Author: Phil Gurski

Here we go again. The fact that Alexandre Bissonnette was able to get a gun, walk into a mosque, slaughter innocent people and not be detected is a failure. On whom? On everyone – CSIS, the RCMP, la police de la ville de Quebec, the Surete, the government of Canada, average Canadians for not standing […]

I feel for politicians and public leaders – sometimes.  True, they do come out with some stupid things on occasion, but I want to give them credit for assuming the role they do. It cannot be an easy job. When it comes to terrorism, and more specifically talking about a specific act as terrorist or […]

Look, I get it.  When something along the lines of the shooting in Quebec City on Sunday evening occurs, people want to know what is happening.  And they want to know NOW.  So, the army of experts – a few actual and most fake – rise up and fill the airwaves with “analysis”. The fact […]

In the wake of the tragic events in Quebec City Sunday evening there is much more that we don’t know than what we do know. We now know the identity of the one suspect as well as those who lost their lives.  We have some idea of what transpired and when.  But we have nothing […]

Well, if there was any doubt about what a Trump presidency means for the US, and by extension for all of us, over the next four years there is little doubt now.  In the first week alone a flurry of executive orders have been signed on a whole bunch of issues that Mr. Trump promised […]

There has been an interesting development in a terrorist court case in Ottawa.  The lawyers for Awso Peshdary, accused of being a terrorism financier and recruiter, have argued that in order to defend their client properly they need all the information that the national spy service, CSIS, has collected on him.  Complicating matters somewhat (but […]

Last week news came out that two grassroots organisations in Minneapolis had received between them over $600,000 to do CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) work in the state of Minnesota, as part of a $10 million disbursement by the US Department of Homeland Security in what has been called an ongoing, but controversial, programme.  Minneapolis is […]

Think what you want about fake news, or “alternative facts” as they are now known, but I think we can all agree that this is not a good development.  People can definitely disagree on what facts mean and what their implications are, but it is simply wrong and indefensible to say that something is X […]

Sometimes I think most of us get terrorism very, very wrong.  I am not sure whether this is due to the Hollywood effect where terrorists seem to be popping up in more and more films each year.  Can anyone point to a movie from the 1960s where violent extremists played a major role?  Aside from […]