Syria’s president has been dared to undergo a “snow bucket challenge” to raise awareness of Syrian refugees living in freezing winter conditions in camps across the region.

In a nod to the Ice Bucket Challenge that became a social media craze last summer, Ehab Yousef, a young Syrian actor, posted a video of himself getting covered in buckets of snow for two minutes. In it, he urged President Bashar Assad to go outside in the snow for two minutes or spend a night in a refugee camp with his family, Al-Jazeera reports.

“Think of us when you’re warm,” Yousef said to Assad in the video.

Lack of protection from the cold so far has killed more than seven people in Syria and four in Lebanon, Al-Jazeera reports.

The Ice Bucket Challenge raised more than $100 million last year for the ALS Association, a group that is seeking a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurological disease also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. Other variations on the viral hit include the Rubble Bucket Challenge, which used rubble, dirt and dust from the remnants of buildings decimated by airstrikes to raise awareness of the situation in Gaza last summer.  

"I urge all the people around the world to donate whatever they can—money, medicine, blankets—to help the desperate refugees in the camps,” Yousef says in the video. He urges Assad to “come out from his hideout and show support for the people who are dying in the refugee camps."

Many of the millions of Syrians displaced by war are spending their fourth winter battling freezing conditions in makeshift camps. Snowfall has been particularly heavy in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where 408,000 United Nations–registered refugees live in camps. More than 3.2 million Syrians have fled the country and 7.6 million are internally displaced, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Last week, Lebanon, which hosts 1.1 million Syrian refugees, started requiring Syrians to obtain a visa to enter to country in an effort to stem the flow of people fleeing violence.

The Syrian Association of Ottawa held its fourth #KeepUsWarm event in December to raise money for Syrians in the snow. Members of the organization stood in the cold in tank tops and took part in other dares in Ottawa; for every $10 donation (the cost of a blanket), one of them got to warm up under a blanket for three minutes.  

In a report published on Sunday, UNICEF said it needs $11.3 million to help deal with winter conditions in Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon.

DRESDEN, Germany (Reuters) - A record 25,000 anti-Islamist protesters marched through the east German city of Dresden on Monday, many holding banners with anti-immigrant slogans, and held a minute's silence for the victims of last week's attacks in France.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior German politicians have called for people to stay away from rallies organised by PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West - people who Merkel has said have "hatred in their hearts".

On Tuesday she will take part in a vigil in Berlin organised by a Muslim group to remember the 17 people killed in Islamist attacks at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

About 7,000 more protesters than last week turned out for the march, a police spokesman said.

Leader Lutz Bachmann set out PEGIDA's demands for the government including drawing up a new immigration law, forcing immigrants to integrate and making sure that Islamists who leave Germany to fight are not allowed back into the country.

"We are getting more support each week," co-founder Kathrin Oertel told Reuters.

"We are against all violence that is religiously motivated whether Muslim or Christian ... People have been confronted by it now and are thinking about it more."

Protesters, many dressed in black, waved the black, red and gold German flag. One carried a banner saying: "With our deepest sympathies for the families of the Paris terror victims."

A German riot police officer looks at opponents of anti-immigration movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA) in Dresden January 12, 2015.Fabrizio Bensch

Mostly men over 50, many chanting of "Wir sind das Volk" or "We are the people", they said they were more concerned about increasing immigration than the events in France.

Their banners read "Stop multiculturalism", "I'm not a Nazi but everyone who enjoys our hospitality must integrate and respect our culture" and "Stop asylum fraud - every one is too many, go home!"

One carried a Christian cross illuminated with fairylights.

Eugen Peuke, 61, was at his second protest.

"It (multiculturalism) doesn't work. Immigration is a problem. They steal. I just don't want them here. The government isn't listening," he said.

Counter-demonstrators shouted "PEGIDA, you're racist" and "Germany is ashamed of you", and in Berlin and the western city of Duesseldorf the rallies were dwarfed by counter-protesters.

Germany has some of the world's most liberal asylum rules, partly due to its Nazi past, and last year the number of asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East, doubled to about 200,000 from 2013.

In a New Year's press conference Monday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye made an overture to North Korea, extending an offer to hold talks without any preconditions.

"My position is that to ease the pain of division and to accomplish peaceful unification, I am willing to meet with anyone,"Park said in her speech. "If it is helpful, I am up for a summit meeting with the North. There is no pre-condition."

The two countries have been divided since the end of World War II. The divide was cemented at the end of the Korean War in 1953—the country split in half by the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, at the 38th parallel roughly along the cease-fire line. But because the Korean War that followed ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty, North and South Korea have technically been at war for more than six decades.

Reunification has been a goal for both states, but they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of political ideology. North Korea is an isolated Communist state with a centralized economy while South Korea is a democracy with a rapidly growing high-tech industrialized economy.

Geun-hye’s remarks are in part a reaction to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un conceding that he would be willing to hold a summit with the South under certain conditions, says Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University.

"If the atmosphere and environment is there, there is no reason not to hold a high-level summit [with South Korea],"Kim Jong Un said in a speech broadcast on state media January 1. However, Pyongyang has not acquiesced to recent requests to resume negotiations with South Korea on human rights and other matters.

"North Korea should respond to dialogue without hesitation," Park said Monday.

Armstrong says that “both sides are sending signals to the other that they are ready to open dialogue.” The signals from North Korea represent a shift for Kim Jong Un, who took the reins of the isolated Communist country in 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il. Armstrong says the change in leadership is one of the biggest factors preventing recent communication between the two Koreas.

“He’s young, unknown, untested,” Armstrong says of Kim. “He’s been really focused on consolidating his leadership.” That would explain, he adds, “why [Kim Jong Un was] able to make fairly bold statement this year. He didn’t have the standing before.”

Park’s statements, however, are more in line with her previous attitude and policies. President since 2013, when she became South Korea’s first female president, she has spoken in the past about developing trust between the two sides as part of a “trustpolitik” approach and has invoked reunification frequently. In March, she gave a speech in Dresden, Germany, in which she looked to a reunified Germany as a model for the two Koreas.

“Germany and Korea have a special relationship through the painful experience of division,” Park said at a news conference with her German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel. in the spring. “Germany is an example and a model for a peaceful reunification of our own country.”

Reunification may still be far-fetched at this point, but there are shorter-term goals the two can address if they do in fact engage in talks. “What we can hope for in the near term is the easing of tensions,” says Armstrong. In addition to issues of security and nuclear weapons and economic exchange, he says, one of the most pressing items on the agenda for South Koreans would be reunions of families divided by the Korean War.

An estimated 1 million family members are separated by the DMZ, Armstrong says, and unlike in divided Cold War Germany, there is virtually no communication across the border. While there have been more than a dozen reunions over the years, they have always been small affairs. Most recently, last February, roughly 250 Koreans from North and South reunited at Diamond Mountain resort in southeastern North Korea.

“Many are into their 80s and 90s,” says Armstrong, and there is little time left for reunions as they age. “There’s a lot of concern about this within South Korea.” As for North Korea, it has been much more cautious about reunions, fueled by concern about too much exposure of their citizens to life in South Korea.

Another factor that shouldn’t be overlooked, Armstrong adds, is the deterioration of relations between North Korea and the United States following reports of human rights violations in North Korea and the Sony hacking debacle. Pyongyang offered Saturday to suspend its nuclear tests if the U.S. would agree to stop planned military drills with South Korea, a proposal Washington quickly rejected.

"The [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] statement that inappropriately links routine [U.S.-Republic of Korea] exercises to the possibility of a nuclear test by North Korea is an implicit threat,"said Jen Psaki, State Department spokeswoman.

It’s rare for North Korea to try to engage with the U.S. and South Korea at the same time, says Armstrong, and the particularly bleak outlook on North Korea-U.S. relations may have allowed Kim to redirect energies toward South Korea.

The opening for talks comes even as South Korea has cracked down on pro-North sentiment. Just two days before Park’s speech, Shin Eun-mi, a naturalized American citizen who was born in South Korea, was deported from her birth country Saturday after making positive comments about North Korea. Shin had traveled north of the DMZ three times and had later given talks which she told The New York Timeswere intended to promote reconciliation between North and South Korea.

“I feel as if I am betrayed by someone I have loved,” she said before Justice Ministry officials took her to the airport to fly to Los Angeles. “My body is leaving my home country, South Korea, today, but they can never deport my soul, too, from the mother country that I love.”

Under the vague National Security Law that was cited in her case, she will not be permitted to return to South Korea for five years. The law can be used against anyone suspected of anti-state activity, Armstrong says, but that almost always means pro-North activity. The “peculiar limitation on free speech in an open society,” as he calls the law, is not enforced often but can be used on the whim of the government.

Shin’s case is not the only recent example of extreme action against perceived sympathy with the North. Last month, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled to disband the Unified Progressive Party (UPP), a left-wing party accused of pro-North activities.

The chief judge, Park Han-chul, said that "there was an urgent need to remove the threat posed by the party to the basic order of democracy,” and eight of nine judges stood behind the majority opinion. The court relieved the five UPP members in parliament from their positions.

