European powers are trying to develop better means for pre-emptively spotting "lone-wolf" militants from their online activities and are looking to Israeli-developed technologies, a senior EU security official said on Tuesday.

The Public Diplomacy program aims to combat the BDS movement and the delegitimization of Israel through uniting a global community of pro-Israel activists on social media in a coordinated effort to inform and influence people on Israel.

Finding that the curse of unsupervised hate speech is rampant on the web and leads to terrorism, social media moguls Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have joined in signing a “Code of Conduct”. The document, produced by the European Commission (EC), states that these mega companies will dedicate manpower and algorithms to remove “illegal hate speech” within 24 hours.

The soft power roadmap for what is needed is relatively clear. Seizing the moment requires the United States and international partners to give much higher priority to activities such as public diplomacy, sustainable development assistance, and exchange programmes.

In 2016 interviews, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter compared the ISIS base in the Middle East to a tumor, demonstrating the cancer analogy had embedded in the administration’s thinking: "There are metastases elsewhere – Libya, Afghanistan…." The analogy, while sobering, offers a useful way to think about the strategies to challenge the Islamic State.

Hollywood’s relationship with the Middle East still relies on stock scenes and clichés. Films often proselytize American militarism while vilifying the largely Muslim region. Can Hollywood get out of this rut, and better yet contribute to the battle of ideas between Western democracies and radical Islam? 

The loss of Palmyra, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, was one of ISIS’s biggest setbacks since the group declared itself a caliphate in 2014. […] [Maamoun] Abdulkarim said he and other historians and archaeologists would travel to Palmyra to more deeply assess the damage, and to plan how they’ll restore the ancient ruins and sites. 

A famous Belgian statue has become a symbol of defiance in the wake of the attacks in Brussels that took place Tuesday morning. The Manneken Pis is a well-known bronze sculpture in Brussels of a small child urinating into a fountain.