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crudely written email threat to members of the Los Angeles Board of Education prompted officials to close all 900 schools in the nation’s second-largest school system Tuesday, sending parents from San Pedro to Pacoima scrambling to find day care — while New York law enforcement dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as an obvious hoax

The unprecedented districtwide shutdown reflected the tense atmosphere over possible terrorist attacks less than two weeks after two Islamic radicals opened fire at a workplace party in San Bernardino, killing 14.

L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon Cortines said he made the decision to order the school closures because he couldn’t take a chance with the system’s 640,000 students.By evening, school officials said they had inspected all campuses and that the FBI had discredited the threat.

The West has failed utterly to understand the appeal of the ISIS narrative, much less to develop effective counter narratives.

In the meantime ISIS is reaching out, especially in Africa but also in Central Asia and wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery” (at-tawahoush) exists, to fill the void. It is establishing its caliphate as a global archipelago where “volcanoes of jihad” erupt, so that it may survive even if its current core base between the Euphrates River in Syria (Raqqa) and the Tigris in Iraq (Mosul) is seriously degraded.

had been radicalized before their marriage, and the husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, might have plotted an attack as far back as 2012 with one of his longtime frie

were considering violent action before the Islamic State rose to prominence in 2014 and began trying to inspire sympathizers to carry out attacks in the West.

two killers were starting to radicalize towards martyrdom and jihad as early as 2013

Believers of the conspiracy theory, which is based on the convoluted notion that a “deep state” within the government is trying to bring down President Donald Trump and his followers, latched onto an innocuous tweet from former FBI Director James Comey sent on Saturday, April 27. The conspiracists dissected the tweet, which was part of the hashtag trend #FiveJobsIveHad, somehow extracting “five Jihad(s)” and circling the first initial of every job Comey had listed: GVCSF — aka the Grass Valley Charter School Foundation

“These people were using words like massacre, bloodbath, not saying they’re gonna come do this but that’s what’s out there,” Willoughby said. “We know from recent events that these theories, though they can be proven false, with no factual or logical evidence to back them up, can motivate and mobilize unstable people to do dangerous things.

The Blue Marble Jubilee was cancelled. Thousands of dollars were lost on event planning with none recouped from the festival itself, leaving the small school in the red

if Trump starts to seem like he’s hurting the GOP’s popularity more than he is helping it, he has no reserve of personal goodwill or substantive support for his ideas on which to fall back

Trump’s unpopularity was illustrated most colorfully by an unnamed GOP representative quoted by conservative commentator Erick Erickson. “I say a lot of shit on TV defending him,” the legislator said. “But honestly, I wish the motherfucker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, shits all over Twitter, shits all over us, shits all over his staff, then hits golf balls. Fuck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.” The unnamed congressman even declared of the president he has defended on television, “If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker.”

The populist right of 1994 to 2014 might have seemed rudderless, insofar as it appeared to drift from the Contract with America to late 1990s anti-interventionism to panicked anti-jihadism to Iraq War boosterism to the Tea Party to Donald Trump-style white nationalism.

While we are used to approaching America’s gun culture as a singular phenomenon, it is worth considering how it relates to those other headlines about immigration.

— from President Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants are rapists to the language of the original travel ban, which targeted Muslim-majority countries and was titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”

a powerful narrative persists that immigrants are preternaturally violent and that our safety is best guaranteed by closing our doors to anyone with brown skin.

Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 100 Nigerian schoolgirls last week is sending political shock waves through a key U.S. counterterrorism ally in Africa as President Muhammadu Buhari weighs whether to seek re-election.

won 2015 elections on a campaign to defeat the Islamist insurgency and liberate more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls, whose 2014 abduction prompted a global outcry.

The kidnapping of 110 girls from the Dapchi Government Girls Science and Technical College in northeastern Yobe state has emboldened his critics, who draw parallels to the Chibok abductions and the potential political fallout in Africa’s most-populous nation and biggest economy.

In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.”

The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”

Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.

What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.

For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.

To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, the men – convinced that they had a duty to prevent the American government from ‘selling this country out’ – had stockpiled weapons and attempted to manufacture or buy explosives. And they had picked their target: an apartment complex in Garden City housing Somalian Muslim refugees.

The group’s ethos was anti-government, nationalist, and anti-Islamic. In a four-page manifesto scrawled in black, blue and green ink on a spiral-bound notepad they claimed they were ready to rescue the Constitution and prevent the government from ‘illegally bringing in Muslims by the thousands.’

they called themselves ‘The Crusaders’.

Two hundred and forty-one marines, most of them asleep because reveille was still eight minutes away, were killed. It was the largest loss of U.S. military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima.

The attack—the deadliest of three suicide bombings against the military and two U.S. Embassies in Beirut over sixteen months—marked a turning point for American engagement in the region. Four months later, the United States opted to withdraw abruptly from Beirut. The collapse of that mission resonates, hauntingly, as U.S. Special Forces soldiers pull out of Syria now.

In each case, the Administration—Trump’s today, and Reagan’s in the early eighties—made expedient political decisions, irrespective of the long-term repercussions. “I hear some of the same tones out of the Trump Administration that I heard from the Reagan Administration,” the retired colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the Marine commander in Beirut in 1983, told me. “You try to learn lessons, but here you are back in the same situation with the same players.”

The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups.

Byzantium had lost considerable territory to the invading Seljuk Turks

In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in southern France, the Pope called on Western Christians to take up arms to aid the Byzantines and recapture the Holy Land from Muslim control. This marked the beginning of the Crusades.

since the 7 October Hamas attacks, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers has reached record levels.“It’s more radicalised, it’s more brutalised, it’s more extreme,” he said. “Since 7 October, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed – more than 100 of them minors – and every day there are invasions of Palestinian cities.”

Jenin has been a particular target for Israeli raids since the 7 October Hamas attacks, with more than 120 Palestinians – civilians and fighters – killed by Israeli soldiers there.

But armed men still patrol Jenin camp where fighters backed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad are based, and residents in the town say there’s no sign of the war subsiding.“What the army doesn’t know is that resistance is an idea planted in the heart,” one resident said. “It won’t stop. If one is killed, five more will replace him.”

we’re not in here to eat mozzarella and go to Tuscany. We’re not in here to accumulate money. We’re in here mostly to sacrifice, to do something. The way you do it is by taking risks.

Some people take risks and some people labor in the fields. You have the option of doing either one or the other. But my point is you should never have someone rise in society if he or she is not taking risks for the sake of others, period. That’s one rule.

The second one, you should never be a public intellectual if any statement you make doesn’t entail risk-taking. In other words, you should never have rewards without any risk