Armstrong offers one hypothesis for the seemingly contradictory moves: Park might “feel the need to silence or marginalize” pro-North voices while simultaneously reaching out to Kim for talks in order to create some political balance and appease conservative concerns about leniency toward their Communist neighbor to the north.

Still, the fact that Park is willing to meet with Kim without any preconditions, like requiring North Korea to make concessions on its nuclear power program, is significant, says Armstrong, and “somewhat bolder than we might have expected.”

The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Korea is less optimistic about the possibility for talks, saying that “there are always unpalatable preconditions in inter-Korean talks even if one side says there aren’t.”

Brent and U.S. WTI crude oil prices fell to their lowest levels in almost six years on Tuesday as a big OPEC producer stood by the group's decision not to cut output to tackle a glut in the market.

Oil prices have fallen 60 percent from their June 2014 peaks, driven down by rising production, particularly U.S. shale oil, and weaker-than-expected demand in Europe and Asia.

Rather than cutting output to try to balance the market, producers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are offering discounts to customers in an attempt to defend market share.

At 0903 GMT, February Brent crude was down $1.40 to $46.03 a barrel, after dipping as low as $45.23, its lowest since March 2009.

U.S. crude for February was down $1.28 at $44.79 per barrel, off an intraday low of $44.41.

"The market is in a bit of a panic now and the momentum is really quite negative. We haven't seen any actions or comments that could reduce this aggressive selling," said Ole Hansen, senior commodity strategist at Saxo Bank.

OiOn the contrary, the United Arab Emirates' oil minister, Suhail bin Mohammed al-Mazroui, said on Tuesday that OPEC's November decision not to cut output had been the right one. He also said U.S. shale oil was an important part of global oil supplies.

He added that the market would stabilize at a level at which conventional producers could sell profitably, "whether $60 or $70 or $80".

Oil prices have fallen so far that the front-month February contract is now trading about $7 below the July contract, encouraging traders to hire tankers to store oil at sea.

The aim is to buy cheap oil now and sell it at a higher price at a future date, when demand picks up again.

At present, deflationary pressures are beginning to build in both Asian and European economies as demand remains weak.

The downward pressure on prices is so large that even record Chinese crude imports for December, above seven million barrels per day for the first time as the world's second largest oil consumer took advantage of low prices to build up its strategic reserves, could not lift the market for long.

Banks have slashed their oil price outlook, with analysts at Goldman Sachs cutting their average forecast for Brent in 2015 to $50.40 a barrel from $83.75.

A record 25,000 anti-Islamist protesters marched through the east German city of Dresden on Monday, many holding banners with anti-immigrant slogans, and held a minute's silence for the victims of last week's attacks in France.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior German politicians have called for people to stay away from rallies organised by PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West - people who Merkel has said have "hatred in their hearts".

On Tuesday she will take part in a vigil in Berlin organised by a Muslim group to remember the 17 people killed in Islamist attacks at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

About 7,000 more protesters than last week turned out for the march, a police spokesman said.

Leader Lutz Bachmann set out PEGIDA's demands for the government including drawing up a new immigration law, forcing immigrants to integrate and making sure that Islamists who leave Germany to fight are not allowed back into the country.

"We are getting more support each week," co-founder Kathrin Oertel told Reuters.

"We are against all violence that is religiously motivated whether Muslim or Christian ... People have been confronted by it now and are thinking about it more."

Protesters, many dressed in black, waved the black, red and gold German flag. One carried a banner saying: "With our deepest sympathies for the families of the Paris terror victims."

Mostly men over 50, many chanting of "Wir sind das Volk" or "We are the people", they said they were more concerned about increasing immigration than the events in France.

Their banners read "Stop multiculturalism", "I'm not a Nazi but everyone who enjoys our hospitality must integrate and respect our culture" and "Stop asylum fraud - every one is too many, go home!"

One carried a Christian cross illuminated with fairylights.

Eugen Peuke, 61, was at his second protest.

"It (multiculturalism) doesn't work. Immigration is a problem. They steal. I just don't want them here. The government isn't listening," he said.

Counter-demonstrators shouted "PEGIDA, you're racist" and "Germany is ashamed of you", and in Berlin and the western city of Duesseldorf the rallies were dwarfed by counter-protesters.

Germany has some of the world's most liberal asylum rules, partly due to its Nazi past, and last year the number of asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East, doubled to about 200,000 from 2013.

Up to 3 million copies of Charlie Hebdo could hit newsstands this week, dwarfing its usual print run of 60,000, in response to soaring demand for the first edition of the satirical weekly since last week's deadly attacks by Islamist militants.

Seventeen people, including journalists and police, were killed in three days of violence that began on Jan. 7 when militants burst into Charlie Hebdo's office during a regular editorial meeting and shot dead five of its leading cartoonists.

Liberation newspaper, now temporarily housing Charlie Hebdo operations, revealed the front page of the Jan. 14 edition via Twitter late on Monday - an image of the Prophet Mohammad holding a sign saying "JE SUIS CHARLIE" ("I am Charlie") below the headline "TOUT EST PARDONNE" ("All is forgiven").

An initial batch of 1 million copies will be available on Wednesday and Thursday, said Michel Salion, a spokesman for MPL, which distributes Charlie Hebdo. A further 2 million could then be printed depending on demand.

"We have requests for 300,000 copies throughout the world - and demand keeps rising by the hour," Salion said, adding that the newspaper usually had just 4,000 international clients.

"The million will go. As of Thursday, the decision will probably be taken to print extra copies ... So we'll have one million, plus two if necessary."

On Sunday, at least 3.7 million people took part throughout France in marches of support for Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression. World leaders linked arms to lead more than a million citizens through Paris in an unprecedented demonstration to pay tribute to the victims.

The new edition of Charlie Hebdo, known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions, will include cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammad and also making fun of politicians and other religions, its lawyer, Richard Malka, told France Info radio earlier.

Salion said 60,000 copies of Charlie Hebdo were normally printed, with only 30,000 generally sold.

German taxpayers should not be afraid of a Greek government led by the left-wing Syriza party, its leader Alexis Tsipras wrote in an article published on Tuesday in a German business daily.

Speculation is growing that if anti-bailout Syriza wins Greece's Jan. 25 parliamentary election, it will try to renegotiate European Union loans and conditions, possibly provoking a crisis between Athens and its euro zone partners.

There is also concern that Tsipras, whose party is ahead of rivals in opinion polls, will demand another reduction in its foreign debt that could cost German taxpayers up to 40 billion euros, according to some German economists.

"German taxpayers have nothing to fear from a Syriza government," Tsipras wrote in Handelsblatt. "On the contrary. It is not our goal to aim for a confrontation with our partners, to get more credits or a license for new deficits."

"The aim is to stabilize the country, reach a balanced primary budget and end the bloodletting from German and Greek taxpayers," he wrote.

But Tsipras said Greece would only be able to pay back its debt if austerity measures were scrapped. "The truth is that Greek debt won't be paid back as long as our economy is continuously exposed to 'fiscal waterboarding'," he said.

Tsipras reiterated that he wanted Greece to stay in the euro zone.

"Our goal is to reach a new agreement -- within the euro zone -- that would allow the Greek people to breathe ... and to live in dignity by restoring debt sustainability and finding a way out of recession through financing growth," he wrote.

The Greek election has reignited investors' concerns that tensions between Athens and its partners might eventually lead to Greece leaving the euro zone, an idea known as 'Grexit'.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has played down the chances of a Grexit, but has made clear she expects Athens to stick to the terms of its international bailouts.

The Global War on Terror has ended. The Global War of Terror has begun.

That is the widely overlooked but frightening lesson from last week’s murderous attack by Islamic fundamentalists on Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly newspaper based in Paris. For more than a decade, since former President George W. Bush declared a war on terror, the focus of strategic planning by the United States and its allies has been largely on groups—Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the like. But intelligence analysts and officers have whispered among themselves that while the bold-name groups posed the biggest national security challenge in terms of their ability to destabilize countries and regions, the real domestic threats would emerge when small, two-or-three-person Islamist cells stopped focusing on sophisticated weaponry and grandiose targets. These terrorists are aligned with the beliefs of ISISes of the world, and maybe even have limited contact with them—but the enemy now is the ideology, not the group.

In Paris, it was just a couple of automatic weapons and a suite of offices—no giant bombs, no airplanes, no bridges or secured government buildings. Nothing elaborate or easy to detect. And this relatively simple attack using readily available weaponry on a soft target stopped a major industrial nation in its tracks while injecting fear worldwide.

And the intelligence world knows this isn’t the end of it.

To a degree, the West is reaping what it sowed from a major strategic blunder in the aftermath of 9/11—the entire concept of a war on technique, that is, terrorism. Defining the enemy when fighting a concept was impossible. Was it Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Saddam Hussein in Iraq? Iran? Those countries and four more were on a list of targets the Bush administration put together in the days after 9/11, based on the premise that they supported terrorism. A war on Al-Qaeda could have been won with a decisive military strike in Tora Bora during December 2001, but American fighters at Tora Bora were refused requests for more forces when they trapped Al-Qaeda there; the Pentagon was busy husbanding resources for the Iraqi invasion.

