Search: “war on terrorism”

I’m no fan of spaghetti westerns and the 1966 film starring Clint Eastwood among others has nothing to do with terrorism.  It’s just that I can think of no better phrase to describe the interim report issued by the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence on countering the terrorist threat in Canada (see the […]

Tackling terrorism is not easy.  There are a lot of tools, some soft and some hard and some in between.  Relying on any one in particular is unlikely to work. For the record, I am not soft on terrorism or terrorists.  When our government agencies identify individuals who subscribe to a violent ideology and who […]

It must appear to most people in Canada that terrorism is a daily scourge.  If you take a global snapshot that is undeniably true.  Over the last few weeks we have seen attacks in France, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and the inevitable – and sadly too frequent – violence in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And […]

It is not uncommon for inaccurate information to be held as accepted wisdom where no amount of data will convince people otherwise. Examples of this would include the conviction that crime rates are soaring (they have actually been plummeting for years) or that e-cigarettes are ok (there is no data yet suggesting that they are […]

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the terrorist attack against Air India flight 182 which fell into the sea off the coast of Ireland, taking with it 329 lives, the vast majority of them Canadians.  Many fail to recognise that the bombing was the largest single terrorist attack prior to 9/11. So as we remember […]

Further to my previous blog on when to call something terrorism, there has been an ongoing debate on what to call the Islamic State (or as it is also known, ISIL or ISIS or DAESH or…).  A recent op-ed in the English edition of Asharq Alawsat (see it here) calls on us to stop calling […]

In the wake of the horrific killings at an African American church in South Carolina, the old argument was again raised: was this an act of terrorism?  Many criticised the media and government for hesitating to use the term and some concluded that terrorism only seemed to apply when the perpetrators were Muslim and not white. […]

While driving through Perth last week, I listened to an interview with a University of Windsor academic who had studied the effects of a program offered on Canadian university campuses aimed at reducing sexual assault .  Her research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the training resulted in a significant decrease in […]

This ain’t good. In an interview with Vice, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, while defending the government’s position that wearing a niqab (face veil) during citizenship ceremonies is not concomitant with Canadian values, uttered the following sequence: ” The overwhelming majority of Canadians want that rule to continue to apply. We’ve done a lot in the […]

You find provocative pieces related to terrorism just about anywhere these days.  Remember the Rolling Stone cover piece on Dhzokhar Tsarnaev (one of the Boston Marathon bombers) that got all that attention last year? I recently read an essay on the “Hydra paradox” in the UK magazine New Scientist (full disclosure: I have been reading […]