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Community-Focused Interventions Against Terrorism

Community-Focused Interventions Against Terrorism

Date and time: Wednesday, October 7, 2020, 11 am to 12:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)

Register here.

Join Abdul Haqq and Dr. Anne Speckhard to discuss community-focused collaborations with government for interventions against terrorism.

About this Event

ICSVE Panel Discussion featuring

Abdul Haqq, Director STREET UK

Anne Speckhard, Director ICSVE

11:00 AM EST

October 7th, 2020

Join via Zoom Meetings

During Abdul Haqq’s 15 years of leadership in Brixton Mosque, he challenged violent extremist narratives, confronting and standing down extremist propagandists like Abdullah el Faisal, who has recently been extradited to the U.S. to face five terrorism charges. His award-winning initiative, Strategy To Reach Empower & Educate Teenagers (STREET) embarked on a successful collaboration with the UK government to engage with vulnerable young people, delivering diversionary programs aimed at increasing their resilience to radicalization. Abdul Haqq’s focus remains at the hard end of intervention work where violent extremism continues to proliferate.

At ICSVE’s eighth Zoom panel, Abdul Haqq will be speaking about community-targeted vs community-focused collaborations with government and how the former effectively perpetuates a top-down securitized focus on communities. Existing tensions, such as racial inequality and racism are exacerbated by such approaches.

He will provide firsthand case study examples illustrating the efficacy of the community-focused and therefore engaging approach where successful interventions are more achievable.

Dr. Abdul Haqq Baker is the founder and Managing Director of the 2009 award-winning youth initiative, Strategy To Reach Empower & Educate Teenagers (STREET) UK, a former Lecturer in Terrorism Studies at the Centre of Studies in Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) in the University of St Andrews and Research Fellow for the University of Exeter’s European Muslim Research Centre. He was also chairman of Brixton Mosque, London between 1994 and 2009 where he successfully countered external extremist threats to the local Muslim community and successfully challenged the destructive propaganda that accompanied it. His strategic focus involves intervention frameworks that enable strategic community based and statutory collaborations/partnerships to address the multifaceted challenges faced by violent extremism and environments at risk of developing them. His STREET program was subsequently cited by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and British think-tank DEMOS, among others, as a model case study. Its effective approach towards youth engagement and intervention led to it winning the Preventing Violent Extremism Innovation award (17th February 2009) for the most innovative youth program in 2008. Abdul Haqq’s insight, experiences and expertise in successfully challenging violent radicalization has led to him being widely acknowledged as an authority on violent extremism and counter-radicalization in the UK as well as an expert in the field of youth intervention projects. He has acted in the capacity of adviser and on occasion, expert witness regarding international terrorism cases.

Dr. Anne Speckhard is Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She has interviewed over 700 terrorists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including in Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the past five years, she has interviewed 245 ISIS defectors, returnees and prisoners as well as 16 al Shabaab cadres and their family members (n=25) as well as ideologues (n=2), studying their trajectories into and out of terrorism, their experiences inside ISIS (and al Shabaab), as well as developing the Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project materials from these interviews which includes over 200 short counter-narrative videos of terrorists denouncing their groups as un-Islamic, corrupt and brutal which have been used in over 150 Facebook and Instagram campaigns globally. She has also been training key stakeholders in law enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other countering violent extremism professionals, both locally and internationally, on the psychology of terrorism, the use of counter-narrative messaging materials produced by ICSVE as well as studying the use of children as violent actors by groups such as ISIS. Dr. Speckhard has given consultations and police trainings to U.S., German, UK, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, Danish, Iraqi, Jordanian and Thai national police and security officials, among others, as well as trainings to elite hostage negotiation teams. She also consults to foreign governments on issues of terrorist prevention and interventions and repatriation and rehabilitation of ISIS foreign fighters, wives and children. In 2007, she was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to 20,000 + detainees and 800 juveniles. She is a sought after counterterrorism expert and has consulted to NATO, OSCE, the EU Commission and EU Parliament, European and other foreign governments and to the U.S. Senate & House, Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Health & Human Services, CIA, and FBI and appeared on CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, CTV, CBC and in Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, London Times and many other publications. She regularly writes a column for Homeland Security Today and speaks and publishes on the topics of the psychology of radicalization and terrorism and is the author of several books, including Talking to Terrorists, Bride of ISIS, Undercover Jihadi and ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. Her publications are found here and on the ICSVE website.

This is the eighth discussion in this series of panels discussing ISIS Foreign Fighters and terrorist rehabilitation.

Dr. Abdul Haqq will speak with Dr. Anne Speckhard and questions will be most welcome with a lively discussion to ensue! Questions can be posed using the Zoom chat feature or by Twitter to @ICSVE

You are welcome to share this invitation with interested colleagues.

The event will take place on Zoom at 11:00 am EDT:

  • New York 11:00
  • Los Angeles 08:00
  • Mexico City 10:00
  • London 16:00
  • Geneva 17:00
  • Amman 18:00
  • Addis Ababa 18:00
  • Bangkok 22:00
  • Sydney 01:00

TheMediaLine
WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE TO CHANGE THE MISINFORMATION
about the
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR?
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