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In his much talked about article, “What ISIS Really Wants” in the March issue of The Atlantic, Graeme Wood punctures Western fantasies that the Islamic State is made of psychopathic discontents, or in President Obama’s estimation, al Qaeda’s “JV team.”   Instead, he discovers, they are a formidable force, drawn together by a coherent faith and ideology. Here are our take-aways from Wood’s 10,000 word article.   According to Wood: 1. ISIS and al-Qaeda are not one and the same. ISIS has eclipsed al-Qaeda and views its leaders as apostates. We have made a mistake in not realizing the difference...

Speaking to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry reminded Congress that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an advocate of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Britons have anxiously followed for nearly a week the hunt for three missing teenage schoolgirls who aren’t “missing” at all. The trio appear to have evaded efforts to track them down as they journeyed to Syria to join Islamic State. Authorities say the three girls lied to their families about their plans for the day on Feb. 17 to buy time to fly from London’s Gatwick Airport to Istanbul. From there they are believed to have traveled into Syria. One of the three allegedly was in contact via social media with Aqsa Mahmood, a 20-year-old Scottish woman who also became...

Officials overseeing a federal program that offers an immigration short-cut to wealthy foreign investors have ignored pointed warnings from federal agents and approved visas for some immigrants suspected of having committed fraud, money laundering, and even one applicant with alleged ties to a child porn website, an ABC News investigation has found. The shortcomings prompted concerns within the Department of Homeland Security that the boutique immigration program would be exploited by terrorists, according to internal documents obtained by ABC News. “It is shocking,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican. “Particularly when you have F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies...

Al-AOUR, Minya Egypt - The residents of al-­Aour, a dusty village in Minya governorate some 250km south of Cairo, are struggling to come to terms with their loss. Last week, 13 residents of the village, all of whom were Coptic Christians, were executed by Islamic State fighters in Libya. When news of the executions broke (IS released a graphic video of the killing on the Internet) women and children in homes across the village, which is home to 2,500 Christians, could be heard screaming. When I visited al-Aour last week, people were sad and dismayed at the killings. Others seemed...

Assyrians in northeastern Syria villages awoke Tuesday to ISIS militants at their doors, with the Islamist extremists abducting scores from the Christian group and forcing hundreds more to run for their lives, an advocate said. The ISIS fighters bust past a few men guarding the village of Tal Shamiram around 4 a.m. (9 p.m. ET Monday) and abducted children, women and the elderly, said Usama Edward, the founder of the Assyrian Human Rights Network. Talking to CNN from Stockholm, Sweden, Edward said that between 70 and 100 people total were kidnapped in that village and others in the same cluster...

The graffiti on a building in Belgium says it all: "Welcome to 'Belgistan." In fact, some are now calling it the Muslim capital of Europe.

If these cowards (ISIS or ISIL) were really as tough as they say they are -- Then why must they cover their faces. I mean, if the BS that they are peddling is in the name of Allah or Mohamad then why must they cover their faces unless they are ashamed or cowards. Allah knows who they are, right. So if what they are doing is "justified" why must they cover their faces, unless they are simply just a bunch of limp wristed pants wetting cowards. Are they afraid of someone or something...who, who are these cowards afraid of that...

Frightening and incredible news out of Israel this morning: Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat and his bodyguards reportedly subdued a knife-wielding Palestinian attacker after he stabbed an elderly Jewish man. Barkat recalled the event: “I was traveling in a car next to the IDF Square (Safra Sqaure) when my team suddenly say a terrorist with a knife right next to us. I immediately jumped out of the car together with my team, (my bodyguard) pulled out his gun and together we held the terrorist until security forces arrived, we also attempted to treat the victim.” Watch the security video here, which...

Below, we demonstrate that the U.S. keeps “losing” war after war. There are 3 potential reasons this might be happening: •Is this chaos an intentional way to implement regime change and grab resources? •Or is this a sign of the decline of the American empire … and we just can’t win a war anymore? •Or do those in charge just not really give a damn about winning … and are they just focusing on one short-term goal after another?

