Author: Phil Gurski

This is not going to end well. President elect Donald Trump has named a bankruptcy lawyer with precisely ZERO diplomatic experience, David Friedman, as the US ambassador to Israel and it is clear that his administration will move the US embassy to Jerusalem.  Mr. Friedman is an extremist whose views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are […]

I have just finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep.  Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]

You  would have thought that after decades of study, dozens of books (including my own The Threat from Within) and hundreds of papers that we collectively would have a better grasp of violent radicalisation.  Countless individuals belonging to movements across the ideological spectrum have been adopting violent extremism for centuries.  This is not a new […]

I have just returned from Oslo where I was thrilled to catch up with one of my favourite terrorist experts, Thomas Hegghammer.  Thomas and his colleagues at the FFI – Norway’s Defence Research Establishment – have published some amazing work over the last decade or so and I have personally learned much from them. When […]

I know for sure that this blog is going to raise some hackles, especially among my US friends and colleagues.  Why?  Because I am going to argue that the current US counter terrorism architecture is inadequate to deal with the threat and needs a serious overhaul.  The solution I am proposing, however, will go against […]

In June 30, 2009 the bodies of three girls/young women and a middle-aged woman were found in a car that had been submerged in a lock along the Rideau Canal system just north of Kingston, Ontario.  Scarcely a month later, three people from the Shafia family, Afghan immigrants to Canada, were arrested and charged with […]

As I have noted in an earlier blog,  I am a Sherlock Holmes fan.  The first story published in The Strand magazine under the “Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” beginning in December 1892 was  ‘Silver Blaze’, in which  Holmes has to solve the disappearance of a famous race horse 0n the eve of a big race […]

I have just returned from the 2016 Anti-Terrorism and Active Shooter conference in Niagara Falls where I was honoured to have been asked to open the 2-day event with a talk on Western foreign fighters.  The conference, now in its fourth or fifth year, has rapidly become a go-to event and one of the premier […]

In the wake of news out of Quebec that police in that province were given court warrants to intercept the communications of journalists, it turns out that CSIS cannot rule out the possibility that sometime over its 30+ year history that it too listened in on some members of the fifth estate.  In a session […]

I have just finished watching ‘Eye in the Sky’, a recent film about the use of drones as a counter terrorism tool.  The movie shows an operation where an Al Shabaab cell in Nairobi is located and targeted for killing, before it can carry out suicide attacks, all while shedding some light on the decision-making […]