scott Walker told ABC that he would not rule out putting "boots on the ground" to fight ISIS:

Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman and Iraq war veteran, ramped up her criticism of the Obama administration on Tuesday for refusing to identify Islamist terrorists as Islamist terrorists. 

"The United States is losing the war with radical Islamists," Newt Gingrich told a group of conservatives at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines. 

Meeting with Italian defense officials in Rome Monday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey said that the threat to the world from Islamic terrorism is "probably a 30-year issue." The Army News Service reports:

Matthew Continetti, writing for the Washington Free Beacon:

Here's video that captured the sound of gunfire inside the Canadian Parliament:

ISIS is a threat to world peace and the U.S. has reason, the president has said, to “degrade" and, then, to “destroy” it. The threat, for some, is much closer.  Right next door, in fact.  As Joel Greenberg of McClatchy reports:

During a press conference on August 28, Barack Obama had a rare moment of candor. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” the president said in response to a question about the prospect of using military force against the Islamic State in Syria. Obama’s declaration drew widespread criticism, as the Islamic…

One of the stranger episodes of recent weeks is the reported death of an American who died fighting in Syria with the Islamic State. Stranger still is the Washington Post profile of this homegrown jihadist, Douglas McAuthur McCain, whose unlikely name was probably the most interesting thing about…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with frequent contributor Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, on the White House's approach to the War on Terrorism.

The killing of James Foley was done, it seems, by someone who spoke with a British accent. This is disturbing, of course, but not surprising.  The first of these ritual executions, that of Daniel Pearl, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, was organized by a man named Omar Sheikh who was born in London…

It was a threat Europe’s security services had long feared coming true. In June, Mehdi Nemmouche, a French-born jihadist who had returned to Europe after fighting in Syria with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, shot four people to death in an attack at the Jewish museum in Brussels. While the…

On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee released a report summarizing its investigation into the April 15, 2013, terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. Among the report’s key findings: Nearly one year after twin backpack bombs killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, U.S.…

Lebanese authorities have arrested two suspects affiliated with a pro-Syrian regime group in the bombing of two Sunni mosques in Tripoli on Friday. Forty-seven people were killed in the attack in the northern Lebanese city, likely retaliation for a bombing the previous week in the southern suburbs…

President Barack Obama condmned the London terror attack, but he didn't single out a motivation for beheading. Here's Obama's statement:

NBC reports that Russia is telling American authorities that it overheard a wiretapped conversation between the suspected Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother about jihad: 

Congressman Tom Cotton took to the House floor "to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs":

Has the United States been successful in its war against terrorism? Yes, without a doubt. Although Islamic militancy remains a potent force, especially in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, Washington’s relentless pursuit of armed jihadists has severely damaged the capacity of Sunni radical…

A State Department spokesman said today that the Obama administration expected that many detainees released or transferred from Guantanamo Bay would return to jihad. The spokesman, P. J. Crowley, made the comments in response to questions about a new report from the Director of National…

The news out of Canada is that authorities have broken up a terrorist cell that had more than 50 electronic circuit boards that could be used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The details of the plot are still a bit cloudy, but Canadian authorities were quick to point out that the plotters…

The president's chief advisor on counter-terrorism related issues, John Brennan, famously referred to Jerusalem by its Arabic name, Al Quds, and publicly defended jihad. But when it comes to answering questions about his defense of jihad, well, he doesn't really have a compelling answer. Instead,…

The Mind of Jihad