Thursday, February 11, 2010

“International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies (Daily News)” plus 1 more

“International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies (Daily News)” plus 1 more

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies (Daily News)

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 11:43 AM PST

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International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies

The 12th International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies (ICSLS) will be held on March 18 to 20 in Colombo.

The ICSLS is a bi-annual meeting of scholars researching on socio-economic, historical, cultural and political aspects of Sri Lanka. Conferences have been held every two years in various venues across the world.

This year's conference is jointly organized by the Royal Asiatic Society and the Open University under the main theme "Sri Lanka after the War: Prevention of recurrence, reaching for prosperity."

Individual papers are also invited on a broad variety of disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, architecture, culture and society, defence studies, demography, development studies, diasporic studies, distance learning, economics, education, ethnic studies, environmental studies, fine arts, gender studies, geography, history, information science, languages and literature studies, library and information studies; management studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, post-tsunami studies, psychology, religious studies, risk studies, science and technology policy; and sociology.

 

Daniel Rubin: Studies Arabic? Must be a terrorist (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 03:34 PM PST

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A federal agent sizing up Nick George might peg him as Most Likely to be Recruited by the CIA. He's a physics major at a top college, is minoring in Middle Eastern studies, speaks Arabic, has lived in Jordan, and is adventurous enough to have backpacked through Sudan and Egypt.

At Philadelphia International Airport in August, his interest in the world got him handcuffed.

The Wyncote native was detained for five hours after Transportation Security Administration screeners grew suspicious about something in his pockets.

Arabic-language flash cards.

George, who was 21 and about to fly back for his senior year at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said he had answered every question to the best of his abilities, and figured he'd be quickly sent on his way.

But what questions . . .

According to a federal suit filed yesterday on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, a TSA supervisor asked him, "How do you feel about 9/11?"

George said he had hemmed and hawed a bit. "It's a complicated question," he told me by phone. "But I ended up saying, 'It was bad. I am against it.' "

He was asked if he knew who "did 9/11."

Osama bin Laden, he answered.

Then he was asked, "Do you know what language he spoke?"

George answered, "Arabic."

The supervisor then held up his flash cards. "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"

To George, they weren't suspicious at all. He was using them to translate al-Jazeera, whose coverage in Arabic he considers critical to understanding America's place in the world. The 200 cards included words for terrorist and explosion, George said. His interest in the Middle East came not from 9/11 but from watching Lawrence of Arabia with his father, Paul, a Philadelphia lawyer and former public defender.

George said he had started taking classes in Middle Eastern history, politics, and languages at Pomona. He spent a semester in Amman, Jordan. He has applied for a State Department program that encourages the study of Arabic and has plans to take the Foreign Service exam after college.

He said he had done the right thing when questioned.

"My mentality was, 'Do what they say, and pretty soon they'll see this is ridiculous and let you go,' " he said by phone. "That was my mentality until they put the handcuffs on me. Then it was surreal."

TSA called Philadelphia police, who marched him through the airport to a small office where he sat for more than an hour in cuffs, awaiting FBI agents.

His suit contends the agents asked him if he was an Islamist or a communist. He said no. After about 20 minutes they released him. He missed his flight.

Neither the TSA nor Philadelphia police would comment yesterday, given that legal action is pending. But in a Philadelphia Daily News column in September, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis was quoted as saying that behavioral-detection officers had selected the student for screening even before the flash cards were discovered. Those officers are trained to look for "involuntary physical and physiological reactions that people exhibit in response to a fear of being discovered," she said.

George said he could not imagine what they meant - he had been calm.

A police official was quoted as saying it was George's ID in Arabic - from his Jordanian studies - that had caught their attention, and police were suspicious that the student's hair was shorter than it was in his Pennsylvania driver's license photo. "That," Lt. Louis Liberati said, is "an indication sometimes that somebody may have gone through a radicalization."

Candace Putter, his mother, thinks that's an amazing statement. She is a longtime advocate for teens in trouble with the law. She came of age in the 1960s, when long hair was associated with a different sort of radicalism, she said.

"You can't change the world on me that completely," she said, laughing.

Putter said she could understand in the post-9/11 world why security officers would pay attention to someone who had been to Muslim countries and was learning Arabic. So can Mary Catherine Roper, George's ACLU attorney. So can I.

"Clearly we want them to be paying attention," Putter said. "But we want them to be paying smart attention."

Security technologist Bruce Schneier was less polite.

"This is just stupid," he said. "There's no other way to explain it. Someone saw these Arabic-language cards and just freaked. It should have taken TSA 15 seconds."

The problem, he said, is that there is no cost to the security agent for doing the wrong thing. "If I detain someone and he's not a terrorist, nothing happens to me. I'm probably praised. If I let him go and he is, my career is over. The TSA incentive is to overreact. Terrorism can't do this to us. I think only we can do this to ourselves."

 

Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com.

 

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