Extremist groups in Alberta detailed in first-of-its-kind report
JONNY WAKEFIELD
Updated: April 23, 2019
Soldiers of Odin take part in a rally against Islam on the anniversary of 9/11 at the Commonwealth Community Recreation Centre on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018 in Edmonton. GREG SOUTHAM / POSTMEDIA, FILE
Alberta is home to a disproportionate number of extremist movements — including far-right groups and people travelling abroad to join armed groups such as ISIS — according to a new report billed as the first of its kind.
The upcoming study, Extremism and Hate Motivated Violence in Alberta, runs nearly 100 pages and provides a taxonomy of the province’s extremist groups. It includes provincial membership estimates for violent or potentially violent ideological movements, and assessments of whether the groups are growing or shrinking.
The Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV), which produced the report, received a $1.2 million grant from the federal government last year as part of a plan to counter hate and violent extremism in Alberta, which has seen a rise in police-reported hate crimes. The report is poised to be made public next month.
The organization also developed an intervention program to steer people away from extremist movements.
OPV executive director John McCoy said he’s unaware of any other studies that identify and quantify extremist groups in Alberta.
“What our research (shows) is that there is a diversity of threats out there related to violent extremism, and there are many different ideologies that can create this problem,” said McCoy, a professor who teaches terrorism studies at the University of Alberta.
“There are a number of ideologies where Alberta is disproportionately represented, in terms of the numbers that we’re producing,” he said.
The report relied on interviews with more than 170 law enforcement members from the RCMP and every municipal police service in Alberta. Researchers also interviewed around 120 people whose communities are impacted by hate and extremism, 50 service providers specializing in violence and at-risk youth, and 21 “formers” — people previously involved with extremist movements or their loved ones.
McCoy said one major conclusion is that individuals on the edges of extremist groups — often radicalized on social media — are the biggest threat.
“The individuals that we’re seeing are really on the margins of extremist movements,” he said.
Al-Qaida, affiliates and splinter groups (AQAS)
The report found Alberta has been home to “both intimate and established networks” tied to al-Qaida and affiliated groups, and “highly isolated cases that are connected with AQAS networks wholly online.”
“Today, the trend is very much towards the latter,” the report says.
From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, low-level fundraising, money laundering and promotion/propaganda work took place in the province, the report said, supporting foreign fighters in the Middle East, North Africa and Bosnia.
The report cited the case of Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, who pleaded guilty to U.S. charges of providing financial support to Tunisian fighters in Iraq who carried out a deadly 2009 suicide attack.
Since 2012, it is estimated that between 30 and 40 people from Alberta travelled overseas to fight for armed groups — a number McCoy said is disproportionate to Alberta’s population. McCoy said the majority of those joined ISIS.
Those fighters include former Edmonton residents Mahad Hirsi, Hamsa Kariye, Heri Kariye and Omar Aden, who are believed to have travelled to Syria in 2013. The four were believed to be part of a network that included up to 14 people spread between Minnesota, Alberta and California. All four fighters were reportedly dead by the end of 2014.
Roughly 20 people are believed to have travelled to Syria and Iraq from Calgary — including 10 or so who shared a loose connection with a now-closed mosque in downtown Calgary.
Now, the primary local concern is people inspired by the movements committing a “homegrown” attack. The report cited a Sept. 30, 2017, vehicle attack on a police officer and pedestrians in Edmonton — still before the courts — saying it mirrored the “playbook” of groups like ISIS. No terrorism charges were laid in that case.
While returning foreign fighters present a threat, those fears have yet to be realized, the report says. Most of those who travelled to fight abroad are dead. About 10 per cent of those who left have returned, the report said, but “no public details were available on their activities.”
The report said the movement’s trajectory in Alberta is “static.”
Anti-authority extremists
Anti-authority extremists cited in the report include Freemen on the Land, who broadly assert that government is illegitimate. The report estimates there are about 150 to 250 Freemen on the Land in Alberta — lower than previous estimates.
The report found that most Freemen come to the ideology after a “negative interaction” with the legal system. The majority of them are non-violent. However, the report found 10 to 15 Alberta Freemen have “demonstrated a behavioural propensity for violence.”