The result was that Al-Qaeda’s surviving members slipped into Pakistan. Then new groups began to emerge—Al-Qaeda in Iraq formed in response to the Western strike there, and that morphed into ISIS, which then spread into Syria, where an assortment of new and re-energized Islamist organizations had gathered to fight the government of Bashar Assad.

All of this strife has created an opportunity for Islamic terrorists they could not have even hoped for on that September day so long ago. Where once there were few sanctuaries for jihadists, now there are many—in Syria and Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia. With so many training camps being run by disparate groups, aspiring terrorists can train and be on their way, heading back to the West with no instructions but with a burning desire to inflict mayhem.

And there is another factor that did not exist in any large-scale way at the time of the 9/11 attacks. In 2001, high-speed Internet wasn’t available in some parts of suburban Chicago, much less in Yemen. But now, terrorists use social media as their primary means of global incitement, fund-raising and recruitment. Young potential murderers obtain almost all of their information about the world from these ideological bubbles, rarely seeing sources that contradict or undermine the exhortations to violence.

All this is why intelligence experts fear 2015 may be one of the worst years for terrorism attacks on Western nations in a decade. Outrage that catches fire in the Middle East now has almost instant global reach, and individuals can carry out attacks that involve some planning, but little skill. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are not the primary enemy now; Al-Qaeda-ism and ISIS-ism are. Ideology is now the greatest danger, and there are no military tactics that can be employed by the West to kill an idea. The West needs to stop fretting about the potential danger of mass, organized attacks by groups like ISIS to the total exclusion of combatting this newer, more viral variant of the Islamist disease.

So what’s to be done? First, focus on young Muslims who traveled to Syria during the three years of civil war there. Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer who is now a senior vice president with the Soufan Group, recently published a brilliant analysis of this growing element of the threat. According to Barrett, more fighters—approximately 12,000—have gone to Syria during its civil war than have traveled to Afghanistan during the first decade of the war there.

Of those 12,000, Barrett reported, some 3,000 come from Western countries. Many of them didn’t speak Arabic and had no military training when they arrived. The majority have adopted the jihadist ideology (some traveled there solely for the purpose of fighting Assad), and unfortunately, the most extreme terror groups have been the most welcoming of these Western travelers.

Firefighters carry a victim on a stretcher at the scene after a shooting at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, Jan. 7, 2015.Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

According to official estimates, France has the highest number of Muslim residents who traveled to the Syrian battles from Europe—about 700; Britain has 250. The FBI reports that more than 70 Muslims have made their way from the United States to Syria.

Western governments—including the Obama administration—have yet to establish a comprehensive policy for dealing with people returning from the fighting in Syria, and authorities don’t even know how many of those sojourners were killed in Syria or returned to their Western homes.

Nor is there a coherent strategy on how to end that conflict, despite its obvious and growing threat to the West. The civil war in Syria has become the breeding ground for the next generation of terrorists, and the jihadist terror organizations are gaining ever more money, equipment and recruits.

Third, the West needs to win the social media war. The simplistic answer—force Twitter and Facebook to identify Islamists on their networks and shut them down—is counterproductive. Social media is not only the most important tool for inciting terrorists, it can also be an effective weapon against them.

Intelligence officials already know Internet communications can tear apart Islamist groups. ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have been fighting each other on the same social media platforms they use to win converts. Islamic terror groups are not some giant, unified entity—they are split by egos, arrogance, self-righteousness and a lust for power just like any other collection of ideological organizations.

Photos: France Under Siege After Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Explosions and gunfire were heard at the Parisian Kosher supermarket. slideshow

The West can play on that. Sowing discontent, conflict and paranoia is straight out of the textbook on psychological operations. The United States only began to develop a stronger commitment to PSYOPS in 2010 in the battles against Islamic terrorists, but there has been little sign that it has been employed on the vast, public network of jihadists.

There is an even more important use of social media if Western politicians and—almost as important—mass-media commentators could be persuaded to stop spouting nonsense. The endless mantra that follows any terror attack is the mendacious claim that Muslims do not criticize the perpetrators or their ideology.

Dozens of Islamic groups have condemned the attack at Charlie Hebdo and the beliefs espoused by the perpetrators, including the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Arab League, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association, the Islamic Cooperation Organization, Al-Azhar and the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

Prominent religious leaders in the Muslim world have stood up as well, including Dalil Boubakeur, imam at the Great Mosque of Paris. And unlike too many American commentators, Boubakeur clearly sees the deeper, more frightening meaning of the Charlie Hebdo attack. “This is a thunderous declaration of war,” he said. “The times have changed. We’re entering a new phase of this confrontation.… We are horrified by the brutality and the savagery.”

These leaders of Islam could help pop the information bubble that has enveloped so many young, disaffected, unemployed and religiously obtuse Muslims and crippled their ability to distinguish between twisted belief and justified opinion.

In 2008, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, professors at Harvard Law School, published a seminal paper on the dangers of allowing extremist groups to seal themselves off from information that conflicts with their beliefs. Their strategy: find the online sites and social networks where extremists talk and crash the party—bring in outside voices to counter the misinformation and anger bouncing around in these virtual echo chambers.

Here is why that is important: Muslims are leading efforts to deprogram these jihadists. Deradicalization programs in which Islamic scholars provide the kind of religious education that few extremists have experienced have been conducted in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Egypt, Singapore, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Indonesia. They have been effective, although not, of course, 100 percent successful.

If Western and Middle Eastern governments engage the online extremist world and bring in respected Muslims, social networks can play a vital role in defusing the anger and ignorance that has led to killings in the West.

Or politicians, media figures and citizens can continue to proclaim that all Muslims are terrorists, and fuel the extremist lie that this is a war of religions. Then, once the name-calling is done, we can all sit back in smug satisfaction and await the gunfire.

Tension between Bill de Blasio and the New York City Police Department was building long before Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch accused the mayor of having blood on his hands after the December shooting deaths of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

As public advocate, de Blasio angered cops by supporting two City Council bills that established an NYPD inspector general’s office and prohibited racial profiling. As a mayoral candidate, de Blasio cruised to victory on a police reform platform and acted on these promises almost immediately after taking office. In January 2014 he announced that his administration would not to appeal a federal court decision that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional.

But de Blasio’s administration hasn’t offered this kind of legal mea culpa when it comes to another contentious policing policy: the department’s now-defunct Demographics Unit. The unit gathered extensive intelligence on Muslim neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey, such as where residents ate and attended mosque, without any suspicions of criminal behavior, The Associated Press first reported in 2011. Unit members also eavesdropped on Muslim businesses and infiltrated local colleges’ Muslim student associations.

De Blasio did say on the campaign trail he was “deeply troubled” by the program. But a Wall Street Journal report from 2012 indicates de Blasio supported the program. “I defend without question the NYPD’s obligation to pursue specific and credible threats,” he said. “Based on what I’ve learned, I believe that the NYPD is currently limiting its work to the pursuit of specific leads and that there is a substantial legal review process connected to those decisions.”

Since the terrorist attacks in Paris last week, the program has received renewed public support. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani implored de Blasio to plant police in mosques, as he did during his administration. U.S. Representative Pete King told the New York Daily News, “To me, it shows the importance of having that inside intelligence in a community.... That requires surveillance, and that’s just reality. You can’t let political correctness get in the way of that.”

And while the NYPD announced in April that it had ended the controversial program, The New York Times reported shortly afterward that another NYPD unit aims to recruit Muslim arrestees as informants. In addition, the de Blasio administration has continued to fight lawsuits challenging the surveillance tactics.

In February, a federal judge dismissed one of these suits,Hassan v. City of New York. The Center for Constitutional Rights and Muslim Advocates, which filed Hassan in 2012, are representing 11 Muslim plaintiffs who claim to have been targets of the surveillance operations in New Jersey. The Hassan plaintiffs appealed this dismissal in March. The city then filed court papers opposing the appeal in October.

Today, both sides will argue whether the case should go to trial before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia. The plaintiffs seek unspecified damages and a ruling that such surveillance is unconstitutional. If the court rules in the plaintiffs’ favor, it would officially bar them from being surveyed, says Glenn Katon, legal director of Muslim Advocates. Though the ruling would apply to them in literal terms, it could serve as legal precedent in similar court cases. In addition to settling litigation, advocates want de Blasio’s administration to confirm that similar intelligence gathering is not taking place.

As The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux pointed out in October, the de Blasio administration’s position on the litigation is the same position held by former mayor Michael Bloomberg. Indeed, the city’s decision to pursue dismissal, and its refuse to settle the lawsuit, largely borrows the language of the previous administration’s legal arguments. City lawyers under de Blasio and Bloomberg have both argued that the AP’s coverage of the program harmed surveillance targets, not the surveillance itself. The city claims that the AP hurt the targets by publishing unredacted, confidential documents, resulting in their “alleged stigmatization,” Devereaux noted.

“All of the arguments are exactly the same. They have not dialed back any of them,” Katon says. “They have made no overtures at all to say, ‘Hey, we’ve stopped doing these things, will you drop the lawsuit?’ There’s been none of that.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs also say that disbanding the unit implicated in the AP’s reports does not mean spying has stopped.

