Author: Phil Gurski

There is a famous line in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz where the protagonist Dorothy, who has just  landed in a strange country courtesy of a tornado, looks around and tells her dog Toto “we’re not in Kansas anymore”.  That sentence has been used countless times over the decades and has come […]

Here we go again.  I have lost track of how many articles I have read over the last few days all written in an accusatory tone that when you distill it comes down to a very simple claim: British intelligence should have known that Salman Abedi was a terrorist and should have stopped him before […]

Terrorism is a dirty, dangerous business.  Terrorists are nasty people who  engage in nasty acts.  To thwart attacks you have to work with sources and groups whose reputations are, shall we say, unsavoury.  As former CSIS Deputy Director Jack Hooper once said, however indelicately, “sometimes you have to take the ugly girl to the dance”. […]

Donald Trump promised during his presidential campaign that if elected to the highest office in the land that he would do things differently.  No more Washington business as usual, he said.  This was welcomed by many who are convinced that the capital, and by extension the government, had fallen into paralysis and inefficiency.  What better […]

Terrorist acts are often heinous in nature.  People targeted at a club in Orlando (or Istanbul) dancing the night away.  Passengers on a city bus in Tel Aviv.  Young political activists on an island in Norway.  When we are happily doing whatever it is that we like and we are felled by indiscriminate terror and […]

The President of the US is a very powerful person.  The so-called leader of the free world has a lot of influence on all kinds of issues and has a great deal of leeway in deciding what to say and do (within the system of checks and balances of course).  The current holder of office, […]

There are few places on Earth more pitiable than Mali, a landlocked country in West Africa that is about the size of South Africa.  It ranks in the bottom ten with respect to poverty, has one of the world’s largest birth rates (6 children per mother), and has a serious terrorist problem to boot. It […]

It was the US artist Andy Warhol who once said “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”, a phrase that seems to have underscored a universal desire to get noticed.  There is no question that it is much easier in a world of 24/7 news to have one’s story told: recall the […]

My late mother had a lot of great advice for me, much of which I followed and much of which has helped me immensely in life.  One maxim that she shared with me has been ignored however.  That would be the time she said it is a good idea never to engage in conversation on […]

I had the pleasure last week of hearing former Canadian Senator Hugh Segal give a talk at an event sponsored by the Canadian International Council on his book ‘Two Freedoms: Canada’s global future‘. He spoke of the famous ‘freedoms’ first put forward by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941: freedom of worship, freedom of […]