Norman Raddatz — the man who killed Edmonton city police Const. Daniel Woodall and shot another officer in 2015 — expressed Freeman-style sentiments and was investigated for harassing a Jewish family. James Roszko, the man who murdered four RCMP officers in Mayerthorpe in 2005, was also known to have violent anti-government views. Both perpetrators are dead.
The report suggests the Freemen on the Land movement is in decline. However, it says general anti-government extremism is on the rise — evidenced in part by an upswing in death threats against politicians following the 2015 elections of Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau.
Left-wing extremism
The report’s category on left-wing extremism includes anarchists and Antifa groups. To date, the report found left-wing extremists have not been involved in any major violent incidents in Alberta, nor do researchers believe they present a “significant threat to public safety.”
The researchers found “reciprocal radicalization” was at play in the relationship between right-wing and left-wing extremist groups. Violence by left-wing extremists is “mainly reactionary in confrontation with right-wing groups.”
The OPV estimates there were 20 to 30 people involved in Antifa and anti-racist groups in Calgary, with only a small number who support violence during confrontations with the far right.
The movements are believed to be growing, the report said.
Patriot and Militia Groups
Patriot and militia groups are motivated “primarily by xenophobia and anti-government views,” the report said, adding many members share anti-Islamic sentiments. Some engage in survivalist activities like “prepping” and firearms training. Some take part in ostensible charity activities, as well as “street patrols” that the report says “primarily target visible minority, newcomer and refugee communities — Muslims in particular.”
While there are reports of militia groups taking part in military-style training in rural Alberta, the OPV said those “remain unsubstantiated to date.”
Examples of the groups include the Three Percenters, Sons/Soldiers of Odin, the Canadian Infidels/Clann, True North Patriots and Northern Guard. Many formed in 2015 — driven by the elections of the provincial NDP, the federal Liberals and the economic downturn.
The report stressed that there is no evidence the groups are involved in violence or “would represent a significant threat to public safety or national security.”
“However, there are not-trivial concerns that individuals associated with, or more accurately on the margins of these groups, may carry out ‘lone actor’ or small network violence.”
The report estimates that in 2017, there were 600 to 700 Albertans who considered themselves “members” of patriot and militia groups. Interest fell off in 2018, and their numbers are now estimated at between 300 and 500 active members.
The report says media coverage has played a role in the group’s recruitment.
“Prior to a number of stories, in particular about larger patriot groups in the province in late 2017 and into the summer of 2018, many of these groups were facing a pronounced drop in membership and public interest,” the report says. “Subsequent to these articles being published, there was a noteworthy spike in potential new members, at least in some urban and rural areas of the province.”
Media coverage of the groups should walk a fine line between giving the public an understanding of the groups and “providing a platform or conveying an outsized threat posed by militia and patriot groups.”
The report also says the rise of the Yellow Vest movement has “re-energized areas of activism and engaged a broader set of individuals, some of whom may now gravitate toward more organized patriot or militia groups.”
White supremacy/associated ideologies
White supremacy has a long history in Alberta. In 1930, the Ku Klux Klan had 50 chapters in Alberta with 7,000 to 8,000 members, the report estimates. By the mid-1930s, however, the Klan had been reduced to a few small, largely rural groups.
Organized white supremacist groups were largely dormant in the province until the late 1980s. In 1988, two young KKK members were convicted of a plot to blow up a Jewish community centre in Calgary. During that period, KKK members numbered around 100 in Alberta.
In the intervening years, a number of skinhead, Neo-nazi and “Aryan” groups were active in the province. Particularly violent years fell between 2008 and 2012, with 10 “noteworthy” incidents of violence linked to white supremacists, including assaults on immigrants and visible minorities in Calgary and Edmonton, at least five homicides and “bouts of infighting” between white supremacist groups.
The report says that while a white supremacist group has never carried out an organized terrorist attack in Alberta, they are a threat — especially to visible minority communities.
Now, the primary active groups in Alberta are Blood and Honour, Combat-18, the Christian Identity Movement and a variety of “identitarian” groups. Blood and Honour is believed to have peaked at 60 to 70 members in 2016-17.
