Author: Phil Gurski

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 28, 2019. If there is one thing in the world of terrorism that touches Canada the most, at least in the minds of average Canadians, it is the issue of those among us who elected to leave to join violent extremist groups abroad. Some of these […]

There is an old saying “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. It means that if you want to exert influence and win people over it is better to use nice rather than nasty means. US President Trump has clearly never read this saying (from what I hear he doesn’t read, period, and […]

We have a definite bias when we think of terrorism. First and foremost, and for justifiable reasons, we focus on Islamist extremism (some focus erroneously on Muslims and Islam writ large, but I hope I don’t need to deconstruct that myth again). More and more recently it seems we are concerned about terrorism and violence […]

(with apologies to Erich Segal) Some of you may have heard of a horrific accident last April in rural Saskatchewan when a bus carrying members of the Junior A Humboldt Broncos hockey team collided with a tractor-trailer whose driver had run a stop sign. 16 young men and their coach died and others were injured, […]

I have spent the last week at a conference in a Central Asian country discussing terrorism and what to do about it. I have listened to a lot of presentations by those who know the region well and who have tried to put terrorism into local context. Some of the contributions were descriptive while others […]

Breaking news out of Afghanistan is that the Taliban and US have reached a tentative deal in which the former agrees not to allow Afghanistan to be used by terrorist groups (wait! Aren’t the Taliban themselves terrorists? Read on….) and the latter would agree to pull its forces out, in the country since 2002, in […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 21, 2019 Third parties are an interesting bit of Canadian political history. I am not well-versed in the blood sport of politics and thus have no intention of pretending to be a pundit on these matters. What I do find intriguing, however, is how certain parties […]

Here we go again. It must be that time of the week to take a swipe at the RCMP, or CSIS, or CSE or (fill in the blank ___) police services. A high-profile arrest is made or an action taken and everyone is a critic over what was done, what wasn’t done, etc. Everyone suddenly […]

If you were to ask the average citizen, the eponymous ‘man in the street’ (as sexist as that may sound), about religious intolerance, hate and violent extremism and which particular faith, if any, is most guilty of these crimes, I would be very, very surprised if the answer you did not receive is ‘Islam’. We […]