Etihad Airways and Arab Film Festival Australia are joining forces again in 2016 to bring the best of contemporary Arab cinema to Australian audiences. The 13th annual Arab Film Festival Australia opened in Sydney showcasing diverse films from Australia, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Syria. [...] The festival will travel to Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth over the next three weeks.

The Obama administration is hosting defense and foreign ministers and representatives from over 40 countries Wednesday in an effort to get more help fighting ISIS. A day after the anti-ISIS coalition announced it had dropped its 50,000th bomb in the nearly two-year campaign to root the terror group out of Iraq and Syria, the US sought to raise over $2 billion in funding to bolster Iraq and seek other help from allies to stabilize the region.

One option is to cut the monster at its roots. This is the strategy adopted by Hollande, calling for stepped up anti-terrorism operations in Syria and Iraq. Eradicating the source of propaganda and erasing the motivations for terrorist acts is one of the few options left when the embedded enemy cannot be identified. However, this strategy is uncertain and will take time to yield results, which means France facing up to the prospect of similar attacks in the near future.

In 2014, Indonesia declared it has chosen “soft power” to counterattack ISIS, determined to resort to violence or war only if every other means failed. Later in March 2016, Indonesia emphasized its decision not to join any military alliance in countering terrorism.