Category: Perspectives

If I were to ask ten people chosen at random what ‘terrorism’ means, I’d likely get some combinations of the following: it involves killing or trying to kill civilians; it is inspired by an idea – religious, political, ideological or something along that line; it is usually carried out by non-state actors; terrorists want to […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 8, 2019. When a massacre on the scale of the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand hits the news we all engage in examinations of what may have led to events as horrific as this to occur. And this time was no different. There was a […]

For those who have been following me over the years you know that the title of this blog is a little facetious. I have been arguing for a long time that the phrase ‘the war on terrorism’ is not helpful and should be dropped. Hell, I even wrote a book about it! Still, even I […]

We all get a feeling of deja vu at times, don’t we? You’ll see something and remark that you definitely seen it before. Sometimes it is a little spooky while at others it is more mundane. Today’s blog is about the latter. The MacDonald Laurier Institute, a Canadian thinktank, has just published a paper by […]

If there is one nation that gets a disproportionate percentage of the headlines, especially in light of its small size (under nine million, including in lands many see as ‘occupied’ – more on that later), it is Israel. The world’s only ‘Jewish’ state (more on this later) is known for its high tech success and […]

When it comes to terrorism I suppose the mantra that most people hold to is somewhat akin to that found in the real estate industry: location, location, location. Attacks that happen in countries most cannot find on a map, or have no intention of ever visiting, or frankly don’t really care about (as harsh as […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 1, 2019. If you are like me – and I really hope you are not for many, many reasons! – you probably read the news with a certain slant and through a certain filter. In my case, I read almost everything via a terrorism lens – […]

I see that the US State Department has elected to list the Pasdaran – the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC – as a “foreign terrorist organisation/state sponsor of terrorism”. In a tit for tat move, Iranian lawmakers have prepared legislation that would label the US military as a terrorist group, according to Iran’s state-run […]

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass are two of my favourite books, in large part because of the way in which the author played with language. There is so much of linguistic interest in these (allegedly) children’s novels that one of my textbooks during my undergraduate courses in linguistics at […]

I would imagine that many people would reject state involvement in religion as a matter of principle Isn’t there, after all, a belief that the two are responsible for different functions? The state is supposed to look after everything that has to do with, well, running a state, and religion is concerned about things like […]