Author: Phil Gurski

We in Canada are, disturbingly to some, becoming used to this story.  A Canadian travels abroad, to a native land or elsewhere, is picked up by local authorities, placed in jail (often in appalling conditions and sometimes allegedly tortured) and eventually released when the foreign government decides there is no case against him.  He returns […]

A few months ago an Austrian town put out a ‘help wanted’ sign – for a hermit.  I am not making this up.  The town has apparently had a hermit since the 17th century and the last one ‘retired’ in the fall of 2016 (how do you retire from being a hermit?  I wonder how […]

I have come to know the journalist Michael Petrou over the past few years.  He would sometimes call me to seek my views on terrorism when he was with Macleans magazine and I relied heavily on his book ‘Renegades’ – the story of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War – for a section of my […]

A pattern is emerging when it comes to the aftermath of a terrorist attack in the West.  People of all faiths and backgrounds denounce the attack, politicians swear that their nations will not be cowed by fear, candles and late-night vigils abound, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris is lit with the colours of the […]

Terrorists are hateful people, of that there is no doubt.  What they hate varies based on the underlying ideology of the group to which they belong or through which they derive their inspiration and yet there are similarities at times.  Most of them hate society or governments or policies or something else and have concluded […]

Once in a while I come across (or, in this case, have someone point me in the right direction) a story related to terrorism that surprises even  me, a 30-year grizzled veteran of intelligence and counter terrorism.  I saw a lot in my time at CSIS and had the incredibly amazing opportunity to work on […]

The third attack in the UK in a little over two months has people panicking, and not just in Great Britain.  On March 22 a man ran over people on Westminster Bridge in downtown London, killing three and wounding 50, before exiting his car and stabbing an unarmed police officer near Parliament before he was […]

In the wake of yet another horrific – but not ‘cowardly’: the terrorists most likely knew they would die in their efforts – attack  in London, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has said ‘enough is enough‘!  She added that there was ‘too much tolerance of extremism’ in her country and that the UK’s counter terrorism […]

Terrorism is a charged term and for good reason.  The crime  evokes fear and an inability of states to keep their citizens safe from outside (or inside forces).  And fear of course is the goal of those who are behind this nature of attack.  Even if there is little agreement on how terrorism is defined […]

No Canadian is unfamiliar with the name Karla Homolka.  She was the wife, and partner in crime, of Paul Bernardo, currently serving a life sentence for the brutal sex slayings of two young women in southern Ontario in the early 1990s.  Ms. Homolka only got a lesser punishment because of a controversial side deal with […]