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 […]
Phil Gurski, former CSIS analyst, discusses with Ben Mulroney about what is known of the suspect so far, and why this hasn’t been called an act of terrorism yet.
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 […]
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When fake news makes us less safe
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 […]
Quebec is a very interesting province for many reasons, not least of which is the tremendous change in the role of religion over time. It is no exaggeration to state that the Catholic Church ruled the roost for centuries, telling Quebecers how to live, how to procreate and who to vote for. This dominance came […]
Humans are really good at categorisation. Babies learn pretty quickly how to group different objects into sets depending on a variety of criteria – colour, texture, function, etc. This ability may actually be ingrained in us and it is believed to play a huge role in language acquisition. But sometimes our knack for categorising things […]