Published in The Hill Times November 30, 2017 An awful lot has been happening in Saudi Arabia of late. There is a new sheriff-to-be in town, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman – or MBS as he is known – and he is not wasting any time in making changes about the place. Scores of senior […]
Published in the Hill Times December 4, 2017 We in Canada do not have a lot of experience when it comes to terrorism. That is, of course, a good thing as the opposite scenario would be tragic. No, despite the fact that the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) in Ottawa has pegged the threat level […]
Having just spent three days in New York I have been thinking a lot about the terrorist threat to the West. The reasons for this are not solely tied to the fact that I was three blocks away from Monday’s mostly unsuccessful attack on the subway near Times Square. It is much more than that. […]
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Terrorism and the Big Apple
New York and New Yorkers have a reputation of being tough. Whether it stems from dealing with horrendous traffic jams or the constant crush of people everywhere I am not sure, but they do seem a rather resilient lot. This came out clearly today in the wake of yet another terrorist attack. I was staying […]
Another successful terrorist attack, another inquiry as to why it was not stopped. This is becoming a common occurrence at least in Western societies where the exigencies of liberal democracies demand accountability. There may very well be post facto reviews in non-democracies like Russia and Saudi Arabia as well but we do not tend to […]
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I was a teenaged terrorist
When I was in first year of high (secondary) school – grade nine as we call it (why is it that I cannot get a BareNaked Ladies song out of my head?) – I did something really stupid. I was about to bus home from a Friday night dance when I decided that it would […]
I, like many others I suspect, have grown tired and increasingly frustrated at trying to understand anything the Trump administration is doing. So many of its decisions seem to be made with little forethought or analysis and appear to be taken in a ‘screw you’ kind of way. What other interpretation can be given to […]
This piece originally appeared in The Hill Times on November 27. There is no question that the relationship between the Toronto Police Services (TPS) and the citizenry of Hogtown have been rocky of late. Whether it is the controversial carding programme or allegations of police brutality and unnecessary use of force, many Torontonians have a […]
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Was Charles Manson a terrorist?
The word ‘terror’ is a very powerful one that tries to describe, insofar as language can, a very powerful emotion. Terror is ultimate fear, a heightened sense of threat to oneself that can freeze one’s ability to react and cloud one’s ability to use reason to get out of a highly dangerous situation. It is […]
And so the debate continues. Arguments range from the alarming view that those who fought with terrorist groups like Islamic State will return to wreak havoc and death on an epic scale to an Alfred E. Newmanesque ‘What me worry?’ response. As with pretty well everything in life reality is somewhere between those two extremes. […]