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Aviation
Israel has a justified reputation as a country offering tight aviation and airport security. Thus, although Israel has been the targets of various forms of terrorism for decades, no one has been killed or wounded inside Ben Gurion airport, or on board an aircraft departing from the airport, for the last forty-four years. Experts say that Europe cannot emulate all aspects of Israel’s approach to aviation security, but that the core idea — that potentially higher risk passengers should be singled out as early as possible before they board the plane – should be adopted, subject to European laws and norms.
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Syria
Iran is propping up the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in order to ensure that Hezbollah, which both countries support, has the continued capability to wage war against Israel, expert witnesses told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing Tuesday.
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Drones
France will employ anti-drone technology to interfere with and take control of any flying machines breaching strict no-fly zones over stadiums where the games of the 2016 European Soccer Championship will be played. The technology is part of broad and unprecedented security measures taken to secure Europe’s biggest sports event. French security agencies have been training for some time for the possibility of drones used to disperse chemical agents over crowds.
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9/11
The Senate has approved a bill which would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi officials for damages. A 1976 law granting states sovereign immunity form such law suits has thwarted efforts by the families of 9/11 victims to use the courts, but the bill just approved by the Senate would circumvent the 1976 law by allowing lawsuits against governments of countries found to be involved in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. President Barack Obama has said he will veto the legislation.
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Chemical weapons
The Assad regime has used sarin gas for the first time since 2013, dropping a sarin-filled bombs on ISIS fighters outside Damascus, a senior Israeli official has said. On 21 August 2013 the Syrian military used sarin and VX to kill 1,400 Sunni civilians in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. In the wake of the attack, Russia and the United States pressured Assad to give up his chemical weapons arsenal and dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons manufacturing capabilities. Western intelligence services say that Assad likely disposed of his mustard and VX, in accordance with the deal, but that he chose to keep the sarin, the most lethal agent at his disposal.
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European security
Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has said that for the EU to offer visa-free access to the EU zone to millions of Turks would be like “storing gasoline next to the fire.” He said that the impact of mass migration is “eating away at the willingness of EU states to act together.” He added that this is making the EU “impotent in the face of the most serious social and humanitarian problem” it has had to face. He also said that the failure by the “present configuration of twenty-eight vastly differing national interests” to meet the challenge of migration may well be an indication that the EU has outlived its historical role.
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Active shooter
The New York Police Department (NYPD), the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) took part in an active shooter exercise early Sunday at a Brooklyn high school to evaluate tactics and technologies for responding to and containing rapidly escalating shooting incidents.
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9/11 Saudi connection
Investigators describe the details revealed in a series of declassified memos relating to the 9/11 attacks as “chilling”: These details offer information about Saudi support for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A former 9/11 Commission staff member said the newly released material largely duplicates the classified 28-section of the 9/11 Commission report, a section which has not been made public. Former Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, said that as many as six Saudi officials could have supported the 9/11 hijackers
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Aviation
Gill Payne, 37, on Friday pled guilty to using force to obstruct the religious freedom of a Muslim woman, who was identified in court by the letters KA. In December 2015, Payne was on a SouthWest Airlines plane flying from Chicago to Albuquerque. He noticed a woman sitting a few rows ahead of him, wearing a hijab. Witnesses said that he got out of his seat, walked down the aisle toward her, grabbed the hijab to expose her head, and shouted, “Take this off. This is America.”
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African security
U.S. officials said on Friday that there is evidence that Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamists are sending fighters to join ISIS in Libya. This is only the latest manifestation of the growing cooperation between the two groups. Nigeria has been asking the United States for military gear, including aircraft, to fight Boko Haram. Congress, however, has restricted the sale of U.S. military equipment to Nigeria because of rampant corruption in the Nigerian armed forces and government, and because the Nigerian military has been engaged in systematic violations of basic human rights of Nigerian civilians.
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9/11
John F Lehman, who sat on the 9/11 Commission from 2003 to 2004 which investigated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has said that Saudi government officials supported the hijackers. There was an “awful lot of circumstantial evidence” implicating several employees in the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Lehman claimed. “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he said. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”
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Islam in Europe
Bar owners in the Nørrebro suburb of Copenhagen say they are being harassed by Muslim youth activists in the area, many of them immigrants, who are trying to impose a “Sharia zone” in the neighborhood. The bar owners have asked for government help. The bar owners say they have received demands for money, and that stones have been thrown through the bars’ windows.
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Terrorism
The office of Colombia’s attorney general said it was investigating five top leaders of the country’s ELN guerrilla group for nearly 16,000 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The allegations come amid heightened tensions between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the government. The ELN is a sister organization of the much larger FARC, both Marxist guerrilla movements which bhave been operating in the mountainous jungles of southern Colombia since the early 1960s.
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Post-conflict
Civil wars divide nations along social, economic, and political lines, often pitting neighbors against each other. In the aftermath of civil wars, many countries undertake truth and reconciliation efforts to restore social cohesion, but little has been known about whether these programs reach their intended goals. A new study suggests reconciliation programs promote societal healing, but that these gains come at the cost of reduced psychological health, worsening depression, anxiety, and trauma.
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Terrorism
The German federal police agency, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), said it is investigating the possible arrival of forty Islamist militants among more than 1.1 million refugees who have entered the country during since the beginning of 2015. The BKA said it had received 369 reports of possible extremists and found that forty of the cases required more investigation. This is an increase relative to numbers the BKA released in January, when eighteen investigations were found to be warranted after 213 warnings had been received.
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Encryption
The Italian security services have been unable to unlock the Apple iPhone 6 plus of a suspect member of a terrorist ring in the city of Bari. Analysts say the development will likely result in another stand-off between Apple and a government fighting terrorism, similar to the stand-off between Apple and the U.S. government over the iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorists.
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Bangladesh
Motiur Rahman Nizami, the leader of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, was hanged at a prison in the capital, Dhaka, on Tuesday. Last week the nation’s highest court dismissed his final appeal of the death sentence, imposed on him for atrocities committed by him and his followers during the 1971 war between the majority if the Bangladeshi population, which favored independence from Pakistan, and the Pakistani military. The Islamist Jamaat movement supported the continuation of Pakistani rule over Bangladesh, and fought along the Pakistani military in an effort to suppress the pro-independence rebellion.
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Radicalization
France plans to set up a deradicalization centers in several cities and towns to help the authorities identify would-be Islamist extremists and reach out to them in order to prevent them from joining jihadist groups. The establishment of the “reinsertion and citizenship centers” in each of the country’s regions is a central element of a comprehensive, 80-point plan to counter home-grown terrorism. The plan was unveiled on Monday.
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Terrorism
Hamza bin Laden, Osama bi Laden’s son, has called on jihadists in Syria to unite, saying that fight for spreading the jihadists’ message in Syria is but a prologue to “liberating Palestine.” “The Islamic umma (nation) should focus on jihad in al-Sham (Syria) … and unite the ranks of mujahideen there,” Hamza bin Laden said in an audio message posted online.
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ISIS
A team of investigators at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said that there is “worrying” evidence ISIS is making its own chemical weapons. An OPCW team of investigators said they had found evidence of the use of homemade sulphur mustard in attacks in Syria and Iraq.
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The long view
Patriots’ Day: How Far-Right Groups Hijack History and Patriotic Symbols to Advance Their Cause, According to an Expert on Extremism
Extremist groups have attempted to change the meaning of freedom and liberty embedded in Patriots’ Day — a commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord – to serve their far-right rhetoric, recruitment, and radicalization. Understanding how patriotic symbols can be exploited offers important insights into how historical narratives may be manipulated, potentially leading to harmful consequences in American society.