This blog is a part of my body of research that seeks to analyse civil society's and academia's understanding of national security models from an academic perspective with a focus on Canada, Israel and the UK.
During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not. – Maya Angelou
לרגל יום ירושלים, החל היום, ובבוא עלינו חודש סיוון, בו נחגוג את קבלת התורה במעמד הר סיני: הצטרפו לקמפיין החדש של נשות הכותל:
זאת התורה- עכשיו תורי!
ראש חודש סיון - הצטרפו אלינו לתפילת ראש החודש סיוון ביום שישי הקרוב, בשעה 07:00 בבוקר בעזרת הנשים בכותל המערבי , ה-30 מאי, 2014
ראש חודש תמוז - אנו מזמינות אותך להצטרף אלינו לתפילת ראש חודש תמוז, ה- 29 ביוני, 2014. בתמוז יגיע לישראל ספר תורה שעבר בין למעלה מ- 40 קהילות יהודיות בעולם, ויגיע לראשונה לתפילתנו בכותל המערבי. אנחנו מתרגשות ופועלות כדי לקבל את אישור רב הכותל להכניס את ספר התורה לתפילתינו על מנת לקרוא בו ולחגוג בת מצווה לארבע בנות ישראליות, כולל עלייה לתורה!
חיתמו על עצומה לראש הממשלה: פנו לראש הממשלה בנימין נתניהו והביעו תמיכה במאבקן של נשות הכותל, המבקשות להתפלל עם ספר תורה בעזרת הנשים, בכותל המערבי בירושלים, בירת ישראל. מדינת ישראל היא היחידה בעולם המונעת מנשים יהודיות זכויות תפילה הניתנות לגברים יהודים. חתמו על העצומה
In honor of Jerusalem Day, today, and the month of Sivan, when we celebrate the receipt of the Torah at Mount Sinai...
Join us for Rosh Hodesh Tammuz, June 29, 2014 with a special double bat mitzvah, and welcoming the ARZA Torahteinu Torah scroll at the gates of the Kotel
At the Kotel, men have access to 100 Torah scrolls. Don't get us wrong, we are happy men have can read Torah but we want women to have equal rights. The Western Wall is a public, holy site which belongs to all Jews.
Women are refused the right to bring a Torah into the women's section of the Western Wall by Kotel Administrator, Rabbi Rabinowitz. Send a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling him that you support women's rights to read Torah at the Kotel NOW!
Women are half the kingdom. Women are half the Jewish world. It is time women have access to Torah at the Kotel. LET MY TORAH GO
EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report: TE-SAT 2014
Acts of terrorism in 2013 caused the death of seven people in the European Union. This, along with the sustained number of Europeans taken hostage by groups or individuals linked to religiously inspired terrorism, demonstrates the continuing terrorist threat posed to the security of citizens and interests of the European Union.
"The threat from terrorism in Europe remains strong, manifesting itself in various forms and driven by diverse motives. There is a growing threat from EU citizens who, having travelled to conflict zones to engage in terrorist activities, return to the European Union with a willingness to commit acts of terrorism. This was especially evident in the case of Syria in 2013. This phenomenon adds a new dimension to the existing threat situation in the European Union, since it provides new groups within Member States with both terrorist intentions and capabilities, which may result in terrorist attacks with unexpected targets and timings," says Rob Wainwright, Director of Europol.
"Be it right or left-wing extremism, separatism or religiously motivated acts, we need to step up our work to respond to the threat of radicalisation. Radicalisation leading to violent terrorism is a gradual process and does not happen overnight. In times when populist movements and xenophobic winds are sweeping across Europe, it is more important than ever to keep this in mind." says Commissioner Cecilia Malmström.
The main figures in the EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT) 2014 are:
7 people died as a result of terrorist attacks in the EU
152 terrorist attacks were carried out in EU Member States
535 individuals were arrested in the EU for terrorism-related offences
Court proceedings for terrorism charges were concluded in relation to 313 individuals.
