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The UK and Canada: polar opposites when it comes to the terrorist threat

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 11, 2018. All is takes is a cursory glance at the news on any given day to conclude – erroneously as I hope to show – that Islamist extremist terrorism is a daily event that threatens us all.  We read of bombings in Afghanistan, beheadings in […]

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The US just won the war on poverty: can the war on terror be far behind?

Hubris, defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence or arrogance”, is a human emotion that has long fascinated me.  There are individuals who exercise it with alarming regularity – a certain US President whose name rhymes with ‘dump’ readily comes to mind – and it is often seen as a fatal flaw that results in someone’s downfall.  For  instance, Napoleon could […]

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Why wasn’t the Air India terrorist attack prevented?

This article was posted in The Hill Times on July 9, 2018. A week ago a relatively small crowd in Vancouver’s Stanley Park commemorated the single greatest terrorist attack in history (as determined by deaths) prior to 9/11. And Canada featured prominently in it.  I refer of course to the downing of Air India flight 182 […]

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Terrorism is less prevalent than you think

Quick!  Name the top ten causes of death in Canada!  Can you?  Here is one list I found in the wondrous playground and source of all wisdom we call the Internet (the data is from 2012: the rightmost column is percentage of yearly deaths:   1. Malignant neoplasms (cancer) 30.2 2 Diseases of heart (heart […]

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Perspectives

Why we should treat returning foreign fighters as criminals

Imagine the following scenario.  There is a person who comes from a good home, not necessarily privileged perhaps, but who ‘has it good’.  Despite this advantage in life  – let’s face it, many people don’t have it so good – this person becomes bored.  In their boredom, this person hooks up with a gang that […]

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Not all vehicular ramming attacks are terrorist incidents

Does anyone else remember the CBC Radio show Basic Black?  I loved that show, which used to run on Saturday mornings and did so from 1983 to 2002.  The show’s host, Arthur Black, would interview a number of guests, some of them quite eccentric, who came from all walks of life.  It was a truly […]

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Wisdom from the most unexpected place

The other night my wife and I went to see a play written by legendary British crime writer Agatha Christie called The Unexpected Guest at the Ottawa Little Theatre.  This particular performance was quite good and the ending, much in keeping with the title, was unexpected (at least to us it was: perhaps “whodunit” was obvious to […]

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Perspectives

A worrisome rise in intolerant Islam in Indonesia

As I -and many others – have mentioned before, Indonesia is by far the largest Muslim nation on Earth.  This often comes to a surprise to many as the southeast Asian country is not located within the ‘normal’ region we associate with Islam (i.e. the Middle East) and is surrounded by nations that are most […]

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How NOT to protect national security

That we live in a time obsessed with threats to national security and what to do about those threats is beyond question.  Whether we are talking about terrorism, gun crime, migrant flows, climate change or other risks to the planet and its constituent nations the conversation and debates surrounding the best approaches to meet and […]

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CSIS is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t

This piece was published in The Hill Times on July 2, 2018 Here is a fundamental question for Canadians: what do you want from your security intelligence service?   What are your expectations of CSIS, an agency of several thousand civil servants which has been plying its trade for more than three decades in the […]