Episode 255 – Are ISIS terrorists also engaged in what are known as war crimes?
War is part of human history alas. Our penchant for killing one another goes back millennia and, as current events demonstrate (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan…), it shows no signs of ebbing. Terrorism, on the other hand, is a much more recent ill. Are there links between terrorism and war crimes? Borealis talks to a Canadian war crimes specialist in the wake of news that a Canadian ISIS wannabe has been charged with both terrorism and war crimes charges.
Alleged Toronto ISIS attack plotter now faces war crimes charges | CBC News
About my guest
Dr. Joseph Rikhof has been an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa from 2005 to 2024 teaching international criminal law. Until his retirement in early 2017 he was also a senior counsel at the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Section of the Department of Justice, Canada. He has published widely in the area of international criminal law as well in refugee and immigration law, especially in the subject matter of serious criminality, namely over 60 articles as well as the following books: The Criminal Refugee: The Treatment of Asylum Seekers with a Criminal Background in International and Domestic Law (2012 with a second edition forthcoming in June 2023 under the new title Exclusion and Refoulement: Criminality in International and Domestic Refugee Law; as co-author with Robert Currie, International and Transnational Criminal Law, Second Edition (2013) and Third Edition (2020) and as co-author with Terje Einarsen, A Theory of Punishable Participation in Universal Crimes (2018).
Canadian Intelligence Eh
In a world of multiple voices and opinions it can be very hard to know where to turn. One choice is to look to those who actually worked in counter-terrorism in the national security world.
In these half-hour podcasts, 30-year Canadian intelligence veteran Phil Gurski is joined by a fascinating array of individuals with something meaningful to say about these issues as they provide insight into what they mean and what we need to do about them.
About Phil Gurski
Phil worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013, focusing on community outreach and training on radicalisation to violence, until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) from May to October 2015.
He was the Director of Security and Intelligence at the SecDev Group from June 2018 to July 2019 and the Director of the National Security Programme at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute from 2020-2022. He has also taught on national security issues at George Brown College, the University of Ottawa and Georgian College. Mr. Gurski has presented on violent Islamist-inspired and other forms of terrorism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world and is actively sought by Canadian and international media on national security and intelligence issues. He has written hundreds of op-eds on these matters for several Canadian media since 2016
He writes at www.borealisthreatandrisk.com.
He is the author of The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), The Lesser Jihads: Taking the Islamist fight to the world (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), An end to the ‘War on Terrorism (Rowman and Littlefield 2018), When Religion Kills: How Extremist Justify Violence Through Faith (Lynne Rienner 2019) and The Peaceable Kingdom? A history of terrorism in Canada from Confederation to the present (self-published: 2021, republished by Double Dagger in 2022). He regularly blogs and podcasts (Canadian Intelligence Eh!), and tweets (@borealissaves) on terrorism and intelligence matters.