The terrorist threat in the EU remains acute and diverse. The largest proportion of terrorist attacks in the EU was related to separatist groups, although the number significantly decreased in 2013 compared to previous years. Most separatist incidents, however, were small-scale. The majority of EU Member States continue to consider religiously inspired terrorism as a major threat, as evidenced by the significant increase in the number of arrests. Two attacks and several disrupted plots in 2013 illustrate this threat.
Al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorist groups abroad continued to encourage self-organised attacks within the EU, aiming for indiscriminate casualties. With regard to left-wing and anarchist terrorism, the number of attacks and arrests increased compared to previous years. Right-wing extremists may exhibit violent and intimidating behaviour, but do not generally employ terrorist modi operandi. An exception to this rule in 2013 was a series of four attacks in the UK carried out by one individual. Tactics employed by terrorists of all affiliations differ in their levels of sophistication. New tactics continue to be observed in attempted, completed or foiled attacks.
The TE-SAT 2014 is the result of excellent collaboration between Europol and EU Member States. This public document, published annually, presents facts and figures on terrorism in the European Union for the benefit of law enforcement officials, policy makers and the general public, and also seeks to identify developing trends in terrorism.
The full version of the TE-SAT 2014 can be downloaded from the Europol website.
Europol Corporate Communications P.O. Box 908 50 2509 LW The Hague The Netherlands
This message is sent in confidence and is only intended for the named recipient. If you receive this message by mistake, you may not use, copy, distribute or forward this message, or any part of its contents or rely upon the information contained in it. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail and delete the relevant e-mails from any computer. This message does not constitute a commitment by Europol unless otherwise indicated.
Dear colleague, we would like to invite you to this year's conference on: 16 July 2014, British Library, LONDON
This year the 8th International Crime Science Conference will focus on "What Works in Crime and Security – Practical Interventions from the Innovation Horizon". The conference will showcase leading research that is helping to tackle threats to our society. The conference in particular will focus on the dynamic between innovation in responses to crime and security issues and the need for such measures to be quickly and effectively brought into the practical domain. Topics covered will include Cyber Security; Forensics; Ballistics & Gun Crime; Knife Crime; Transport Crime & Drug Trafficking.
The conference, which has enjoyed consistently high approval ratings from delegates over the past seven years, brings together senior security practitioners, policy-makers, technologists, and academics, all developing the latest techniques and technologies for preventing crime and increasing security. The conference is supported by the UK Home Office Centre for Applied Science and Technology (CAST) and the new What Works Centre for Crime Reduction at the College of Policing.
This course is aimed at security professionals whose role involves developing and implementing strategies to address the threat of extremism, against public, corporate and critical targets. The course is also suitable for those wishing to make a career in these areas. MSc/Diploma/Certificate in Crime Science- Full/Part time
This course is the UK's first (and most successful) programme designed to equip law enforcement and security practitioners, and graduate students, with the means to deliver immediate and sustainable reductions in crime through the use of scientific method. PhD programme in security and crime UCL SECReT is the £17m international centre for PhD training in security and crime science at University College London, the first centre of its kind in Europe.We offer the most comprehensive integrated PhD programme for students wishing to pursue multidisciplinary security or crime-related research degrees. We recruit our doctoral students from a range of scientific backgrounds to pursue research in crime or security domains across the engineering and social sciences.
Use these links to post to your social media:
Join our Security and Crime Science FACEBOOK page by clicking on the below:
UCL Department of Security and Crime Science University College London 35 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9EZ
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Example: On 11 December 2001, precisely three months after the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was at the centre of an event that was to cast an even longer shadow over the twenty-first century, changing more people's lives around the world than Osama Bin Laden's attacks on America. Yet few know it even happened, let alone its date.
Research proposal I submitted (and then revoked) to the University of Birmingham (UK)
This is a partial copy:
Debra V. Wilson
______________
______________
USA
Email:
____________
ID-Number 1196815
RESEARCH PROPOSAL
FOR 1196815
GLOBAL MARKETING AND AL-SHABAAB: HOW
A SOMALI BASED PARAMILITARY GROUP HAS PACKAGED ITSELF TO “CONSUMERS” IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
OF RESEARCH PROJECT
Harakat Shabaab al-Mujahidin or
more commonly known as al-Shabaab (the Youth) was the militant wing of the
Somali Council of Islamic Courts or (ICU).
