Wednesday July 21st, 2010 • 3:30 ~ 5:30 PM
Hardin Room • The Church Center • 777 UN Plaza, New York, NY
Editor/Authors
Charles B. Strozier
The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence and History (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin
The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth about the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing (Potomac Books, 2010)
Discussant
Richard Barrett: Coordinator of the Al-Qaida and Taliban Monitoring Team, assisting the Security Council’s Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee, officially known as the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1267 (1999.)
All participants will be invited to discuss the books, their premises and implications.
Refreshments will be served.
To help with planning please RSVP by July 19.
Please include your name and organization:
About the Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice
The Forum@Four is organized by the Alliance as a transdisciplinary series of talks, seminars and discussions informing and stimulating new thinking through meaningful dialogue about the tough questions that face the United Nations, governments and civil society. The Alliance is an active Committee of the Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations. Please visit our website at: cpcjalliance.org
Forum@Four Presenters
RICHARD BARRETT is an expert on Al Qaeda-related terrorism. He is based in New York. Since March 2004 he has been the United Nations Coordinator of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Implementation Monitoring Team, also known as the Al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team, appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General at the request of the Security Council.
The role of the Team is to advise the Security Council on the threat from Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, their affiliates and associates, and to monitor the implementation and effectiveness of the sanctions regime imposed by the Council against them. His current job takes him to all parts of the world and has put him in touch with a wide variety of officials and others active in the field of counter-terrorism. He has been particularly interested in working with national governments to examine the precise factors which lead individuals to join terrorist groups and how to counter them.
Mr. Barrett is also a member of the Task Force established by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to promote implementation of the Global Strategy to Counter Terrorism adopted by the General Assembly in September 2006. He is co-chair of two working groups, one that looks at what leads people to terrorism and one that examines the use of the Internet for terrorist purposes.
Before taking up his present position he worked with the British government both in London and abroad, serving with the Security Service, the Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He has had postings to Canada, Jordan, Turkey and to the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations in New York.
He has conducted live and recorded interviews on television and radio, including with Al Arabiya, BBC, CBC, CNN, NBC and many local stations. He has a master’s degree from Oxford University in history and Italian literature.
DR. NANCY KOBRIN is a psychoanalyst with a clinical specialty in trauma, PTSD. Her Ph.D. is in romance and Semitic languages, specializing in Aljamía, Old Spanish in Arabic script. She did a two volume dissertation on Ahadith Musa. Part of this work was translated into German in the 1980s because the Kurd and the Turks were not integrating. She began to study the perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the early 80s as well when the truck bombs went off in Lebanon. Residing in Minnesota for many years she was asked to teach Radical Islam to the Sheriff’s Deputies of Hennepin County. She is an expert on the Minnesota Somali diaspora and a graduate of the Human Terrain System program at Leavenworth Kansas and was slated to go into Helmand Province in Afghanistan with the British. She has an extensive foreign language background including Pashto, Dari and af-Somali.
Her book THE BANALITY OF SUICIDE TERRORISM – THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT ISLAMIC SUICIDE BOMBING, Potomac, 2010, proposes the first theory of imagery for the suicide attack site as a crime scene related to serial killing by proxy.
CHARLES B. STROZIER is Professor of History and Criminal Justice, John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director, Center on Terrorism, John Jay College December; a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Training and Research Institute in Self Psychology (TRISP), New York City; and a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and won a Gradiva Award in 2002 and the Goethe Award in 2005. He has a completed manuscript that is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2011, Until the Fires Stopped burning: 9/11 and New York City based on interviews with survivors and witnesses of the World Trade Center Disaster. He has eight other books, including (senior editor, with Terman, Jones, and Boyd) The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History (Oxford University Press, March, 2010); Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April, 2001); and Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait (Basic Books, 1982)
