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the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.

the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.

the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.

Mr. Macron has already used his huge majority in Parliament to inscribe into law some government tactics — searches and seizures, house arrests, shutting down mosques — that had been applied before only as part of the state of emergency put in place after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people in November 2015.

The case of Imam Doudi, 63, who was born in Algeria and is not a French citizen, is part of a high-profile effort by the Macron administration to intensify scrutiny of Muslim clerics and, in some cases, to deport them. Some analysts say that Mr. Macron is using it to display toughness, as European governments struggle for tools to battle radical Islam, and as he fends off political challenges from the far right.

“They want to make an example of him,” said Vincent Geisser, an Islam expert at the University of Aix-Marseille. “It’s got more to do with communicating firmness.”

“self-radicalization”—the process by which those unconnected to organized jihad are lured toward extremism via the Web.

how exactly does this process work? How does one become so imbued with hatred online as to be willing to pack a pressure cooker with ball bearings and detonate it at the feet of an 8-year-old boy? What Internet “community” could motivate a floppy-haired teenager to send hot shrapnel into the body of a Chinese exchange student?

The constant on my feed—the thing that made me long for the Facebook where high-school friends squabbled about the efficacy of gun control legislation—was ceaseless images of dead children, mostly killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Unlike Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself.

And unlike Bush, he doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor.

While Republicans think ISIS is strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it’s weak and growing weaker.

GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson tells Breitbart News that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – which has spoken out defending Muslims including the San Bernardino terrorist’s family – is a terrorist organization that is calling for a “civilization jihad” and will “destroy us from within.”

They want to bring about what they call civilization jihad and destroy us from within. They recognize that we are vulnerable because we are so politically correct and won’t do anything about it. That’s why I’m trying to call attention to it. Not that I have anything against Muslims who want to be Americans who accept our values, and our culture and our laws, but anybody who doesn’t, as far as I’m concerned, they’re not welcome.

“CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding operation.”

An Islamic State-supporting gunman who killed four people and injured 23 others in an attack in central Vienna on Monday night deliberately “deceived” his mentors in a deradicalisation programme to feign a renunciation of jihadism

Twenty-three people were injured with gunshot and knife wounds, of whom seven were in a critical condition

The attacker, born in Mödling, south of Vienna, developed a strong interest in political Islam as a teenager and eventually hatched plans to join Isis in Syria.

In just the last two weeks, Islamist militants have detonated a car bomb at the gates of the capital’s security headquarters, gunned down a senior Interior Ministry official in broad daylight and shot down a military helicopter over Sinai with a portable surface-to-air missile.

Egyptians returning from jihad abroad to join a campaign of terrorism against the military-backed government.

But until last summer, when the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi and began a bloody crackdown on his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt remained largely insulated from the Islamist violence that flared up around it.

The Obama administration is now facing a real test of its resolve in Iraq. The depressing but utterly predictable resurgence of Sunni Jihadism in a country broken in 2003 and never put back together again by the “surge” has been so successful and the Iraqi government so weak that even Kurdistan is now at risk. The policy now is to do enough – but no more – to keep the Kurds in the game, keep the Yazidis on planet earth and push the Iraqis in Baghdad to get real.

the greatest throwback to 2003 in this respect is Hillary Clinton. So far as one can tell from her interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, there is no daylight between her and John McCain or even Benjamin Netanyahu – but a hell of a lot of space between her and Barack Obama

Obama’s signature achievement so far has been his steadiness in resisting that vortex, in defusing Jihadism rather than giving it yet more reason to be inflamed, in being that rare president capable of internalizing what most Americans want – rather than what Sunday talk show blowhards demand.

The group of young Muslim men, some still teenagers, became known to the French authorities as the Buttes-Chaumont group after the police in 2005 broke up their pipeline for sending young French Muslims from their immigrant neighborhood to fight against American troops in Iraq. The arrests seemingly shattered the group, and some officials and experts were skeptical that members ever posed a threat to France.

But the shocking terror attacks last week in Paris have now made plain that the Buttes-Chaumont network produced some of Europe’s most militant jihadists, including Chérif Kouachi, one of the three terrorists whose three-day rampage left 17 people dead and who was killed by the police.

“They were considered the least dangerous,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies and specialist on French Islamic terror cells, said of the Buttes-Chaumont group. “And now you see them really at the forefront.”

