Author: Phil Gurski

In a statement of the obvious, Islamic State has taken barbarity to a new (recent) low.  There is no question that throwing homosexuals off apartment buildings, burning people alive, beheading prisoners and raping girls qualifies as reprehensible behaviour.  Not that we humans have never before engaged in these subhuman kinds of acts, but the frequency […]

Intelligence is usually a plodding business.  Not that it is not exciting – quite the contrary! – but that it takes time to gather information, process it, analyse it, figure out what gaps remain, and then go out and get more.  Rarely do you paint a complete picture, regardless of how good and diverse your […]

CSIS Director Michel Coulombe appeared before the Senate National Security and Defence Committee today and stated that his organisation has used its new disruption powers over twenty times since 2015.   This measure was controversial when introduced by the former Conservative government and is still seen by some as too strong for a service that […]

I see that another Canadian has died fighting in what he believed to be a legitimate jihad overseas, this time in Libya.   Owais Egwilla joins a not so illustrious list of fellow citizens including Ali Dirie, Andre Poulin, Vilyam Plotnikov, Abdelrahman Jabarah, Salman Ashrafi, Damian Clairmont and – unfortunately – many others.  Their graves, […]

From time to time a bizarre case crops up in the world of terrorism, even in Canada.  We have all read of individuals who are portrayed as incompetent or cells described as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” (that was the consensus on the Toronto 18 for a long time and may still be believed […]

We all remember when the Taliban blew up two huge Buddha statues in Bamyan, Afghanistan back in March 2001.  These religious objects, almost 1500 years old, were reduced to rubble when the extremists gleefully dynamited them and bragged about their act of demolition.  At the time, their crime made headlines around the world and was, […]

Anyone who has seriously studied violent radicalisation knows that it does not happen in a vacuum. The term “self-radicalised” is inaccurate and unhelpful.  True, it is remotely possible for some individuals to adopt violent ideologies entirely on their own, but it is so rare as to be inconsequential.  Never say never, the old adage goes, […]

I just read in the Ottawa Citizen that the brother of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Alexandre, has called on the Liberal government not to deport alleged Algerian terrorist Mohamed Harkat back to his native land. Recall that Mr. Harkat was subject to a National Security Certificate and found to be inadmissible to Canada under the […]

One of the paradoxes of modern Islamist extremism (including AQ (or IS) inspired terrorists) is that while it is impossible to predict who buys into the violent narrative offered by terrorist groups and engages in extremism, those that end up doing so all look and sound more or less the same when you look at them.  We […]

It is often a difficult question for governments to decide which activities to allow and which to ban. There are clear cases where certain actions should not be tolerated, like murder for instance, and we have laws to take care of those.  Some argue, however, that governments should just stay out of our lives, that […]