“They have never said they are stopping the program of spying on Muslims,” Katon says. “There are some definite indications that they have not.”

As in the court filings, a de Blasio spokeswoman blamed the AP, not the surveillance program, for the plaintiffs’ grievances.

“This filing does not address broader policy issues concerning surveillance of Muslim communities, but rather technical legal issues. The argument involves only the sufficiency of the allegations in plaintiff’s complaint and whether the activities of the NYPD state a plausible claim in court,” Marti Adams wrote in a statement to Newsweek.

“The city has moved to dismiss this suit because the plaintiffs have not demonstrated that they have suffered injury as a result of the NYPD’s activities. In fact, the city argues that any injuries to the plaintiffs are the result of reporting by The Associated Press—which released identifying information of businesses, schools, mosques and individual identities—not the activities of the NYPD,” Adams wrote.

Adams continued: “Nowhere in the city’s brief is there an argument regarding the merits of surveillance of individuals solely because they are Muslim. Mayor de Blasio continues to believe that singling out people on the sole basis of their religion is unfair, and has promised the people of New York a police force that keeps our city safe but is also respectful and fair, and this administration will continue efforts to bring communities and police closer together.”

Still, the political reasoning behind the administration’s position isn’t clear, though it is simpler than one might expect, and perhaps not as contradictory as it appears.

Continued conflict with the NYPD and police unions, of course, does not bode well for de Blasio’s time in Gracie Mansion, or his political future.

“He has to decide which battle to fight. Right now, he’s involved very publicly in a battle with the NYPD,” says Christina Greer, an assistant professor of political science at Fordham University. With the Muslim surveillance litigation, she adds, “he can also sort of frame this battle less about the NYPD and more about keeping New Yorkers safe.”

For Doug Muzzio, a political science expert at Baruch College, the administration’s position aligns with de Blasio’s broader role to defend the city. This, Muzzio explains, includes defending the NYPD from lawsuits, even when many rank and file members are literally turning their backs on him.

“He’s the chief executive. He needs to protect the institution,” Muzzio says. “I believe that this action is protecting his institution. That’s what chief executives do.”

Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime New York City political consultant, says the explanation could be less about politics and more about money. The city’s corporation counsel always wants to minimize financial risk. So the city might want to prolong legal proceedings as a negotiation tactic.

“This could be a gambit by the corporation counsel to reduce that...while still having room to come up with a settlement that is acceptable to all parties,” he says.

The AP is not commenting directly on the mayor’s position, a spokesman told Newsweek, but said of its surveillance stories, “That coverage did earn the Associated Press a Pulitzer Prize, of which we were proud then and remain proud today.”

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has accepted an invitation from Russian president Vladimir Putin to attend a military march in Moscow this May, according to South Korean media, making his first ever foreign visit since coming to power in 2011.

"It was confirmed that North Korea gave a positive response to the Russian invitation for Kim Jong-un," a South Korean diplomat told Seoul-based daily newspaper The Korea Herald under the condition of anonymity on Tuesday.

In December, the Kremlin publicly announced that Kim Jong-un was among the leaders invited to the upcoming 70th anniversary commemoration of allied victory over the Nazis. At the time, Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov told Russia’s state-owned news agency Itar-Tass: “The first signals from Pyongyang are that the North Korean leader plans to come to Moscow and attend celebrations.”

US president Barack Obama and Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite are among the leaders who have refused to attend.

Should reports of North Korea’s confirmation be true, Kim Jong-un’s attendance to the Russian event would be his first ever state visit since succeeding his father as Supreme Leader of North Korea in December 2011. Notably, Jong-un has not visited China since becoming Supreme Leader, despite the fact the country has traditionally been North Korea’s strongest ally.

“If the news is confirmed - and it does seem quite solid - the two interesting aspects are the strengthening of ties with Russia and the implicit snub to China,” says former MEP, author of North Korea on the Brink and a frequent diplomatic visitor to North Korea, Glyn Ford.

According to Ford, Kim Jong-un’s arrival in Moscow could mark a historic shift in North Korea’s allegiances, not seen since the rule of his grandfather Kim Il-sung, who seized power in Pyongyang in 1948, aided by the advance of the Soviet Red Army.

“Unless Beijing fits in an earlier visit it will be highly symbolic that, for the first time since the Kim Il-sung era, Russia will have apparently superseded China as the North’s closest ally,” Ford says.

“Under Kim Il-sung, North Korea spent decades skilfully playing Moscow and Beijing off against each other. This balancing act seemed to be over with the collapse of the Soviet Union but it may all be back on again in the new post-Ukraine era,” Ford adds.

Kim Il-sung remained in power until his death in 1994, when his son Kim Jong-il took over leadership of the country. However Sung’s presidential post has remained symbolically vacant since his death as in North Korea’s government records he is simply referred to as the ‘Eternal President’, as a sign of resepct. Neither his son nor his grandson have been referred to as ‘President’ during their respective reigns but assumed the alternate title of Supreme Leader.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has become North Korea’s strongest political and economic ally, but the relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing has been strained of late.

Sung’s grandson Kim Jong-un’s allegiance to China has been questioned after he chose to pursue new joint military and agricultural projects with Russia. North Korea recently bid to rent 10,000 hectares of Russian farmland, perhaps prompted by worries that Pyongyang had becoming overly growing reliant on Chinese grain.

Most notably, the new Jong-un has not visited China despite being invited to do so “as soon as possible” by Chinese state broadcasters over a year ago.

Vulnerable people living in east Ukraine are in serious danger of starving if normal government services aren’t restored by the government in Kiev. In November 2014 the decision was made to stop social benefits being sent to east meaning, among other things, that elderly Ukranians in the region are no longer receiving their pensions.

Krasimir Yankov, Amnesty International’s Ukrainian researcher described the situation in the east as “dire”, saying: “[Kiev] have cut off these regions from the Ukrainian financial situation. People can’t get money from the bank, ATMs don’t work, they can’t to electrical transactions. We saw huge queues outside the post offices as now people have to go there to access their money.”

Yankov, who made several visits to the eastern territories in December 2014, estimated that “60% in Donetsk are entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. Things might be OK in the bigger cities but in small villages and towns it’s not.”

He said that there had already been reports of hunger-related deaths by the Kharkiv Human Rights Defence group, although these have not been verified, However, he did say: “Bearing in mind that it's the most vulnerable people affected - elderly, disabled and alone - it's not unimaginable for starvation to be taking place.”

However, Yankov pointed out that this latest blockade, imposed by the Kiev government, “is only the latest twist in this horrible chain of events and is not the main cause of the looming humanitarian catastrophe in eastern Ukraine. Both sides bear responsibility.”

Max Tucker, the editor of English-language newspaper the Kyiv Post, echoed Yankov’s sentiments, describing similar scenes in the East: “Pensioners have to go from rebel-held territory into Ukrainian-held territory to collect their pensions, so you see these large groups of them going across the lines to do that. Without this money they cannot buy food, and if they’re far away from the demarcation line it’s very difficult.” Tucker also warned that this problem is likely to get worse, as on Sunday Ukraine sealed off more roads to Donbas, the region which Russian-backed separatists have been slowly encroaching on since April 2014.

Tucker also indicated that it’s the smaller towns that are suffering the worst, especially due to the damage to infrastructure that shelling has caused. “The bigger towns are kind of kept going by the Russian aid and some aid from the Ukrainian side too, but this isn’t reaching the smaller towns and they’re really stuck.”

“There are reports that hundreds of heating pipes, lights and energy supplying units have been destroyed - although it’s hard to verify these. But there is definitely a fear - which the UN have spoken about too - of a humanitarian crisis,” he continued.

Last week, Denis Krivosheev, deputy director of Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International, said that Eastern Ukraine is heading for a “humanitarian catastrophe”. In an email to news agency Reuters, Krivosheev explained that pro-Kiev groups were contributing to the declining situation by attempting to stop aid and food reaching the residents of separatist-controlled Donetsk and Luhansk. "Attempting to create unbearable conditions of life is a whole new ballgame,” he wrote. “Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime."

The fighting on both sides has been backed by a propaganda war that has been raging between Kiev and Moscow and which is leading to “this disconnect which is visible on both sides”, according to Yankov. “Young Ukrainians can access the internet and thus get information from there, but the decision to ban some Russian TV channels [in Ukraine] is effecting the elderly population. Both sides are transmitting a very biased picture.”

Tucker added that it’s the perception that each side has of each other which is problematic too: “Some of the attitude in Kiev is that the people in the East are so different to Ukraine - they think that they don’t have democratic aspirations.” Although this divide has always existed to some extent due to the Russian-leaning tendencies of those in Eastern Ukraine, Tucker says that the media and rhetoric exacerbates this. “The government didn’t reach out to these people [in the East], and they were just left to absorb Russian propaganda. You know: ‘Ukraine doesn’t care about you, but Russia does’. I think that’s been a problem.”

