It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that we live in an age when almost every headline story has become a Rorschach Test for spin doctors on cable news or in cyberspace. Their purpose is not to promote dialogue leading to some sort of shared understanding but to further fuel current political polarizations with wildly different, ideologically driven interpretations. A case in point: Elliot Rodger who went on a killing spree near UC Santa Barbara. He was a product of America’s misogynist culture. Or he was a gun fanatic acting out violent video games or shock films like “American Psycho”—the moral: censor pop culture and more gun control. Or he was a psychotic loner driven by homicidal-suicidal delusions—the moral: more mental health spending. Prepackaged, often contradictory theories were offered up almost before the crime scenes were roped off. Another dynamic fueling polarization is built into the psychic economy. Across the political spectrum, there seems to be a compelling need to prove novelist Charles Dickens’ at least half right when he wrote: “These are the best of times. These are the worst of times.” Our current updates of Voltaire’s arch-optimistic Dr. Pangloss believe that—despite the last century’s calamitous wars and economic depression—human life has never been healthier, longer-lived, or more literate and economically advanced than today. But we also have our Doomsayers who see Apocalypse around the corner because of climate change or the next pandemic or a new nuclear-chemical-biological-cyber world war triggered by global inequalities. The optimists have statistics on their side. The pessimists have the truism that history is prone to repeat its catastrophes. Think back a hundred years to 1914 when, despite well-armed rival nationalisms, European (and U.S.) civilization seemed to be on an unstoppable upward arc. A distinguished peace crusader, Norman Angell, had just written a well-received book proving that global economic integration made a general war impossible. And even such atavistic eruptions as Tsarist Russia’s Beilis Case, in which Jews were accused of modern-day ritual murder, had ended in an acquittal. Nobody—not even science fiction writer H. G. Wells—believed anything as bizarre as that enlightened Germany would, within twenty years, be ruled be a totalitarian party led by a megalomaniac preaching holy war against the world Jewish conspiracy. After the 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil, the mantra was “9/11 has changed everything.” Yet scarcely more than a decade later, he are once again enmired in polarizing debates about the relative dangers of “homegrown” vs. “global” terrorism that in some ways are a throw back to the 1990s. Then, one camp single-mindedly-focused on the 1993 World Trade Center attack as the harbinger future danger from the Mideast, but the other camp fixated on “right-wing extremism”—like that of Timothy McVeigh at Oklahoma City in 1995—while treating Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as mostly a bogeyman. The world indeed has indeed changed since the 1990s, and those concerned about the danger posed by both terrorism and violent anti-Semitism must grapple with how and why without resort to self-validating ideologies. Take, for example, the phenomenon of “lone wolf terrorism” which American Neo-Nazi guru William Pierce dubbed “leaderless resistance.” This has been important for roughly thirty years. An early example is Buford Furrow, Jr., who in 1999, after casing the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, chose instead to attack with an automatic weapon a Jewish community center where he wounded five people, including three children and a teenage counselor, and an office worker, before killing a Filipino American mailman on a nearby street. With a background of mental health problems, Furrow spent time at Robert Hayden’s “Aryan Nations” Idaho compound where he imbibed the white supremacist, anti-Semitic ideology, yet was given, not specific marching orders, but general encouragement to commit mayhem as a “lone wolf.” It’s instructive to compare Furrow with Frazier Glenn Miller who earlier this year killed three people at a Jewish community center and a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas. Miller, a 20-year Army veteran, was a Neo-Nazi and KKK activist who served three years in prison for conspiring to assassinate Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Miller was a self-starter like Furrow, but unlike Furrow was also very much a product of Internet hate culture which was only in in its infancy in the 1990s. Again unlike Furrow, Miller’s Jew hatred single-mindedly targeted Israel, which is why he drew inspiration not only from right-wing hate sites but from a recent left-wing best-seller picturing the Israelis as “Jewish Nazis” vis-à-vis the Palestinians. These are very much twenty-first century trends involving cyberspace and the convergence of extremist ideologies. Now, take the notorious case of the Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Motivated by a jihadist ideology, he together with his brother Tamerlan perpetrated the April, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombing that killed three and injured over 260 people. The Tsarnaevs were of Chechen background, though brought up Kyrgyzstan before coming to the U.S. and gaining asylum with their parents. Dzhokar was first radicalized while attending the Islamic Society of Boston, a process that continued after his visiting Russia, about which the FBI failed to connect the dots. Dzokhar was almost certainly also responsible for the anti-Semitic murder of Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken, as well as their roommate Brendan Mess, in Waltham, Massachusetts, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. So here we have a complicated fusion of foreign and homegrown Islamist terrorism with lethal anti-Semitic ideology. Remarkably, ideologically-driven apologists are still busy on the Internet downplaying or denying the significance of what should be obvious about the Dzhokar Tsarnaev. They picture him, not so much as a cold-blooded killer, but as a socially dysfunctional young man frustrated in his ambition to serve as a boxer on the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team! The important truth is that Dzhokar Tsarnaev was a jihadist fanatic, an anti-Semitic murderer, and a product of both imported and U.S. nurtured Islamist extremism, to which he was exposed through both the Internet and personal networks. To put it another way, his characteristically twenty-first century terrorism and anti-Semitic violence were neither “global” nor “local” but both in a combination that might be called “glocal.” Recently, in Salon magazine, William Saletan argued that Frazier Glenn Miller’s murderous attack in Kansas was “an outlier,” because ADL and other polls show low or declining levels of anti-Semitism, at least in the U.S. Saletan has since backtracked writing that “every nation is different.” He has in mind recent anti-Semitic attacks in Belgium and France, and he could add to his “outlier” U.S. events the latest anti-government attacking killing two policemen in Los Vegas that probably was motivated by an ideology akin to Miller’s. But Americans would be wrong to seize upon current poll data on U.S. anti-Semitism to convince themselves that this country will remain an “outlier” to terrorism including anti-Semitic violence. The U.S. is not immune to dangerous, complex new trends that don’t fit into simple ideological boxes.