Borealis Threat & Risk ConsultingPhil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting Ltd. Phil is a 32-year veteran of CSE and CSIS and the author of six books on terrorism.
Historical revisionism is inevitable I suppose. There are those who look back at events, both recent and less so, re-interpret them through a new paradigm, lens or self-interested agenda, re-package them, and present them to us in a way that goes against the previous collected wisdom. Sometimes this re-interpretation is necessary in the light of […]
A couple of years ago I went out to my car, which I had left on the street in front of my house and found a ticket on the windshield. For the record, overnight parking is allowed on my street, which is located in a subdivision of Ottawa. I could not understand why I had […]
I am always tickled pink when I see what I think are fascinating parallels between (or among) phenomena. As someone who worked in, and now writes about, terrorism and counter-terrorism, I try to find new ways to describe and, if I may be so bold, to explain why people opt for violent extremism as a […]
A Canadian judge’s job cannot be easy. You are expected to listen to a whole bunch of information, often contradictory in nature, from diametrically opposed sides (Crown and defence), and determine which side has made the better argument, all while keeping your knowledge and understanding of Canadian law in mind. Then you have to make […]
Of all the cases of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ that has cropped up of late, and there have been many, many such instances, the story of a British ‘schoolgirl’ is one of the most interesting. Shamima Begum left the UK in 2015 as part of the ‘Bethnal Green’ trio of females who joined Islamic State (IS). […]
This piece appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on February 14, 2019. In January 2017 Canada witnessed an event that is thankfully rare, at least in comparison with our southern neighbour. I am referring to a mass shooting, this one at a mosque in Quebec City carried out by a young man named Alexandre Bissonnette. He […]
I just read a really good paper on counter terrorism and the courts written by a Canadian scholar from the U of Calgary, Michael Nesbitt. This is a rare occurrence for me for several reasons. First, there are far too many offerings that are far too theoretical for me and don’t have any real data […]
There have been a lot of very good analytic pieces on Islamic State of late, especially in the wake of US President Trump’s Tweet “we have won against ISIS; we’ve beaten them, and we’ve beaten them badly”. Here are links to a few: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/17/its-not-just-isis-many-terrorist-groups-have-been-declared-dead-only-rise-again/?utm_term=.dab4f12cf0b8 https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/tracking-jihadist-movements-2019-islamic-state https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/islamic-state-terrorism-extremism-eyes-southeast-asia-11199586 https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/1577356/pentagon-isis-syria-could-regroup-6-months https://www.thedailybeast.com/isis-smuggler-sleeper-cells-and-undead-suicide-bombers-have-infiltrated-europe?ref=home The US office of the Director of […]
In case you didn’t notice – or don’t care – today marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. It was this day in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini-led revolt against the Shah of Iran consolidated victory in what became known as the Dah-e-fajr (the ‘ten days of dawn’ in Farsi, the period between Khomeini’s […]
Staying with the Lewis Carroll theme for a bit, in 1876 the English writer penned the poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. The ‘Snark’ was described as follows: Some have feathers and bite, and some have whiskers and scratch. It also sleeps late into the day. While the snark is very ambitious, and has very […]