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 […]
Lawyers don’t get a good rap most of the time. After all, wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote in Henry VI, Part 2 “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. A tad harsh that. I’m not sure what it is exactly that elicits such anger and fury when it comes to lawyers. Is […]
Terrorists do awful things. We need not try to find more proof of this, what with two and a half years of subhuman brutality by Islamic State – beheadings, drowning people in cages, burning people alive, throwing people off buildings to their deaths, raping children… The list goes on and on. It would be hard […]
Categories
Should we “ban” Salafism?
What causes terrorism? Lots of things, and that is why it is so hard to stop. We can identify, and have identified, the behaviours and attitudes that terrorists engage in, but we are very far from coming up with a hard and fast list of the why and the who and, frankly speaking, I am […]
The debate over what to do with terrorists is neverending. Positions range from one extreme to another, from “kill them all” to “maybe it’s our fault they are they way they are”. I would hope that by now we have learned beyond any doubt that there is no one cause, one driver, one explanation for […]
Categories
What price integration?
There is no doubt that throughout much of the West these days there is considerable angst over immigration and the impacts of new arrivals on Western societies. Whether it is the real – but largely exaggerated – fear that terrorist groups like Islamic State are seeding refugee flows with operatives ready to unleash carnage on […]
Germany has spent a long time apologising for the actions and crimes of the Nazi regime. Not to mention the price it paid during the Versailles conference in 1919 for its decision to launch WWI (and in that case the price exacted by the victors played a big part in laying the conditions for WWII). […]
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Almost a year ago I wrote that the Canadian government would be placed in a difficult position should one of our citizens who chose to travel to Iraq to fight the terrorist group Islamic State alongside Kurdish forces was caught by the […]