Author: Phil Gurski

Lawyers don’t get a good rap most of the time.  After all, wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote in Henry VI, Part 2 “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.  A tad harsh that. I’m not sure what it is exactly that elicits such anger and fury when it comes to lawyers.  Is […]

Terrorists do awful things.  We need not try to find more proof of this, what with two and a half years of subhuman brutality by Islamic State – beheadings, drowning people in cages, burning people alive, throwing people off buildings to their deaths, raping children…  The list goes on and on.  It would be hard […]

What causes terrorism?  Lots of things, and that is why it is so hard to stop.  We can identify, and have identified, the behaviours and attitudes that terrorists engage in, but we are very far from coming up with a hard and fast list of the why and the who and, frankly speaking, I am […]

The debate over what to do with terrorists is neverending.  Positions range from one extreme to another, from “kill them all”  to “maybe it’s our fault they are they way they are”.  I would hope that by now we have learned beyond any doubt that there is no one cause, one driver, one explanation for […]

There is no doubt that throughout much of the West these days there is considerable angst over immigration and the impacts of new arrivals on Western societies.  Whether it is the real – but largely exaggerated – fear that terrorist groups like Islamic State are seeding refugee flows with operatives ready to unleash carnage on […]

Germany has spent a long time apologising for the actions and crimes of the Nazi regime.  Not to mention the price it paid during the Versailles conference in 1919 for its decision to launch WWI (and in that case the price exacted by the victors played a big part in laying the conditions for WWII). […]

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.  Almost a year ago I wrote that the Canadian government would be placed in a difficult position should one of our citizens who chose to travel to Iraq to fight the terrorist group Islamic State alongside Kurdish forces was caught by the […]

Whenever a new year kicks in we always cast a Janus-like glance back to the previous one to get an idea of what we just went through and, hopefully, gain some insight into what we are in for in the coming 12 months.  By all accounts 2016 was not a great year on several fronts, […]

I am a glass half full kind of guy, someone who seeks to find the positive in life.  I am an optimist tinged with realism.  Three decades in intelligence and 15 years in counter terrorism do tend to give one a good look at the less savoury aspects of life on this planet and as […]

Years ago when I first joined CSIS there was a veteran CT (counter terrorism) guy whom I’ll call Mike.  He had been around a fair bit and I had a great deal of respect both for his experience and his insight into Islamist extremism.  In all his time in the trenches he had seen a […]