Category: Perspectives

As scarcely a day goes by that we are not accosted with yet another story on a terrorist attack somewhere it is of little surprise that this form of violence has become a topic of conversation everywhere. What was once of interest to a niche market of specialists and confined to articles in little read […]

Thank God for reporters like Stewart Bell of the National Post.  Now that I am outside the realm of state secrets I have come to rely on people like him to do the investigative legwork that keeps me informed on what is going on in the world of terrorism, both in Canada and abroad.  Just […]

Religion is getting a bad rap these days and it is not that hard to see why.  Self-styled protectors or controllers of the faith – i.e. religious extremists – continue to push their narrow views on truth and praxis on everyone else, whether they are co-religionists or not.   These arbiters of religion cannot see […]

Earlier this morning the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens more was shot to death by Italian police in Milan.  An international manhunt ended successfully with the killing of Anis Amri, a Tunisian refugee who had spent time in Italy before moving on to Germany. He was known to […]

When my kids were young they liked to engage in an activity called “Mad-Lib”.  What is a “mad-lib”?  Thanks to the ever useful Wikipedia I learned that this “phrasal template word game” (!) was invented in 1953.  It is nothing more than a story or narrative in which several key words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) […]

It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front.  A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine.  The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara.  And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]

This is not going to end well. President elect Donald Trump has named a bankruptcy lawyer with precisely ZERO diplomatic experience, David Friedman, as the US ambassador to Israel and it is clear that his administration will move the US embassy to Jerusalem.  Mr. Friedman is an extremist whose views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are […]

I have just finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep.  Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]

You  would have thought that after decades of study, dozens of books (including my own The Threat from Within) and hundreds of papers that we collectively would have a better grasp of violent radicalisation.  Countless individuals belonging to movements across the ideological spectrum have been adopting violent extremism for centuries.  This is not a new […]

I have just returned from Oslo where I was thrilled to catch up with one of my favourite terrorist experts, Thomas Hegghammer.  Thomas and his colleagues at the FFI – Norway’s Defence Research Establishment – have published some amazing work over the last decade or so and I have personally learned much from them. When […]