By the end of 2006 ICU controlled Mogadishu and most of southern
Somalia. After the loss of most of its
territorial holds in the battles of Baidao and Bandiradley the Somali Council
of Islamic Courts fled in retreat and splintered. The less militant members went onto form the
Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (in late 2007) whilst more militant
members regrouped into several more combative prone alliances one of them being
al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab is a paramilitary group
with membership numbering somewhere in the thousands and with somewhat tenuous
(often self proclaimed) links to al-Qaeda, believes itself to be a defender of
Islam protecting the faith from a range of designated enemies some of them
being the Western backed Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), the
African Union Mission to Somalia, (AMISOM), Western NGO’s operating in Somalia,
the United Nations, the United States and the United Kingdom and even less
conservative/les strict interpretations of Islam. Members
of al-Shabaab also wish to install Sharia law throughout Somalia. Their tactics
have run the gamut from suicide bombings to stoning to forced amputations to charitable
works in Somalia that include feeding the poor.
Al-Shabaab controls much of southern Somalia.
Until recently al-Shabaab was
thought of as a Somali phenomena and problem with little possibility of
paramilitary reach beyond its own borders.
That assumption has been proven erroneous. In a leaked (via Wikileaks) US State Department
Nairobi Embassy cable from 2009 the radicalization of UK nationals traveling to
Somalia for ‘jihad’ is noted. In March
2010 UK Home Office proscribed the Somali based group, al- Shabaab. On 11th
July 2010 al-Shabaab took credit for the World Cup twin bombings in Kampala,
Uganda. And in September 2010 MI5’s Director
General, Jonathan Evans warned of the threat of UK youth being radicalized by
al-Shabaab and Mr. Evans went onto say that UK security services were aware of more
than one hundred UK residents training and fighting in Somalia at the behest of
al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab’s violence has not only moved to
the global stage so has their recruitment.
My research will explore al-Shabaab’s brand, marketing tools and how
this paramilitary group of mostly young males is packaging itself to recruit UK
residents.
QUESTIONING
AL-SHABAAB’S MARKETING PLAN
How does al-Shabaab
views itself (its brand) – domestically (in Somalia) and globally?
What is al-Shabaab’s current presence on
the internet and in print? How does
al-Shabaab utilise social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and
Youtube?
From the
public’s perspective how does the al-Shabaab brand in Somalia differ from
its brand in the in the United Kingdom?
How does
al-Shabaab use the global press, foreign security services and foreign
governments to further globalise its brand?
What
marketing tools (including imagery and language) does al-Shabaab’s use in
reaching a foreign (UK) consumer base that is mostly young and male?
How does al-Shabaab’s
select (and market to) the most receptive consumer base in the UK?
First Nations from Across Canada to Gather in Ottawa for AFN Special Chiefs Assembly on Tuesday May 27, 2014 for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Special Chiefs Assembly.
This Special Chiefs Assembly called by the AFN National Executive will focus on the timing and location for the election of National Chief and the approach going forward on Bill C-33 (federal legislation on First Nations education) and, more broadly, First Nations control of First Nations education.
The ...main plenary of the Special Chiefs Assembly will be webcast at www.afn.ca.
England has had its share of terrorist bombings, economic crises, political reshuffles, the Olympic Games, and so on – but the basic “grammar” of Englishness hasn’t changed.
Flagging spirits: a St George's Day parade in 2010. Photo: Getty
What did you do on St George’s Day this year? You know, 23 April? Or maybe you didn’t know. Surveys regularly show that the vast majority of us do not celebrate our national day in any way. Two-thirds of English people are unaware of when it is. Can you imagine so many Americans being ignorant of Independence Day or Irish people forgetting St Patrick’s Day?