Obama has carefully not organized a large part of his foreign policy around a war against jihadism. The foreign policy vision he describes is, as you’d expect from a former law professor, built around reverence for certain procedures: compromise, inclusiveness, rules and norms. The threat he described in his West Point speech was a tactic, terrorism, not an ideology, jihadism. His main argument was against a means not an end: the efficacy of military action.

Obama is notably cautious, arguing that the U.S. errs when it tries to do too much. The cast of his mind is against intervention. Sometimes, when the situation demands it, he goes against his natural temperament (he told Friedman that he regrets not getting more involved in Libya), but it takes a mighty shove, and he is resistant all the way. In his West Point speech, he erected barriers to action. He argued, for example, that the U.S. could take direct action only when “there is near certainty of no civilian casualties.” (This is not a standard Franklin Roosevelt would have applied.)

Obama and Clinton represent different Democratic tendencies. In their descriptions of the current situation in Iraq, Clinton emphasizes that there cannot be inclusive politics unless the caliphate is seriously pushed back, while Obama argues that we will be unable to push back the caliphate unless the Iraqis themselves create inclusive politics. The Clinton language points toward some sort of intervention. Obama’s points away from it, though he may be forced by events into being more involved.

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture

Islamist extremism: Why young people are being drawn to it

She was speaking after a 15-year-old boy was charged with conspiracy in connection with an alleged terror plot in Australia.

Last month, reports said one of two girls who ran away from their home in Austria to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria had been beaten to death while trying to escape. She was 17.

The group's rise in Iraq -- and its capture of thousands of square miles of land -

"We have not defeated the idea," he is reported to have said. "We do not even understand the idea."

A global caliphate secured through a global war. To that end it speaks of "remaining and expanding" its existing hold over much of Iraq and Syria. It aims to replace existing, man-made borders, to overcome what it sees as the Shiite "crescent" that has emerged across the Middle East, to take its war -- Islam's war -- to Europe and America, and ultimately to lead Muslims toward an apocalyptic battle against the "disbelievers."

She took the name Umm Jihad, or “Mother of Jihad.” Home alone as her husband went out to fight, she posted toxic tweets under her pseudonym. “Hats off to the mujs in Paris,” she said in one of them, using an abbreviation for “mujahedeen” on the day in 2015 when jihadists stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people at the satirical magazine.She also urged others to join the terror organization. “There are soooo many Aussies and Brits here but where are the Americans, wake up u cowards,” she posted.And she used her account to help incite attacks in the West, including in the United States. “Americans wake up!” she wrote on March 15, 2015. “You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them.”

By the time Ms. Polman arrived in the caliphate, its crimes were well documented, including beheading journalists, enslaving and systematically raping women from the Yazidi minority and burning prisoners alive. Both she and Ms. Muthana were evasive when asked about that brutality.

In her telling, Ms. Muthana began to pull away from the terrorist group in her second year in the caliphate. She was married to a second fighter and was pregnant. Anemic from an iron deficiency, she spent much of her time in bed.“I started having doubts,” she said in an account that The Times could not verify. “I was pregnant. Very emotional, because I missed my family,” she said. “I thought — what am I doing?

, a brilliant piece of film-making. The direction, acting, and cinematography make it as good as The Hurt Locker. The attention to detail is stunning, and the raw, granular honesty of its dialogue manages to avoid the tired tropes of action movies. It's entirely believable.

the film shows without any hesitation that the United States brutally tortured countless suspects - innocent and guilty - in ways that shock the conscience.

The acts that Lynndie England was convicted for are here displayed - correctly - as official policy, ordered from the very top. In that way, the movie is not an apology for torture, as so many have said, and as I have worried about. It is an exposure of torture

American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, but in Iraq it is an entirely different story: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group.

On the outskirts of Falluja, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police officers and Shiite militiamen backed by Iran are preparing for an assault on the Sunni city, raising fears of a sectarian blood bath

But the United States has long believed that Iran’s role, which relies on militias accused of sectarian abuses, can make matters worse by angering Sunnis and making them more sympathetic to the militants.

American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa

: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group.

another example of how United States and Iranian interests seemingly converge and clash at the same time in Iraq.

Despite not being able to pay the Russians for complete S-300 Surface to Air Missile systems, Iran still manages to find the money to fund groups committed to Israel's destruction.

Moscow has already transferred three S-300 missile batteries to the Iranians, but have yet to send over the other two

It provides approximately half of the terror group's funding, which amounts to approximately one billion dollars a year.