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in its 700-plus pages, the author catalogs virtually all the legal disputes over counterterrorism in the Obama era, all the justifications, procedural steps and bureaucratic battles, to the point where at times his book seems more like a compendium than a narrative

With the exception of torture, which President Obama prohibited on his first day in office, his administration managed mostly to provide new legal underpinnings for many of the national-security policies (including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and drone strikes) that were first adopted under Mr. Bush

President Obama will some day be seen “as less a transformative post-9/11 president than a transitional one.”

in some areas like surveillance, the Obama team never planned to outlaw the policies, despite what some of his supporters on the left may have thought

He has led a “lawyerly” administration, Mr. Savage writes, one that has added “an additional layer of rules, standards and procedures” to “the unsettling premise that the United States was still at war and would, of necessity, remain so with no end in sight.”

Power Wars” opens with an incident that Mr. Savage considers a fundamental turning point for the Obama administration: the attempt by the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate explosives aboard a plane heading for Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.

the political fallout from this incident, arguably including the Democrats’ loss of a Senate seat with Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts, effectively spooked the Obama team. It “profoundly hardened the Obama administration’s attitude towards counterterrorism,” he writes.

there are alternative ways of interpreting the Obama administration’s policy steps on national security in its early years. One is that well before that time, the administration was already spooked: It had retreated on counterterrorism issues throughout the president’s first year in office.

Gregory Craig, President Obama’s first White House counsel, who had pushed for quicker and more vigorous changes in counterterrorism policies, had already left the administration after a series of battles with other White House officials who were reluctant to take actions that might anger the C.I.A.

In short, the Obama White House was from the outset under pressure from the military and intelligence communities not to veer too sharply from the policies and decisions of the Bush era

during the Bush years, the Democrats mounted two strands of attack on the post-9/11 policies. The first was from the civil liberties perspective, to assert that policies like warrantless surveillance were inherently wrong. The second line of attack was to say that the Bush administration’s policies violated the rule of law because President Bush adopted them on his own without congressional or other legal authority.

President Obama’s “specific complaints” about the Bush programs and his promises “were heavily tilted towards fixing the legal process.”

the death of Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs in Pakistan, a subject of renewed controversy

He concludes that the lawyers’ activities and the memos they wrote fit with the Obama administration’s account of the raid and not with the revisionist theories about it.

Mr. Savage writes that there is no simple judgment to be made on President Obama’s legacy on counterterrorism issues: His administration deeply disappointed defenders of civil liberties critics on the left but was also regularly attacked by hawks on the right.

“Obama’s record was irreducibly messy and complex, not unlike the world in which he tried to govern,”

Maajid Nawaz, chairman of London-based counterextremism think tank Quilliam, argued in Facebook posts that critics missed the point of the cartoon, and others in the issue, as a critique of fickle European attitudes to migrants.

When I wrote in August 2015 that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought — only to find conservative Trump critics denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with embracing Trumpism.

relatively few of my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his rallies.

What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome

As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.

In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles.

If everything — the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the survival of the planet — depends on tribal victory, then neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative.

In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.

Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution.

And then, there was social media. Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a “cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in line.

we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

In some towns, mothers wearing head scarves have been prevented from picking up their children from school or from chaperoning class outings. One major discount store has been accused of routinely searching veiled customers.

But in recent years, French leaders appear ever more focused on banning veils. They have been driven by a number of factors, including the rise of a far-right movement that openly deplores what it calls the Islamization of France and the reality that homegrown Muslim extremists have carried out two of the worst attacks within France, including the shootings at the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January.

Meanwhile, researchers say that some Frenchwomen who are committed to being fully veiled have become shut-ins, afraid to leave their homes.

"If Dr. Gasbarri, a great friend, says a swear word against my mother, then a punch awaits him," Francis said. "It's normal, it's normal. One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun

of faith."

Francis steadfastly denounced the terrorists' killings and the idea that anyone -- as the France attackers apparently did -- could pretend to justify such violence in the name of God.

One cannot make war (or) kill in the name of one's own religion," Francis said

“I believe that we [were] fools who took an unnecessary risk,” Roussel, who writes under the pen name Delfeil de Ton, continued.

For years, decades even, it was a provocation, and then one day the provocation turns against us.