It is often claimed that the English lack patriotic feeling and there is some evidence to support this. In a Europe-wide survey conducted in 2010, English respondents, on average, rated their degree of patriotism at just 5.8 out of ten, far below the self-rated patriotism of the Scots, Welsh and Irish and the lowest of all the European nations. If you are English, you may well feel that this absence of national amour propre is a good thing. These statistics might even be making you feel a little proud – although I’m sure the irony (and Englishness) of taking pride in our lack of national pride won’t have escaped you.
But I had a hunch, based on research for my book Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, first published ten years ago, that these statistics might be misleading. I recently did my own survey, asking more detailed questions, for a revised edition of the book, which was published, appropriately, on St George’s Day. My findings confirmed my view that we are a nation of “closet patriots”: 22 per cent of us “always” feel proud to be English; 23 per cent “often” do; 38 per cent do at least “sometimes”. Only 3 per cent “never” feel proud.
My poll shows (as many other surveys have suggested) that the quality we feel most proud of is our sense of humour. And although we may need reminding of the date, 75 per cent of the English feel more should be done to celebrate our national day and nearly half would like to see greater numbers of people flying the English flag on it. Despite this, even when it falls on a weekend, 72 per cent of us do not celebrate the day in any way and only 11 per cent would go so far as to fly a flag. If we feel proud to be English, why do we not celebrate St George’s Day or display the St George’s cross?
There is a clue in the way we take pride in our sense of humour. A crucial element of this humour is something I call the “importance of not being earnest” – the unwritten rule prohibiting excessive zeal. The extravagant parades and boastful, sentimental flag-waving of other nations make us cringe. We may feel proud to be English but we are too squeamish and cynical to make a fuss. It is perhaps ironic that the quality in which we take most pride prevents most of us from displaying this pride.
You may have noticed that the high percentage of English people who feel that more should be done to celebrate St George’s Day (75 per cent) is almost the same as the high percentage who make no effort to celebrate it (72 per cent). This contradiction is typically English and it reflects two of our defining characteristics: moderation and Eeyorishness. We avoid extremes and excess and we have a tendency to indulge in a lot of therapeutic moaning about a problem rather than address it. We complain that “more should be done” to celebrate our national day but we don’t even fly a flag.
Our reasons for not doing so are only partly rooted in these qualities. The flag has to some extent been reclaimed but it is still seen by some as a symbol of the far right and racism: a quarter of my respondents cited this as their reason for not flying it. However, the flag was only available for appropriation by extremists in the first place because the rest of the population had shunned it.
As a result of squeamishness about patriotism, particularly among the intelligentsia, even the concept of national character is regarded with suspicion – to the point that some deny there is any such thing – and the study of Englishness is regarded as a self-indulgent, archaic and perhaps even jingoistic pastime.
This queasiness is unfortunate, particularly at a time when we English are having a bit of a wobble about our identity. It’s nothing as dramatic as a full-blown national identity crisis – the navel-gazing implied by the term “crisis” would be rather un-English – but various factors, including the call for Scottish independence, globalisation and immigration, have caused a degree of uncomfortable uncertainty about what it means to be from this country.
We are not alone in this. Globalisation is not turning the world into a vast monoculture. Quite the opposite: there has been an increase in nationalism and tribalism; a proliferation of struggles for independence, devolution and self-determination; and a resurgence of concern about ethnicity and cultural identity. Now is a good time to be addressing and studying cultural identity, instead of cringing at the idea that we might have one.
Those who deny or shy away from the notion of national character often seem to fail to grasp that the term is just a metaphor, a colloquial way of talking about culture. Some psychologists appear to take the metaphor literally and have devoted much time and research to “proving” that the national character is a myth – on the grounds that stereotypes about it are untrue, because they do not correlate with aggregate scores on five personality factors.
The supposedly reserved English, for example, tend to score highly on extraversion in personality questionnaires. The so-called English reserve is certainly far more complex and contextual than the crude stereotype would suggest – as is its opposite, English hooliganism. Yet both our inhibited reserve in some social contexts and our selective shedding of inhibitions in others are part of a cultural grammar of rules and norms that has nothing to do with individual personality traits.
