(Berlin, Germany) -- The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) and the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) today announced the publication of a handbook designed for German educators who are confronted with radicalisation and other complex cross-cultural and religious issues.
German teachers, especially in areas with high immigrant populations, often struggle to understand and properly respond to difficult and sensitive cultural and religious issues, including recognizing the signs of radicalisation. The goal of the handbook is to present useful, practical options for action, showing how educators can react to situations that are challenging in professional, legal, or emotional terms. The handbook will be first introduced into a school in Bremen, Germany, and Berlin, and is based on extensive discussions and meetings with staff at counselling centres throughout Germany and existing literature.
Rita Schlegel, principal of a German school in which 91.5 percent of the children are from families who do not speak German as their first language, participated in a Berlin press conference announcing the handbook with CEP Executive Director David Ibsen, Advisory Board Member Dr. August Hanning, former director of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and EFD Executive Director Alexander Ritzmann.
Ibsen and Hanning also explained CEP’s new technology, eGLYPH, which is a response to the weaponization of the Internet and social media platforms by ISIS and other extremist groups. Developed in partnership with Dartmouth College Computer Science Professor Dr. Hany Farid, the world’s foremost authority on “hashing” technology, eGLYPH is capable of detecting and efficiently and permanently removing extremist images, videos, and audio messages that have been determined to violate the terms of service of Internet and social media companies. The same type of software developed by Dr. Farid almost 10 years ago is used around the world to instantly identify and remove online graphic images of child exploitation.
To read the report, A Practitioner’s Guide on Preventing Radicalisation in Schools, in German, please click here.
To learn more about the eGLYPH technology, please click here.