The report said that while “traditional” white power groups are in decline, more sanitized “identitarian” and ethno-nationalist movements are attracting new members.
jwakefield@postmedia.com
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Climate change has already made poor countries poorer and rich countries richer
But few nations will be spared as temperatures rise further.
by James Temple
Apr 22
Numerous studies have predicted that poor nations will suffer the greatest devastation from climate change. (See “Hotter days will drive global inequality.”) A new analysis finds it’s already been happening for decades.
From 1961 to 2010, rising temperatures cut the per-person gross domestic product of the world’s poorest countries by 17% to 31%, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That, in turn, widened the gap in economic output between poor and rich nations by 25% more than it would have been “in a world without global warming,” slowing an otherwise positive shift toward shrinking inequality over that half-century.
All of that has happened with only around a 1 °C rise in global temperatures, but far worse changes are in store. The planet could warm by 1.5 °C as early as 2030, and by more than 4 °C by the end of the century, according to the United Nations climate panel.
The inequity is exacerbated by the fact that the nations suffering the worst economic effects have pumped out the least carbon dioxide. Among the 19 wealthier nations where historical emissions divided by the current population exceeds 300 tons, 14 have benefited economically so far. Those countries experienced a median of 13% more economic output per person, the Stanford researchers found in the study.
The researchers conducted the study by comparing economic growth rates during the time period in question with a range of modeling results simulating a world that didn’t get hotter in recent decades, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford, who coauthored the paper with Marshall Burke.
Poorer nations have suffered harsher effects in part because they’re concentrated in already hotter parts of the world, like Africa, South Asia, and Central America. In such places, a tick up in temperatures can quickly cut labor productivity and agricultural yields while increasing levels of violence, crime, suicides, illness, and mortality. These effects have been identified in many studies, including earlier work by Burke (see “Hot and violent”). In addition, the same countries often don’t have the money to invest in tools, infrastructure, and programs to address these dangers.
Country level economic impact of global warming
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
On the other hand, a little bit of warming can nudge cooler or temperate countries toward the “empirical optimum,” where productivity and agriculture yields actually rise. Warming in Norway, for instance, likely boosted per capita GDP by 34% over what the Scandinavian nation would have experienced in a world without global warming, while India experienced 31% less growth than it would have.
None of this means that richer nations are in the clear, of course. Various parts of the US are already grappling with more frequent or severe extreme weather events that have been strongly linked to climate change, including hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires. Plenty of other studies have concluded that warming will have devastating effects on the economies of most nations in the decades to come (though a few frosty ones, notably Canada and Russia, could wind up better off economically).
As the resolution of climate modeling improves, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the effects of climate change will vary dramatically within countries as well. A 2017 study led by Solomon Hsiang at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the hotter regions of the US South will suffer disproportionately under high emissions scenarios, resulting in a massive shift in wealth toward the North and West that would increase the nation’s economic inequality.
These highly variable economic consequences promise to significantly complicate the politics of how nations and regions work together to address the looming dangers—or how they don’t.
Global warming has increased global economic inequality
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/04/global-warming-has-increased-global.html
PNAS first published April 22, 2019
Trump baby blimp back and could be even bigger for UK state visit
Balloon depicting nappy-wearing US president could be five times size of predecessor
Matthew Weaver
Tue 23 Apr 2019
The baby blimp during a women’s march to Parliament Squar in London last July. Photograph: Andrew Aitchison/In Pictures/Getty
The Donald Trump baby blimp, which became the focal point of protests against the US president’s visit to the UK in July, will rise again for the state visit and could be accompanied by a bigger version, activists have revealed.
What happened next? The Trump baby blimp: 'In retrospect, we should have ordered a bigger balloon'
Anti-Trump campaigners are considering launching a hot air balloon, five times the size of the blimp, which would also depict Trump as a wailing baby in a nappy.
Leo Murray, who helped crowdfund the original six-metre-high inflatable, said: “The Trump baby will definitely fly again.”
He added: “We have been toying with the idea of a Trump baby hot air balloon, which would be about five times the size. But would cost a huge amount of money – upwards of £70,000.”
The shadow Treasury minister, Clive Lewis, called on protesters to “dust off the blimp” amid widespread opposition to the three-day state visit in the first week of June, announced on Tuesday.
