Category: Perspectives

There is an old saying that goes “If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bus (or a bike, apparently. in the original Spanish)”.  This very silly sentence means that there are things that are unlikely to happen and therefore are not worth mentioning. This phrase was the very first thing that came to my […]

As readers of my blog and books will well know I consider myself, and am considered by some, an expert (I prefer specialist) in terrorism.  More specifically Islamist extremism as that scourge was the topic of my four books thus far as well as my career at CSIS.  Indeed, I have studied many aspects of […]

One of the most difficult challenges for governments around the world is what to do with their citizens who left to join Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq from 2013ish to 2017.  As we all know, IS is a shadow of its former self. It has lost swaths of territory.  […]

Way back in 1929, in the depths of the Great Depression, seven members of a Chicago gang were lined up and shot to death by members of another gang, probably tied to the infamous Al Capone.  The incident, now known as the Valentines Day Massacre, was probably part of Capone’s attempt to control organised crime […]

Now that Alexandre Bissonnette has pleaded guilty to killing six people (and wounding 19 others) at a Quebec City mosque in January 2017  and we are seeing at last some of the evidence mounted against him (largely his 911 call and his jail cell ‘confession’), we are getting a much clearer picture of why he […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 2, 2018   Is it just me or is it strange that an independent, secular democracy cannot make simple decisions on whom it wants to allow to stay in the country?  We are speaking here of immigrants, of course, since those lucky enough to have been […]

Look, I get it. I know why defence lawyers try to get their clients’ cases thrown out on technicalities or by feigning outrage that anyone could harbour any suspicion that the individual they represent could possibly in a million years be guilty of the offences alleged by the Crown.  That is, after all, why we […]

I apologise if I am repeating myself but I am a HUGE Monty Python fan (after 600+ blog posts in almost 3 years I forget whether I am have already said this).  Yesterday, thanks to my eldest daughter, I had the distinct pleasure of attending a public talk by Python alumnus and master comedian John […]

According to the standards of witches and warlocks in the Harry Potter series there were three curses or spells that were ‘unforgivable ‘.  These three are the Imperius curse (it forces one to do the bidding of the caster), the Cruciatus curse (it subjects the victim to excruciating pain) and the Killing curse (which does […]