Borealis Threat & Risk Consulting

Earlier this morning the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens more was shot to death by Italian police in Milan.  An international manhunt ended successfully with the killing of Anis Amri, a Tunisian refugee who had spent time in Italy before moving on to Germany. He was known to […]

When my kids were young they liked to engage in an activity called “Mad-Lib”.  What is a “mad-lib”?  Thanks to the ever useful Wikipedia I learned that this “phrasal template word game” (!) was invented in 1953.  It is nothing more than a story or narrative in which several key words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) […]

It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front.  A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine.  The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara.  And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]

This is not going to end well. President elect Donald Trump has named a bankruptcy lawyer with precisely ZERO diplomatic experience, David Friedman, as the US ambassador to Israel and it is clear that his administration will move the US embassy to Jerusalem.  Mr. Friedman is an extremist whose views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are […]

I have just finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep.  Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]

You  would have thought that after decades of study, dozens of books (including my own The Threat from Within) and hundreds of papers that we collectively would have a better grasp of violent radicalisation.  Countless individuals belonging to movements across the ideological spectrum have been adopting violent extremism for centuries.  This is not a new […]

I have just returned from Oslo where I was thrilled to catch up with one of my favourite terrorist experts, Thomas Hegghammer.  Thomas and his colleagues at the FFI – Norway’s Defence Research Establishment – have published some amazing work over the last decade or so and I have personally learned much from them. When […]

I know for sure that this blog is going to raise some hackles, especially among my US friends and colleagues.  Why?  Because I am going to argue that the current US counter terrorism architecture is inadequate to deal with the threat and needs a serious overhaul.  The solution I am proposing, however, will go against […]

In June 30, 2009 the bodies of three girls/young women and a middle-aged woman were found in a car that had been submerged in a lock along the Rideau Canal system just north of Kingston, Ontario.  Scarcely a month later, three people from the Shafia family, Afghan immigrants to Canada, were arrested and charged with […]

As I have noted in an earlier blog,  I am a Sherlock Holmes fan.  The first story published in The Strand magazine under the “Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” beginning in December 1892 was  ‘Silver Blaze’, in which  Holmes has to solve the disappearance of a famous race horse 0n the eve of a big race […]