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This paper evaluates how the July 2005 London terrorist attacks affected Muslim teenagers' education plans and decisions. The attacks triggered a violent backslash against the Muslim community, which could have affected their incentives to continue in full-time education. I examine panel data on educational attitudes from the "Next Steps" Survey in England and use the month the survey was administered to divide individuals into treatment and control groups. I find that the attacks negatively affected the education plans of Muslims, but not those of any other major religious group. The probability of planning to continue in non-compulsory full-time education decreased by around 4.4% points for Muslims after the attacks. This corresponds to a 69% increase in individuals who were not sure whether to continue or drop out of full-time education. However, this change in plans appears to be a temporary reaction, since it did not affect students' actual decisions two years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Blitz spirit' is a popular story of Britain during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. This paper reviews the Blitz spirit as a myth before a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examines how this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings. I firstly analyse Blitz spirit discourses that evoked unity between Britain and America in the war on terror. I then argue that evocations of this myth became more complex, often criticising Tony Blair for his moral incompatibility with Second World War or Churchillian analogies. Both discursive positions used a myth that remembers and forgets details in a popular story from the past. This paper argues that whilst the Blitz spirit was a problematic feature of post-July 7th media, it did not serve one ideological purpose. Through a nuanced approach to Roland Barthes' model of myth, I argue that an ideological battleground occurred when a myth from the 1940s recurred in 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specific problematic of this paper is the effects of the events of 11 September on English education policy, particularly policy surrounding faith schooling. One story to be told is one of an absence of effect, of policy discussions and directions continuing on the same trajectory before and after that date, a story of ‘no U-turn’. However, this article presents an alternative account that recognizes important effects, but effects that have largely remained below the surface. The central focus of the paper is the symbolic power of 11 September operating around an axis of destabilization. It is argued that the event symbolizes a disruption of myths of urban order and of the ‘safe’ accommodations between modernity and postmodernity; and that there has been an analogous impact on the myth of liberalism as the all-encompassing voice of reason and civilization. ‘11 September’, it is suggested, serves as a potent reminder of the fundamental tensions in models of liberal education, evident, in particular, in the paradox of ‘liberal imperialism’. It can thus be effectively mobilized in policy discussions by either regressive or progressive thinkers. The paper draws attention to the way in which these tensions and mobilization practices can be seen behind current English policy debates on faith schooling. It concludes that intensified public anxieties about ‘Osama Bin Laden academies’ fundamentally undermining ‘our way of life’ have not coalesced into anything ‘measurable’; but that the lack of a U-turn by New Labour on the faith schooling issue could be understood as an important ‘intervention’ designed to act as one stabilizing message in destabilized times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English law has traditionally taken little or no notice of freedom of expression.' A right to free speech (or expression) was not typically recognised by common law, unlike, for example, the rights to property and reputation, which are fiercely protected by trespass and libel laws, respectively. There has been no English counterpart to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which bans any measure that restricts free speech or press. There isn't even a law like France's 1881 Law of the Press, which officially asserts press freedom and prohibits the licencing of newspapers and magazines. To be sure, there has been no system of official press censorship in place since 1694, and in fact, the media and private publishers in England have undoubtedly had more freedom of expression than in other European countries. Furthermore, as will be explained in Part II of this Article, courts in England, particularly in the last thirty years, have occasionally suggested that the common law did recognise freedom of speech, and that the right could be invoked to shape the interpretation and development of both statutory and common law. However, the freedom lacked a defined constitutional position, making it impossible to foresee when courts would recognise it as relevant in the settlement of specific situations. As a result, publishers could not depend on the right to free expression with certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the London ‘7/7’ attacks in 2005, UK government agencies required the development of a quick-running tool to predict the weapon and injury effects caused by the initiation of a person borne improvised explosive device (PBIED) within crowded metropolitan environments. This prediction tool, termed the HIP (human injury predictor) code, was intended to:— assist the security services to encourage favourable crowd distributions and densities within scenarios of ‘sensitivity’; — provide guidance to security engineers concerning the most effective location for protection systems; — inform rescue services as to where, in the case of such an event, individuals with particular injuries will be located; — assist in training medical personnel concerning the scope and types of injuries that would be sustained as a consequence of a particular attack; — assist response planners in determining the types of medical specialists (burns, traumatic amputations, lungs, etc.) required and thus identify the appropriate hospitals to receive the various casualty types. This document describes the algorithms used in the development of this tool, together with the pertinent underpinning physical processes. From its rudimentary beginnings as a simple spreadsheet, the HIP code now has a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows three-dimensional visualization of results and intuitive scenario set-up. The code is underpinned by algorithms that predict the pressure and momentum outputs produced by PBIEDs within open and confined environments, as well as the trajectories of shrapnel deliberately placed within the device to increase injurious effects. Further logic has been implemented to transpose these weapon effects into forms of human injury depending on where individuals are located relative to the PBIED. Each crowd member is subdivided into representative body parts, each of which is assigned an abbreviated injury score after a particular calculation cycle. The injury levels of each affected body part are then summated and a triage state assigned for each individual crowd member based on the criteria specified within the ‘injury scoring system’. To attain a comprehensive picture of a particular event, it is important that a number of simulations, using what is substantively the same scenario, are undertaken with natural variation being applied to the crowd distributions and the PBIED output. Accurate mathematical representation of such complex phenomena is challenging, particularly as the code must be quick-running to be of use to the stakeholder community. In addition to discussing the background and motivation for the algorithm and GUI development, this document also discusses the steps taken to validate the tool and the plans for further functionality implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of ‘terrorism’, which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the ‘root causes’ that give rise to the politics of com placency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the fi rst tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government's response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a ‘social science’ itself, deeply questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores some key issues around Olympic-related security and insecurity in London, England in 2012. It considers some of the diversity of Olympic terrorist-related threats and contrasts these with the more standardised features of Olympic security programmes. It also explores the significance of these issues for London Olympics 2012, particularly the ways in which regeneration and security are increasingly interconnected with the hosting of sporting mega-events.

The article highlights the extent to which previous experiences of terrorism have been discounted by policy makers and opinion formers in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, England. According to the article, even though London had been a terrorist target since the end of the 19th century virtually all of the political and media responses to the July bombings chose to ignore that previous experience. This followed the pattern set by responses to the U.S. terrorist attacks, the article adds.

The article reports on several disputations on terrorism and the involvement of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie concerning the issue. The Prime Minister's wife has faced a domestic and international criticism during the charity event in London, England. A certain member of the London-England based Israel Embassy has responded to her speech concerning the targeting of innocent civilians. Meanwhile, there are several ideas of terrorism. Others defined it as a privatization of political tribulations.