In real-life social situations, most people unconsciously obey the unwritten rules of their culture, whatever their individual personality. On commuter trains, for instance, English extraverts hide behind their newspapers, mobile phones and laptops and even avoid making eye contact with strangers, let alone striking up conversation – except when there is some disruption to share a brief Eeyorish moan about. In town centres on Friday and Saturday nights, after a few beers, even English introverts shed the same designated inhibitions in the same choreographed manner as everyone else. (Incidentally, they also do this if they are unknowingly drinking non-alcoholic placebos – the behavioural effects of alcohol are determined by culture, not by chemistry.)
****
National character has become a taboo subject among anthropologists, who should know better, as studying cultures is what we do. Yes, we have historically studied smaller tribal cultures, in places with mud huts, monsoons and malaria – but I am hardly the first anthropologist to tackle the national character of a modern culture or even that of the English. Ruth Benedict’s study of the Japanese national character, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), is still hugely influential in Japan. Margaret Mead’s And Keep Your Powder Dry: an Anthropologist Looks at America (1942) was a university set text for decades.
The demise of national character as a respectable subject for anthropological research was probably, to some extent, the result of a pair of rather more questionable studies of the Russian and English national characters, published in 1949 and 1955 by the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer. His conclusions, particularly on the “causes” of some aspects of the Russian mindset, were so far-fetched that the anthropological study of national character fell into disrepute and has never recovered.
Social anthropology has become both more “micro” and more timid in recent years. These days, ethnographers take a tiny aspect of a tiny social group and describe it to death – and there is almost a taboo on ever attempting to make a definitive statement about any aspect of a culture, let alone trying to define a national one. We are not much help to nations struggling to understand themselves.
Is there any hope for a resurgence of anthropological interest in national character? Or will this remain a subject addressed only by journalists, humorists and, occasionally, from a safe distance, historians – and regarded as suspiciously patriotic by the English intelligentsia?
Perhaps it can be rehabilitated with a bit of clever marketing. After all, another branch of anthropology, sociobiology, became a highly unfashionable subject in the 1970s and 1980s, only to re-emerge, exactly the same but rebranded as “evolutionary psychology”, in the 1990s. It is now respectable and popular again. Many objections to the notion of national character might be resolved if we ditched this misleading figure of speech and talked instead about “cultural grammar”. It’s another metaphor but maybe a more helpful one, as a culture is much more like a language than a personality – and it allows for variation (regional, ethnic, class or subcultural “dialects”). A grammar, like a national culture, is merely a set of rules, which can be learned, although most natives obey them unconsciously.
Native speakers are rarely any good at explaining the grammatical rules of their language and, in the same way, members of a culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the unwritten, largely unconscious behavioural rules of that culture in an intelligible manner. That’s the point of anthropologists, so in Watching the English I set out to provide a kind of cultural grammar of Englishness.
At the risk of labouring this metaphor, I would add that although languages do change and evolve, these modifications take time to become established and changes in the underlying grammatical rules take even longer. It is much the same with cultural grammar. When my publishers asked me for a revised edition of my book, ten years after it was first published, I was initially a little reluctant. Yes, a lot has happened in the past decade – and England has had its share of terrorist bombings, economic crises, political reshuffles, the Olympic Games, and so on – but the basic “grammar” of Englishness hasn’t changed. Still, there were some emerging cultural codes that needed deciphering – changes in greeting practices, new linguistic class indicators, developments in mobile-phone etiquette, the new rules of social media. Minutiae, in the grand grammatical scheme of things, but I ended up adding over 50,000 words.
That my book is now being taught on “introduction to anthropology” courses at a number of distinguished universities suggests that the taboo on studying national cultures may be losing some of its force. Even if the rebranding is successful, however, there will still be squabbles over how we study such cultures. For instance, purist ethnographers object vehemently to the use of quantitative research methods such as national surveys. The trouble is, there are embarrassing things that some people will confess to only in the safety of an anonymous survey. For closet patriots, those things may include: “Yes, all right, I admit it. I sometimes feel proud to be English.”
The revised edition of “Watching the English” is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25)
