There has been an interesting development in a terrorist court case in Ottawa. The lawyers for Awso Peshdary, accused of being a terrorism financier and recruiter, have argued that in order to defend their client properly they need all the information that the national spy service, CSIS, has collected on him. Complicating matters somewhat (but […]
Category: Perspectives
Last week news came out that two grassroots organisations in Minneapolis had received between them over $600,000 to do CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) work in the state of Minnesota, as part of a $10 million disbursement by the US Department of Homeland Security in what has been called an ongoing, but controversial, programme. Minneapolis is […]
Categories
When fake news makes us less safe
Think what you want about fake news, or “alternative facts” as they are now known, but I think we can all agree that this is not a good development. People can definitely disagree on what facts mean and what their implications are, but it is simply wrong and indefensible to say that something is X […]
Sometimes I think most of us get terrorism very, very wrong. I am not sure whether this is due to the Hollywood effect where terrorists seem to be popping up in more and more films each year. Can anyone point to a movie from the 1960s where violent extremists played a major role? Aside from […]
Quebec is a very interesting province for many reasons, not least of which is the tremendous change in the role of religion over time. It is no exaggeration to state that the Catholic Church ruled the roost for centuries, telling Quebecers how to live, how to procreate and who to vote for. This dominance came […]
Humans are really good at categorisation. Babies learn pretty quickly how to group different objects into sets depending on a variety of criteria – colour, texture, function, etc. This ability may actually be ingrained in us and it is believed to play a huge role in language acquisition. But sometimes our knack for categorising things […]
Lawyers don’t get a good rap most of the time. After all, wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote in Henry VI, Part 2 “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. A tad harsh that. I’m not sure what it is exactly that elicits such anger and fury when it comes to lawyers. Is […]
Terrorists do awful things. We need not try to find more proof of this, what with two and a half years of subhuman brutality by Islamic State – beheadings, drowning people in cages, burning people alive, throwing people off buildings to their deaths, raping children… The list goes on and on. It would be hard […]
Categories
Should we “ban” Salafism?
What causes terrorism? Lots of things, and that is why it is so hard to stop. We can identify, and have identified, the behaviours and attitudes that terrorists engage in, but we are very far from coming up with a hard and fast list of the why and the who and, frankly speaking, I am […]
The debate over what to do with terrorists is neverending. Positions range from one extreme to another, from “kill them all” to “maybe it’s our fault they are they way they are”. I would hope that by now we have learned beyond any doubt that there is no one cause, one driver, one explanation for […]