Free Republic

The White House plans a conference next month on efforts to counter violent extremism — in light of this past week’s shootings in France, and earlier attacks in Canada and Australia. The meeting will highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring others in the United States and elsewhere to carry out violent acts.

The Obama White House has finally released the names of the fourteen Muslim “leaders” who met with the President this past week. Among the group — which included a comedian, along with a hijab-wearing basketball player and a handful of left wing activists — were a select few individuals with disturbingly close ties to the global Muslim Brotherhood.

The White House did not invite the most senior American official charged with preventing terrorist attacks — the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — to the three-day conference this week on countering violent extremism in the United States and abroad because the administration did not want the event too focused on law enforcement issues, according to senior American officials. But Mr. Comey’s Russian counterpart — Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet K.G.B. — was at the meeting, even though international human rights groups have repeatedly accused the Russian security service of unjustly detaining...

With little fanfare, another taboo in U.S.-Iran relations has shattered. Jim Slattery, a former six-term Democratic Congressman from Kansas, late last year became the first former or current American legislator to visit the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Tehran to attend a conference on countering violent extremism, Slattery encountered a largely friendly reception from both officials and ordinary Iranians and came back equipped to present a more realistic and upbeat depiction of Iranians than is usually found on Capitol Hill. Speaking Monday at the Atlantic Council in Washington, Slattery conceded that there are elements in Iran that still oppose any...