He went on to say that the attitude in Kiev and much of the rest of the Ukraine is that this increasing humanitarian crisis in the East is not their concern. “There is a perception of ‘You’re fighting against us so why should we provide you with food and aid and money when our own country, the rest of Ukraine, is suffering a huge economic crisis’. They’re facing energy shortage caused by the fact that Donetsk is not supplying coal to the rest of the Ukraine and therefore a lot of the powerplants are running short. People think: ‘We’re in a desperate situation, why should we supply you with aid if you’re fighting against us.’”

It happened late in the third quarter, as flawed but inexorable Ohio State nursed a 21-20 lead against Oregon in Monday night’s national championship game. Although the Buckeyes would ultimately win the inaugural and prolix College Football Playoff National Championship Game 42-20, at this moment the outcome was very much in doubt. That is, before this moment: The game’s signature play took place in a 21st century sports Alhambra in a contest that was being “megacast” by ESPN, but was as primal as a pair of rams butting horns on the side of a cliff.

After Oregon had marched down the field on the game’s opening drive to stake itself to a 7-0 lead, the Buckeyes had appeared dominant. However, both of Ohio State’s second-half drives thus far had ended in careless turnovers—giveaways, truly—and coach Urban Meyer’s sideline gesticulations after each reminded all who were watching that this man, only 50, had once retired due to chest pains and depression.

Now the Buckeyes faced third-and-three at the Ducks’ 28, with roughly two minutes remaining in the third quarter. Cardale Jones, the school’s ostensible third-string quarterback, was flushed from the pocket. Jones, a 6-foot-5, 250-pound redshirt sophomore from Cleveland, darted upfield where, two yards shy of the first down, he was met head on by Oregon’s 6-foot-4, 310-pound nose tackle, Alex Balducci.

Quarterbacks are not designed to withstand head-on collisions with nose tackles, much like Jaguars are not built to withstand such crashes with HumVees. Boom! Jones, who admittedly is built more like a tight end, exploded into Balducci and rocked him one yard backward. He continued forward, taking his team with him as he has done ever since he was pressed into service in late November, and crossed the first-down marker.

Three plays later, Ezekiel Elliott rushed it in from nine yards out on the final play of the third quarter and the Buckeyes led 28-20. Ohio State, which had been deemed roadkill at least three times this season, were about to become the only school who will ever be able to claim it won the first authorized college football playoff.

“This will go down as one of the great stories in college football history,” Meyer, a native Ohioan, said afterward, and who are we to question him?

After all, this Buckeyes team lost its Heisman Trophy candidate quarterback, Braxton Miller, due to a season-ending injury in August. When Ohio State lost by two touchdowns at home to unranked Virginia Tech on September 6—the same day Oregon spanked another Big Ten favorite, Michigan State, by 18 points in Eugene—not a few pundits pulled the plug on the Buckeyes’—and the conference’s—chances to reach the four-team playoff.

That was before the advent of backup quarterback J.T. Barrett, who proved more than a capable understudy. The native Texan set a Big Ten record, accounting for 44 touchdowns running or passing, and finished fifth in the Heisman Trophy balloting. However, before the Wichita Falls, Texas, native could consummate a sentimental homecoming script for a national title game in Arlington, Texas, he suffered a broken ankle in the fourth quarter of the Buckeyes’ final regular season game, against longtime rival Michigan.

Oregon Ducks wide receiver Austin Daich (19) walks off the field after losing to the Ohio State Buckeyes in the 2015 CFP National Championship Game at AT&T Stadium. Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

As November bled into December, Ohio State remained on the outside looking in. The Buckeyes, 11-1, were ranked fifth by the College Football Playoff selection committee and were about to take the field in the Big Ten championship game with a quarterback who had yet to make a collegiate start. At that point Cardale Jones’s lone brush with fame was for an ill-fated tweet he had sent out two years earlier as a freshman: “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL. We ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.”

Whatever. Jones and the Buckeyes ravaged Wisconsin and tailback Melvin Gordon, who would finish second in the Heisman Trophy balloting, 59-0. We will never know what exactly was said in the playoff selection committee room that weekend—perhaps someone reminded his colleagues that the top two television markets when No. 5 Notre Dame visited No. 2 Florida State back in October were Birmingham, Alabama, and Columbus, Ohio—but that weekend the Buckeyes leap-frogged the Horned Frogs of TCU into the college football final four. (The Horned Frogs had won by 52 points that afternoon, but their conference, the Big 12, does not have a postseason championship game—yet.).

And so, after crashing the party as a No. 4 seed, the Buckeyes laid waste to the field. In Jones’s three games as a starter Ohio State tackled a trio of opponents that featured the three Heisman Trophy finalists (Gordon; Amari Cooper of Alabama; and this year’s winner, Marcus Mariota of Oregon). Ohio State silenced—at least for a season—the idea of Southeastern Conference hegemony by overcoming Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, then debunked the “Speed Kills” narrative of the Ducks by limiting them to less than half their average points per game (47).

For Meyer, the Urban renewal project is complete. Four autumns ago, he was a burnt-out former coach doing commentary on ESPN. In three seasons in Columbus he is 38-3 and with last night’s victory is only the second coach (Alabama’s Nick Saban) to win national titles at two different schools (Meyer got two at Florida). Like Saban, Meyer has now won three national championships in the past decade and in each of his three title-clinching wins, his squad triumphed over that season’s Heisman Trophy winner (Meyer’s Florida teams beat Troy Smith and Ohio State in 2007 and Sam Bradford and Oklahoma in 2009).

Meanwhile, college football found an ideal balance between the chaos of the BCS system and the madness of, well, March Madness. It’s worth noting—and so we will—that over the weekend four of the nation’s college basketball teams ranked in the top seven (No. 2 Duke, No. 4 Wisconsin, No. 5 Louisville and No. 7 Arizona) lost, and all but the Cardinals to unranked opponents. Top-ranked Kentucky needed double-overtime to escape with a victory at unranked Texas A&M.

That rash of upsets elicited two responses from the sports world: Ho and Hum. That’s because everyone knows the college basketball season does not really begin until the conference tournaments commence in late February and early March. Sixty-eight teams qualify for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, where a 6-0 record is the equivalent of a gavel hammering down as the judge declares, “Objection overruled.”

No one thought last season that Connecticut was one of the nation’s top four college hoops squads. But the Huskies won the national championship. In college basketball, November, December, January and February is just a four-month dress rehearsal.

At the other end of the spectrum was a college football format that heretofore would have eliminated the Buckeyes two weeks before the autumnal equinox. Play out the scenario in the BCS format and we’d likely have seen No. 1 Alabama facing undefeated defending national champion Florida State in the national championship game. Oregon, as it has before, would be left to quack about East Coast bias. The Buckeyes and their denizens, curiously enough, would have been left to sate their bowl appetites with a Rose Bowl date versus…the Ducks…in a contest that would have had no bearing on who won the national championship.

Instead, this season provided an opportunity for more inclusion without giving fans a season that was more watered-down than the vodka tonics at a strip joint (not that we’d know). Last night in Arlington, Texas, and 11 days earlier in New Orleans versus Alabama, Ohio State proved it belonged. It wasn’t just a matter that the better team won. No, the best team won.  

Since it was created more than a decade ago, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has largely been seen as a toothless, albeit well-intentioned institution. Tasked with what its top prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, calls “mass crimes that shock the conscience of humanity,” the court has dealt with significant cases, but so far failed to score any high-profile convictions.

Now, as the ICC prepares to delve into Israeli-Palestinian affairs, supporters hope that taking on a related case could raise the court’s profile. Yet even the ICC’s most outspoken proponents fear that wading into the conflict could backfire by politicizing The Hague and reducing its status. “[The] teething period has been a difficult one for the court,” says Richard Dicker, a legal adviser at Human Rights Watch. But the latest developments “will test the mettle of the ICC.”

Earlier this month, the United Nations announced that Palestine, which it recognizes as an observer state, will be eligible to join the ICC in April. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., told reporters he intends to bring cases involving Israeli settlements and alleged war crimes in Gaza last summer, to The Hague.

Some leaders in the developing world applauded the move, saying the court’s focus has previously been too narrow. “At last, the ICC may now take a case against someone other than Africans,” a diplomat from that continent said, echoing a widely held belief that The Hague has demonstrated a colonialist bend. ICC supporters disagree. But some such as Stefan Barriga, the deputy U.N. ambassador of the principality of Liechtenstein, still think the court should plow ahead, despite possible retribution from Israel’s allies. “In the long run, it would not hurt the court,” he says, “and it could help to counter the false narrative of bias against African countries.”

Skeptics, however, fear that wading into such a polarized debate in the Middle East will actually weaken the court at a time when its record is less than stellar. In 2005, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against the Sudanese strongman, Omar al Bashir, but he’s left the country several times without being detained. Last month the court acknowledged it failed to gather sufficient evidence to try Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyata on crimes against humanity because Nairobi authorities refused to cooperate. “Supporters of the ICC...should be careful what they wish for, given the ICC's abysmal record on so many fronts,” says Brian Hook, who served as assistant Secretary of State under George W. Bush.