Last year, the London mayor gave permission for the Trump blimp to fly over the capital in a move that infuriated the president’s supporters.
A spokesman for Sadiq Khan hinted that an attempt to relaunch the balloon would be approved. He said: “Any application to fly it on land that the Greater London Authority manages will be judged by the same criteria as last time by GLA officials, the police and the Civil Aviation Authority.”
But campaigners fear the authorities will block the approval for a bigger version of the blimp. Asad Rehman, the executive director of War on Want and a member of the Stop Trump Coalition, said: “We do have the baby blimp – it will fly and we’re also thinking about the option of making a bigger baby blimp. Logistics are the only consideration.”
He added: “We are very confident there will be more than a quarter of a million protesters. Trump’s visit last year mobilised a large number of people, but a year later the man has done more to rip up human rights, step back from international norms, continued his climate denialism and fuelled white nationalism.”
Murray conceded that raising money for the bigger blimp “might not be the best use of resources, especially if we are unable to fly it over London”.
Military Traverse Underneath Alcatraz
BY STEPHANIE VALERA 03.01.2019
Aerial photograph (dated 1930s) of the Alcatraz island and penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay. (Photo Credit: OFF / AFP / Getty Images)
Alcatraz holds many forgotten secrets, but one has been discovered: High-tech radar and laser scans have uncovered a hidden military traverse underneath the infamous penitentiary, according to new research.
A team of researchers from Binghamton University, State University of New York used terrestrial laser scans, ground-penetrating radar data, and georectifications (the process of taking old digitized maps and linking them to a coordinate system so that they can be accurately geolocated in 3D space) to locate and assess the historical remains beneath the former recreation yard of the Alcatraz penitentiary, according to a press release.
The scans revealed that remnants of buried structures, including a “bombproof” earthwork traverse along with its underlying vaulted brick masonry tunnel and ventilation ducts, ran east to west beneath the recreation yard of the Alcatraz penitentiary, which is located in the San Francisco Bay, 1.25 miles offshore from San Francisco, Calif.
Binghamton University archaeologist Timothy de Smet, whose team’s findings are detailed in a paper published in the journal Near Surface Geophysics, said he was shocked to discover that the historical structures were maintained in such good condition.
“The remains of these historical archaeology features were just a few centimeters beneath the surface and they were miraculously and impeccably preserved,” de Smet said. “The concrete veneer of the Recreation Yard floor is incredibly thin and, in fact, in places sitting directly atop the architecture from the 1860s. We also learned that some of the earthwork traverses were covered over with thin concrete layers through time, likely to decrease erosion on the rainy windy island.”
Known as a former high-security federal penitentiary that once housed many of America’s most notorious gangsters and criminals, such as Al Capone, Alcatraz Island is now a National Historic Landmark that attracts several tourists in its location adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge.
However, many overlook Alcatraz’s former military role as a 19th century coastal fortification, featuring underground ammunition. Since it was converted to a prison, researchers have been interested to see if there were any historical remains left of the fortification.
Binghamton University archaeologist Timothy de Smet and colleagues used terrestrial laser scans, ground-penetrating radar data and georectifications to locate and assess historical remains beneath the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. (Photo Credit: Timothy de Smet)
According to de Smet, during the construction of the Alcatraz prison in the 1900s, the area was essentially bulldozed from the former military installation to the modern prison we see today.
“We sought non-invasive, non-destructive means to ascertain if any historic archaeological remains lay beneath several parts of the island, like the Recreation Yard of the infamous US Federal penitentiary,” said de Smet. “We did not know what to expect. We did not know if there would be any extant subsurface architecture of these historically significant remains, or if there was anything left, what their extent and integrity would be like.”
The noninvasive process used by researchers permits accurate spatial identification 19th-century architectural structures depicted in historical documents. And this groundbreaking approach can also be applied to investigate other important cultural landmarks worldwide.
de Smet said the results prove that archaeologists can detect historical structures in a gentler manner: “These results are significant in that they show how modern technology can be used to answer fundamental questions of archaeological importance without any destructive excavations. This research shows that best practice approaches can be used to non-invasively non-destructively investigate the archaeological record with remote sensing alone.”