“I suspect that Chérif Kouachi did engage AQAP members in Yemen, but that he was not fully brought into the organization,

The statement by the Qaeda branch in Yemen called the Kouachi brothers, who were shot to death by police on Friday, “two heroes of Islam.” But it referred to the actions of Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a police officer the day of the assault on Charlie Hebdo and was shot to death by police after holding hostages in a kosher supermarket, as a coincidence and did not take responsibility for them.

But Islamic scholars and legal experts say that the Quran does not explicitly prohibit image-making, and while the act is considered sinful in some branches of Islam, in others it is not — and certainly not one deserving of death.

The objection to images of the prophet — positive or negative — as well as all depictions of any being with a soul, animal or human, has evolved over time and has been interpreted in diverse ways.

Mr Hollande said that radical Islam had fed off contradictions, poverty, inequality and conflict, and that "it is Muslims who are the first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism and intolerance".

But some Muslims were angered by the edition and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu condemned it on Thursday as an "open provocation".

"Freedom of the press does not mean freedom to insult," said Mr Davutoglu, who on Sunday attended a Paris march in memory of the victims of last week's attacks.

For years, this segregation was taking place among conservatives, whose rightward lurch was fueled by a 24-7 infotainment complex driven by conspiracies, xenophobia and paranoia.

As former professor, I tend to agree to an extent with Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's assessment that the intellectual coddling of students has discouraged critical thinking and being able to see other perspectives (which should actually be the goal of any humanities-based education).

It seems as if ideologically, religiously, and culturally, many Americans are beginning to retreat into comfort zones, either out of fear of the Other or fear of offending the Other.

Simply put, some of the prominent racial, social and economic justice movements over the past five years have floundered because they don't have cohesive goals, fail to incorporate pragmatism as part of long-term growth, and stifle the possibility for internal discussion.

Efforts to condemn police brutality have come under fire for lacking the vision, discipline and willingness to dialogue to effect meaningful change.

Even the marriage equality movement of the late 2000s, after a setback in California in 2008, worked in a way to get more people across generations and ideological lines to accept the idea -- and reality -- of same-sex marriage.

Whether in Germany, the United Kingdom, India or Israel, these debates are also being accompanied by polarization and ideological segregation. Of course, in countries such as Bangladesh, free speech rights have become a matter of life and death, particularly for secular bloggers who are coming under increasing attack.

. However, we don't need another Charlie Hebdo-type tragedy to remind us that these entrenched silos we have clustered ourselves into are undermining the very basis of our democracy: the free exchange of ideas, and the enrichment of our society through dialogue and collective action. More:

What seemed for generations the prerogative of powerful men has been fully revealed as a pernicious form of dehumanization. Men such as Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose have been exposed at their moments of maximum cruelty and creepiness — just as their alleged victims (on credible testimony) experienced them. An ethical light switch was flipped. Moral outrage — the appropriate response — now seems obvious.

Over a period of years, this is what happened with the same-sex marriage movement. A type of inclusion that initially appeared radical and frightening became an obvious form of fairness to a majority of Americans.

We are seeing an example of how social change often (and increasingly) takes place. Advocates of a cause can push for a long time with little apparent effect. Then, in a historical blink, what seemed incredible becomes inevitable.

Such rapid shifts in social norms should be encouraging to social reformers of various stripes. Attitudes and beliefs do not move on a linear trajectory. A period of lightning clarity can change the assumptions and direction of a culture.

The movement against capital punishment, for example, may be reaching such a point.

Advocates of gun control, in contrast, seem to have an endless wait. But the record of our times counsels against despair.

how we got here is instructive. Conservatives have sometimes predicted that moral relativism would render Americans broadly incapable of moral judgment. But people, at some deep level, know that rules and norms are needed. They understand that character — rooted in empathy and respect for the rights and dignity of others — is essential in every realm of life, including the workplace.

Conservatives need to be clear and honest in this circumstance. The strong, moral commitment to the dignity of women and children recently asserting itself in our common life has mainly come from feminism, not the “family values” movement. In this case, religious conservatives have largely been bystanders or obstacles. This indicates a group of people for whom the dignity of girls and women has become secondary to other political goals.

We are a nation with vast resources of moral renewal. It is a shame and a scandal that so many religious conservatives have made themselves irrelevant to that task.