Hear why Zo is so upset about Michael Moore's recent comments about "American Sniper" and the U.S. military.

A terror group linked to al Qaeda released an online video Saturday in which the group appears to call for attacks on Western malls. Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab specifically named the Mall of America in Minnesota, the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, and London's Oxford Street. Federal law enforcement officials told CBS News that they are investigating the video. In 2013, the Somali-based group claimed responsibility for an attack on an upscale shopping mall in Kenya. More than 60 people were killed in the four-day siege when attackers stormed the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.

One of the most famous speeches in American history is the one given by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, in which he said: “ Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy – The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation, and at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor. Imagine if Obama gave that speech that rallied a nation into World...

ihad Enclaves: With names like Islamberg and Mahmoudberg, some 22 of what the FBI calls "enclaves" have been established across the U.S. by a group linked to a Pakistani militant group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra. The specter of 21 Christians being murdered "on the shores of Tripoli" in Libya where U.S. Marines first encountered Muslim forces — the Barbary pirates — and threats by the Islamic State against Rome show how President Obama's "JV team" has metastasized as a global threat. And, yes, it can happen here. The Islamic State is encouraging attacks on infidels in the West like the one...

(CNSNews.com) – Declaring that “you cannot defeat what you don’t understand,” Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday suggested some reasons why tens of thousands of young people are flocking to join terrorist groups in the Middle East. Among some of the likely motivations he listed were deprivation, a desire to avenge the death of a loved one, a response to “acts of discrimination or repression,” the desire to belong to a group, and “rebellion against anonymity.” Absent from the list was any belief – misguided or otherwise – that joining a terrorist group was an Islamic duty or demonstration...

While Obama desperately tries to stick to his now crushed "Nobel peace prize winner" image, by not succumbing to an all-out land war in the one nation where his progressive "pacifism" brought him fame (and according to some, the presidency), namely Iraq, the rest of militant, "interventionist" US foreign policy is rapidly starting to resemble that waged by the most brutally rabid, neo-con Republican leader. Case in point an absolute stunner reported minutes ago by the WSJ, according to which the White House has decided to provide pickup trucks equipped with mounted machine guns and radios for calling in U.S....

Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama on Thursday called on Middle Eastern leaders to stand up to "violent extremism" and stop proxy wars that fuel the rise of terror groups. "The notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie," he told the final day of a conference on combatting extremism. "And all of us, regardless of our faith, have a responsibility to reject it." Obama challenged Middle Eastern powers to stop actions that he claimed have stoked the rise of Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and others. Fighting between Sunnis and Shia "will only end when...

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the fight against violent extremism, President Barack Obama argues the U.S. has one thing going for it that Europe doesn't: a long tradition of warmly embracing its immigrants, including Muslims. With the Islamic State group spreading and terrorists gaining strength in the Mideast and Africa, Obama has sought to use this week's White House summit on violent extremism to urge the world to broaden its response far beyond military interventions. U.S. airstrikes have managed to blunt some of the militants' gains in Iraq and Syria, but they don't address the extreme ideologies that underpin deadly groups...

Fun stuff via BuzzFeed, portending an exciting “whose close relative is more of a devastating electoral liability?” primary for the GOP if the two men left standing are Jeb Bush and Rand Paul. I don’t understand this even within the parameters of the Ron Paul worldview. I thought hardcore isolationists — sorry, “non-interventionists” — believe that the war machine will always find a new pretext to keep rolling even if the current one goes bust. Obama, for instance, did eventually get Bin Laden, along with many other Al Qaeda capos … and yet at this very moment there’s an AUMF...

On Monday's Morning Joe on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough suggested that having a literal interpretation of the Bible could lead Christians to violence in a similar manner as radical Islam. Oddly enough, Scarborough hoped to avoid being "torn to shreds online" by equating the two, but made the comparison anyway. The morning's panel centered on the violence of ISIS and its undeniable ties to the tenets of Islam, but Scarborough felt compelled to find a link between Islam and Christianity. He said: “A very crude way to put it is, this would be the ultra fundamentalist Christians who believe every single...