Israel doesn’t belong to the ICC. But nonmembers can still be put on trial if the Security Council refers their case to Hague, or if alleged crimes occurred in a territory of a court member (the Palestinian Authority considers Gaza part of its state). Jerusalem could decline to cooperate. But that doesn’t appear to be Israel’s strategy. “We are not worried,” said Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, the chief of staff of the Israeli army, during a visit to Washington last week. He and other Israeli officials have pointed to what they call significant efforts to avoid civilian casualties while defending Israel’s own citizens. Those include embedding international lawyers in army units and warning civilians of impending attacks.

Even if the court decides that Gaza-related complaints merit investigation, any trial must be carried out in coordination with Israel's justice system, which is currently investigating more than a dozen cases related to the Gaza war. Given Israel’s well-respected courts, some observers say the ICC will find it easier to try cases accusing Hamas of indiscriminately shelling Israeli civilians than to take on the IDF.

But not everyone is taking their chances, which is why one Israeli law organization, Shurat HaDin, has recently asked the ICC to investigate war crimes not only against Hamas, but also against leaders in the Palestinian Authority, which last year formed a national unity government with the Islamic group. Abbas and the other officials have Jordanian citizenship and are therefore eligible to be tried by the ICC, says Nitsana Darshan Leitner, Shurat HaDin's chairwoman. A trial against them would be a long shot, she added, but she hopes the prospect of it could serve as a warning. “To deter the Palestinians from going to The Hague,” she said, “we must make clear to them that they are vulnerable, too.”

The U.S.—Israel’s biggest supporter on the matter—is also technically vulnerable to prosecution. Last year the ICC launched a preliminary investigation into allegations of crimes by American soldiers in Afghanistan, which is an ICC member. Washington’s global influence makes advancing cases against it unlikely. But the possibility of Americans standing trial at The Hague is exactly what the U.S. was afraid of in the 1990s, when nations started negotiating the Rome Statute, which later created the ICC. At the time, American diplomats insisted that the new court only take up cases approved by the U.N. Security Council, where the U.S. wields a veto. They also opposed another clause that defined settlements as war crimes, feeling that this measure specifically targeted Israel.

The Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute with reservations but never sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification, and the Bush administration later rescinded the signing. The U.S., like other nations such as China, Russia, India, Pakistan and all the Arab countries, with the exception of Jordan and Tunisia, are still not members of the court. "Our big concerns were that the ICC lacks safeguards against political manipulation,” Hook told Newsweek.  

Nevertheless, the Bush administration abstained when Sudan was referred to the ICC in 2005, and the Obama White House has been more friendly to The Hague, twice voting to support a Security Council referral to the court. Last year, Washington actively lobbied to pass a council resolution referring atrocities in Syria—where more than 200,000 people have died in a brutal civil war—to the ICC. But Russia and China nixed the resolution.

The latest move by the Palestinians, however, could change Washington’s more amicable stance. Last week, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the administration will consult with Congress over legislation that mandates cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority if its leaders bring a case against the Israelis to The Hague or assist in building one.

Court supporters shrug; American opposition to the ICC is nothing new. But many are in fact concerned about influential ICC members such as France and Canada, which have expressed strong reservations about the Palestinians’ latest gambit. These reservations have left Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador, confused but undeterred. “It is really puzzling, when you seek justice through a legal approach, to be punished for doing so,” he said.

For her part, Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor, is obliged to act on legal merit alone. But in the coming months, she’ll be forced to consider what’s quickly becoming a political morass. Her decision could well determine whether the ICC will remain a play toy for legal enthusiasts, or a powerful judicial body with worldwide authority. As Brett Schaefer, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, put it, referring to the U.S. "The ICC is hamstrung by the fact that the most powerful democratic country in the world is not a member.”

Follow Benny Avni on Twitter: @bennyavni

Part of the recent heartbreaking events in Paris reached their tragic end today in Israel, when the victims of the attack on the Jewish supermarket were laid to rest in Jerusalem. The leaders of Israel gave moving eulogies with President ReuvenReuvenReuvenReuven Rivlin stating, “This is not the way wanted to greet you in Israel.”

Jews have a long history of ending their life’s journey by being buried in the holy land. However, usually those being buried have been much older than the young men cut down by the terrorist in Paris.

The deplorable incidents in Paris have revived a long simmering debate in Israel on Israel’s relationship to Jews outside Israel. We have seen an almost Pavlovian reaction by some members of the government (including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu), calling on the Jews of France to move to Israel. Thereby, allowing Israel to fulfill its traditional role as “the refuge for endangered Jews wherever they are.”

Others have been calling for Israel to find ways of strengthening the French Jewish community, fulfilling what Israel sees as its other role, that of being an advocate for Jews everywhere. These different views represent what has always been a dichotomy in the Zionist world, between those who believe a Jewish State was the place to which all Jews should move, and those who have believe the very existence of a Jewish state would normalize the state of the Jews in the world and result in the near elimination of anti-Semitism.

The reality of the past 60 years has proved great fodder for continued debate, with the facts on the ground differing widely from location to location. For the Jews of the United States the existence of Israel, combined with the shadow of the horrors of the Holocaust, have diminished overt anti-Semitism to the point of being minute. Sadly, in the Arab world, the effect has been just the opposite.

There, anti-Semitism increased to the point that almost all of the Jews of the Arab world were forced to find refuge in Israel (some went to France). In Europe, for most of the last 60 years the situation remained more similar to that experienced in the United States. However, that situation began to change over the last twenty years, with the increasing number of Muslims living in Europe and the use of the Jews of Europe as surrogates for the Jews of Israel (who remain more difficult to attack.)

The irony of Muslim attacks on the Jews of Europe is that anytime a Jew is attacked, because s/he is a Jew (in Europe or anywhere else in the world), the fundamental premise of Zionism is strengthened—i.e. that Jews can only be safe if they have a Jewish state.

Trying to make sense of shocking events in Paris over the past few days has been an intellectual challenge. If it had just been another attack on a Jewish institution in France, that would fall into a familiar narrative. If the incident had been only the premeditated attack on a leading French cultural institution that had run afoul of the Muslim obsession of not insulting the prophet Mohammed, then it would have fallen into a very different narrative.

However, a seemingly coordinated attack on both the Jewish community and at a French institution falls into unchartered territory. What is the connection? Why attack Jews and French-Western ideals at the same time? What, if anything, do they have in common?  

On one level, there is very little that directly connects the editors of Charlie Hebdo with a random group of Jews who were gunned down in a Jewish supermarket. The connection is provided by Israel and what it has meant to part of the Muslim world. To Muslim fundamentalists,  the very establishment of Israel was a Western assault on a part of the world that, to their minds, was meant to remain forever Muslim. Israel’s very success is seen as an affront to their worldview, in much the same way that Charlie Hebdo was seen an assault on Muslim values and sensibilities.

Unfortunately for Israel, its conflict with the Arab world (and the Palestinians in particular) has always been taking place on two planes. First, it has always been about land and nationality—i.e. the conflicting national goals of the Jews/Israelis and the national goals of the Arab states and the Palestinians. The national conflict has always been solvable. The peace agreement with Egypt proved that fact. The conflict could have been resolved in the 1947, if the Arabs of Palestine had accepted the Partition Plan.

However, some of the main opponents of accepting any compromise were religious figures, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who opposed any concession. King Abdullah of Jordan, who tried to reach a peace agreement with the young state of Israel, was assassinated in 1951. President Sadat of Egypt also paid with his life (he was murdered by Islamist extremists) for daring to reach a peace agreement with Israel.  

In more recent times, it was the bombing by Hamas (an Islamic fundamentalist religious organization) that paved the way for the narrow election victory in 1996 of Benjamin Netanyahu over Shimon Peres, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fundamentalist, showing that Muslims do not hold a monopoly on those who have prolonged the conflict thanks to misguided religious beliefs.

The questions now remain: what does this mean for policymakers—to the new government in Israel that will be formed after the March 17 elections; to the European nations who must grapple with a multi-cultural Europe; and to the leadership of the United States that has been sending drones to kill the most radical of Muslim fundamentalists (ones who have actively taken up arms against those they see as opponents of Islam.)

The answer is: We have all been fighting the wrong war, with the wrong tools. I am not saying that military action is unnecessary. When someone brandishes a gun to fight, you cannot answer solely with words. However, our fight is not only with those who take up the gun, or bomb in defense of their religion. Our fight is with anyone, from whatever religion, who believes that only their path is the right path.

Our struggle is with those who do not accept the primacy of the nation-state over their identification with their community. Our battle is a war of ideas—a war that maintains you can have your religion, I can have mine, or I can be free to have no religion—but my religious beliefs and practices are my business and not those of anyone else.  

Since the Iranian revolution and the rise of Iran’s fundamentalist regime there has been ongoing hostility between the West and the fundamentalists in the Muslim world. This struggle has often turned to violence and it has impeded a chance to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

We often have heard that extremists  is a problem the Muslim world has to resolve. The recent speech by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi, in front of clerics at Al Azhar University, calling for a religious revolution within Islam is a courageous start. However, Sisi’s calls need to be supported. His actions need to be strengthened.

Beyond that there must be a realization throughout the world that if the wave of Islamic terrorism is to end, if Muslims are to be successfully integrated into Europe, if the Israeli-Arab dispute is to be resolved, there must be a concerted worldwide effort to help the leaders of Islam move away from the path they have taken and learn to coexist with other religions and beliefs.

Our military fight may be with the jihadists, but the larger battle is with fundamentalists—from whatever religion they come.

Media historian Marc Schulman is the editor of historycentral.com. An archive of his recent daily reports from Tel-Aviv can be found here.

A French citizen detained in Bulgaria had allegedly been in contact several times with one of the two Islamist militants who shot dead 12 people at the offices of Paris newspaper Charlie Hebdo, a Bulgarian prosecutor told Reuters on Tuesday.

Fritz-Joly Joachin was detained by Bulgarian police at a border checkpoint as he tried to cross into Turkey in the early hours of Jan. 1, under a European arrest warrant that alleged he had abducted his three-year-old son - an accusation he denies.

A second European arrest warrant alleges the 29-year-old had participated in a criminal group that plotted acts of terrorism, said Darina Slavova, a prosecutor in the town of Haskovo near the border.

"The second arrest warrant says Joachin, a man of Haitian origin, had several contacts with Cherif Kouachi, one of the brothers who carried out attacks in Paris," Slavova added. It was not clear how the alleged contact took place.

Joachin's Bulgarian lawyer, Radi Radev, told Reuters the second arrest warrant alleged his client had been part of an Islamist group based in the 19th arrondissement - district - of Paris and that it also alleged he had been in contact with Cherif Kouachi several times during 2014.

He said Joachin - who faces extradition to France - denied any links to terrorism and had told a judge on Tuesday: "I have friends but if they have committed crimes I cannot be held responsible for that."

French police have said brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices last week, were part of the "Buttes-Chaumont" Islamist network based in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.

CHILD

Joachin had been traveling by bus from France to Turkey with his son. Bulgarian police arrested him after his wife told French authorities he planned to take their child to Syria to be raised under radical Islam.

Speaking to a judge in a Haskovo court on Monday, Joachin agreed to be sent back to France, and the court will make a ruling on the extradition on Friday.

He said he was just planning a vacation with his son and his girlfriend in Turkey, and denied he had abducted his son.

"There is no such thing, I am not an Islamist," the Bulgarian daily newspaper Standart quoted Joachin as saying. "With my girlfriend we planned a 10-day trip to Turkey, while my wife was with our smaller child in her homeland (Tunisia)."

According to the initial European arrest warrant, Joachin's wife told authorities on Dec. 30 that he had converted to Islam 15 years ago and had become radicalized in recent years.

Seventeen people were killed in Paris in three days of violence that began with the storming of the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 and ended with a siege at a kosher supermarket two days later when four hostages were killed.

On Monday, Turkish officials said that a suspected female accomplice in the attacks came through Turkey to Syria before the killings occurred.

In the wake of the New Year’s Eve stampede along the Bund in Shanghai that resulted in the death of almost 40 people, Chinese President Xi Jinping wasted no time calling for hospitals to treat the injured and for an investigation to determine responsibility for the tragedy.

Yet beyond that, his response, and that of the rest of the Chinese leadership, has been tone-deaf, missing an important opportunity to demonstrate real leadership through compassion and understanding.

As people throughout China have sought to express their shared grief and reach out to those who lost loved ones, Beijing has actively discouraged such generosity of spirit. Instead, the leadership has mistakenly understood this terrible disaster as a potential threat to its legitimacy.

It is censoring news accounts, trying to prevent victims’ families from speaking with journalists and placing these families under surveillance. It has expended scores of police hours searching for and interrogating people who have posted their thoughts about the tragedy online.

And before one father was allowed to receive his daughter’s body to fly back to Malaysia, he was told that he had to agree to “absolve the government of any wrongdoing.”

A commentator in Shanghai explains the government’s reaction thus: “Such a major public safety incident can tug the heartstrings of the public, and the acts and words by victims’ relatives can make the public sentiments swing, making it a key task for authorities to control the families, limiting their contacts with each other or with the media….The method is brusque toward the families, preventing them from resorting to law and to the media, but—in a positive way—it can indeed alleviate the shock to the public.”

Yet the Chinese people clearly do not need to be told what matters or how to behave when confronted with tragedy. In the aftermath of the devastating July 2012 Beijing floods—the worst in six decades—that resulted in the death of 77 people, for example, Chinese social commentator Li Chengpeng wrote a beautiful and profound testament to the selflessness and generosity of his fellow Beijing citizens: “The humanity is there, like a luminous pearl, normally ordinary and unremarkable like a rock, but in the key moment shining brightly…This is Chinese people’s civic awareness growing…which is to say, when you participate in community self-government and self-management, you’ll feel a strong sense of existence and security.”

Xi Jinping and the rest of the Chinese leaders have allowed their own narrow, self-protective interests to take precedence over the broader desires and needs of the Chinese people. In so doing they have squandered an important opportunity to develop the type of citizen spirit and social unity that they so desperately seek, and deprived the Chinese people and themselves of an essential element of the Chinese dream.

Elizabeth C. Economy is the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations website and on Forbes Asia.

The verbal blows have begun as contenders step into the ring for the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

On Monday, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz fired his opening salvo against former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, both of whom have announced their interest in securing the nod for 2016.

Speaking after a speech at the conservative Heritage Action Summit in Washington, D.C., the Texas senator was asked by reporters about Bush and Romney’s expressions of interest in the 2016 nomination, NBC News reports.

"There are some who believe that the path to Republican victory is to run to the mushy middle," Cruz is reported as saying. "I think recent history has shown us that is not a path to success. It doesn't work. It's a failed electoral strategy.”

The 44-year-old Canadian-born Cruz’s remarks appear to be an attempt to position himself to the right of his potential rivals. Cruz is seen by many as a hard-liner on social issues important to conservatives. On immigration, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and the Affordable Care Act, Cruz outpaces his rivals in his race to the right.

Cruz was swept into the Senate in 2012 on a wave of Tea Party support. He remains one of the more conservative members of that body.

The most recent CNN poll shows Cruz in eighth place among likely Republican contenders with 4 percent of the vote. Jeb Bush comes in first with a projected 23 percent of the vote.

The poll included Paul Ryan, who recently confirmed that he would not be campaigning for the nomination.

The poll was also conducted before Romney announced his interest. Few expected him to run after his failed bid for the nomination in 2008 and his loss to President Barack Obama in 2012.

The autumn of 2005 was Denmark’s Charlie Hebdo moment, except it was more deadly. On 30 September, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, including one showing him with a bomb in his turban. Local Muslims reacted with fury, and soon protests were engulfing Denmark.

By early 2006, 200 people had been killed, Denmark’s embassies in Beirut and Damascus had been destroyed, and Danish, European and Christian organisations in Muslim countries had received threats. Then prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen called it Denmark’s worst crisis since the Second World War.

It’s all the more surprising, then, that in the years following the cartoon crisis, it has mostly been quiet on Denmark’s radical Muslim front. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems. For every million Danish residents, 100 have joined Isis fighting in Syria or Iraq, a recent survey shows. Only Belgium has a larger share of foreign fighters. Yet there have been no more attacks on Danish targets at home or abroad. Denmark’s secret, which French authorities may want to study more closely, is the elevation of the humble social worker. “Denmark hasn’t been afraid to tackle the Islamic radicalism problem,” notes Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert at the Swedish Defence College. “Around 2008, it began addressing Islamic radicalism-related crime through prevention work, creating the so-called SSP model where schools, social services and the police work together. What’s equally important is that government agencies on the state level work hand in hand with local authorities.”

In fact, because the cartoon crisis hit this peaceful country with such surprise and force, officials had to innovate as they went along. “The lesson learned was that security had to be on permanently high alert, which it has been ever since,” Fogh Rasmussen says. “We also learned that integration is not just about jobs and education, it’s also about values. Among the radicals you see many well-educated young people.” That’s where social workers now play a crucial role. The SSP model features a corps of mentors working with at-risk youth, steering them away from radical groups or encouraging them to leave if they have already joined, and maintaining close connections with their families.

Social workers involved in the programme are trained by the Ministry of Children, Gender Equality, Integration and Social Affairs in conjunction with PET, the country’s national security intelligence agency. Working with PET, Danish prisons have developed a staff retraining programme with the goal of preventing radicalism. Last year, authorities also added psychologists to the setup with the specific goal of reintegrating returning foreign fighters, and a new government plan includes training youth who’ll serve as role models and facilitate dialogue with youngsters at risk of radicalisation.

“Another crucial aspect is that Denmark has understood the importance of working actively for integration and is much better at not letting ghettos form,” notes Ranstorp. “Politically, there’s some hard talk, but in reality they make sure that neighbourhoods are integrated. The authorities even have a direct dialogue with mosques such as Grimhøj. It’s not clear that it has any influence on the mosques, but at least it’s there to signal red lines or during crisis situations.” Grimhøj, which is suspected of radicalising a number of the foreign fighters, has long caused controversy. Imam Oussama el Saadi has said that he hopes Isis will win and declined to denounce the Charlie Hebdo attack, noting that “the Protestant and Catholic churches didn’t distance themselves from the acts of the terrorist Breivik”.

The social workers and psychologists, then, often work under extremely adverse conditions, trying to prevent jihadist acts one would-be jihadi at a time. And, with the government in charge of overall strategy, the real action takes place at the city level. Ranstorp notes that it works better in Aarhus and smaller cities, while reaching would-be jihadis in Copenhagen poses a challenge. But as far as Morten Storm is concerned, the painstaking prevention work is a futile effort. “The Danish model is the most misguided approach you can imagine,” he argues. “The most important step that needs to be taken is preventing those who go abroad for terrorist training from coming back.”

The Danish prime minister at the time said that the protests were the worst crisis in the country since the Second World War. HAIDAR/AFP/Getty

Storm knows a thing or two about Islamic radicalism. A Bandidos member-turned-Muslim, the Dane went on to join al-Qaida, later becoming an informant for PET. Storm helped PET track down his friend, the Islamic hate preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, allowing the CIA to kill al-Awlaki in 2011. Storm, who now lives in hiding, documents his colourful career in the 2014 book Agent Storm.

The Danish government is planning a law along the lines of what the unorthodox former terrorist suggests. “The threat posed by foreign fighters in Denmark is a highly prioritised area by the Danish government,” Justice Minister Mette Frederiksen says. “In order to address this threat most effectively, we’ve launched a new action plan that focuses on both intervention and prevention. Recently we’ve introduced a bill that enables the police to refuse the issuing of passports, to revoke passports from suspected foreign fighters and to issue travel bans.” That, of course, does not include Danish citizens and residents simply going abroad for terrorist training, the very people Storm worries will commit atrocities at home.

Denmark’s conscientious mentoring, dialoguing and counselling risks can offer little defence to violent international forces, even though the government plan gamely offers solutions for growing concerns such as online radicalisation. “Even when [jihadi terror] incidents only involve lone wolves, they’re part of an international threat scenario, because the perpetrators have been inspired by international events,” says Fogh Rasmussen, who went on to become Nato’s Secretary-General, leaving office in October 2014. “The Danish security services have prevented several attacks, but we need improved international cooperation in order to be more effective. Returning foreign fighters constitutes a real threat.”

But what if Charlie Hebdo and the cartoon crisis require a different response altogether, one more profound than mentoring and travel bans? As Michael Melchior sees it, European countries need a fundamental dialogue to establish how their ethnic and religious groups are going to co-exist. He speaks from experience: the seventh-generation Danish rabbi is a former social affairs minister and deputy foreign minister of Israel, the Chief Rabbi of Norway and a leading voice for religious reconciliation. “We’ve never had a fundamental debate about the parameters in which different groups can live together in our multicultural society,” he says. “But everybody is in fear of going into that debate because, suddenly, you’ll see that society has changed.”

That change may involve more adjustment on all sides than simply accepting new names and diets. “We’re living in a multicultural society where values clash with other values,” observes Melchior, who is also the rabbi of a Jerusalem synagogue. “I strongly believe in freedom of speech, but we also need to use that freedom with wisdom. Although the bloodshed and killings [in Paris] just makes one totally identify with those who became victims in the battle for that freedom of speech, the ultimate goal of democracy in a multicultural world can’t be to trample the beliefs of others.” In Melchior’s book, one step towards successful multicultural coexistence is this: “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you have to say everything always.”

Almost 50 years into his filmmaking career, Woody Allen will write and direct his first ever TV series—and it’s for Amazon.

Half-hour episodes of the as-yet unnamed project will be available on Amazon's Prime Instant Video service by next year, The Hollywood Reportersaid Tuesday. The massive online retailer has commissioned a full season.

“Woody Allen is a visionary creator who has made some of the greatest films of all-time, and it’s an honor to be working with him on his first television series,” said Amazon Studios vice president Roy Price in a statement. From Annie Hall to Blue Jasmine, Woody has been at the creative forefront of American cinema, and we couldn’t be more excited to premiere his first TV series exclusively on Prime Instant Video next year.”

“I have no ideas, and I’m not sure where to begin,” Allen joked in his own statement. “My guess is that Roy Price will regret this.”

Regret or no regret, the news signals that Allen’s career won’t be slowing down.

It also suggests that Amazon hopes to capitalize on the success of Amazon Studios series Transparent, which won two Golden Globes on Sunday, with more original content.

In a predawn raid earlier this month, armed militants operating from the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, breached the northern Saudi Arabia border and launched a suicide attack on a military post, reportedly killing three border guards. After ISIS claimed credit for the strike, it emerged that one of the dead Saudi soldiers was General Oudah al-Belawi, the commander of all Saudi forces in the northern part of the country. Normally, such high-ranking officers don’t visit the border, which suggests that ISIS may have been tipped off in advance about the general’s travel plans.

Saudi officials don’t like to talk about it, but experts who closely follow developments inside the kingdom say ISIS enjoys growing support among ordinary Saudis, who see the group as the true champion of embattled Sunnis in their sectarian struggles against the Shiite-led governments in Iran and elsewhere. For many Saudis, ISIS also stands for a righteous, austere brand of Islam, while the royal family, they believe, is irredeemably corrupt.

Now, after years of condemning yet turning a blind eye to jihadists fighting against the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, the kingdom’s leaders are increasingly worried about support for ISIS at home. Saudi Arabia’s concerns are so strong they’ve even prompted Riyadh to reenergize its relationship with the United States—the only country that can guarantee its security. As Frederic Wehrey, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it, “It’s like that line in the movie Ghostbusters: ‘Who you gonna call?’”

The cooperation was far from a given. Over the past year, the relationship between Washington and Riyadh has been mired in distrust. Saudi Arabia is upset that the White House decided not to bomb Syria, the ally of the kingdom’s biggest rival, Iran. It also hasn’t been a fan of President Barack Obama’s efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Tehran. The kingdom has even gone so far as to suggest that it might try to go nuclear as well.

“We are not going to sit idly by and receive a threat there and not think seriously how we can best defend our country and our region,” Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi ambassador to Britain, told The Times of London last November.

But Saudi Arabia’s fears also come at a time when the health of King Abdullah, 90, appears to be deteriorating, raising the possibility of a succession struggle within the royal family. Which is why, for now at least, the Saudis appear to be putting their reservations aside as they help the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. That joint effort began last August, when Saudi Arabia took part in airstrikes against ISIS positions in Syria and Iraq. The Saudis also announced they would host a facility where some 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels will be trained by U.S. special forces.

More recently, over the past few weeks several senior Saudi security officials have come through Washington for meetings with top leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and various intelligence agencies. Among other things, senior administration officials say, their talks have focused on ways the United States can assist Riyadh’s domestic counterterrorism measures. The Saudi and American officials have also discussed joint actions to help stabilize Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s next-door neighbor and home to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed credit for last week’s terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The latest Saudi leader to visit Washington is Prince Khaled bin Bandar, the head of Saudi intelligence. In meetings last week with Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, and counterparts in the U.S. intelligence community, Khaled focused on, among other things, Saudi efforts to undermine ISIS’s recruiting members inside the kingdom, a senior White House official told Newsweek. “We can bomb better than they can,” said F. Gregory Gause III, a Saudi Arabia expert at Texas A&M University, in an email from Riyadh, where he is now visiting. “So their real contribution is with intelligence and messaging, which they can do better than we can.”                                                                          

In another step against ISIS, Riyadh recently announced a decision to reopen an embassy in Baghdad. The kingdom hasn’t had a diplomatic presence in the Iraqi capital since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait 25 years ago. The move by Saudi Arabia—the home of Wahhabi Islam, the same creed followed by ISIS—to restore ties with the Shiite-led government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is a “serious blow to the sectarian narrative of the group,” according to an analysis by the Soufan Group, which provides strategic intelligence and security to governments and multinational companies.

In response to Riyadh’s move, ISIS can be expected to step up attacks like the one on the Saudi border post, Soufan analysts say. They add that the timing of such strikes—as a possible succession looms—could work to the militants’ advantage by reminding the country’s disaffected youth that meaningful change isn’t likely to come as long as the royals remain in power. Further assaults could also boost recruiting for ISIS, which uses Saudis for suicide attacks more than any other group of foreign fighters.

U.S. Middle East experts say confronting the ISIS challenge inside the kingdom won’t be easy. Last August, King Abdullah criticized his country’s own religious scholars, calling them “lazy” for not publicly challenging ISIS’s interpretation of Islam. But Bernard Heykal, a Middle East expert at Princeton, says the fact that Abdullah felt he needed to scold his religious scholars underscores the internal challenges facing the royal family. “There are enough religious scholars who believe what ISIS is doing is not wrong,” he said.

Popular support for ISIS is also a major problem in the kingdom. A poll commissioned last October by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a D.C.-based think tank, found that only 5 percent of adult Saudis openly support ISIS. But that 5 percent translates into more than half a million adults in a country with an overall population of nearly 31 million, noted David Pollock, one of the analysts who worked on the poll.

The fear that such numbers arouse is bound to keep on driving the Saudis closer to the United States, even if Washington’s overtures to Iran, among other things, give Riyadh severe heartburn. Saudi officials are bracing for more ISIS attacks along Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq—as well as the growing likelihood that some of their own citizens will be cheering for the black banners.