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Perspectives

Is there a link between terrorism and elections in the West?

Terrorists are hateful people, of that there is no doubt.  What they hate varies based on the underlying ideology of the group to which they belong or through which they derive their inspiration and yet there are similarities at times.  Most of them hate society or governments or policies or something else and have concluded […]

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Perspectives

Some thoughts on the London Bridge attack

The third attack in the UK in a little over two months has people panicking, and not just in Great Britain.  On March 22 a man ran over people on Westminster Bridge in downtown London, killing three and wounding 50, before exiting his car and stabbing an unarmed police officer near Parliament before he was […]

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What is the balance between free speech and support for terrorism?

In the wake of yet another horrific – but not ‘cowardly’: the terrorists most likely knew they would die in their efforts – attack  in London, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has said ‘enough is enough‘!  She added that there was ‘too much tolerance of extremism’ in her country and that the UK’s counter terrorism […]

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Terrorism or hate crime – does it matter?

Terrorism is a charged term and for good reason.  The crime  evokes fear and an inability of states to keep their citizens safe from outside (or inside forces).  And fear of course is the goal of those who are behind this nature of attack.  Even if there is little agreement on how terrorism is defined […]

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The difficult question on when to release terrorist prisoners

No Canadian is unfamiliar with the name Karla Homolka.  She was the wife, and partner in crime, of Paul Bernardo, currently serving a life sentence for the brutal sex slayings of two young women in southern Ontario in the early 1990s.  Ms. Homolka only got a lesser punishment because of a controversial side deal with […]

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Could the Manchester attack have been prevented? Not necessarily

Here we go again.  I have lost track of how many articles I have read over the last few days all written in an accusatory tone that when you distill it comes down to a very simple claim: British intelligence should have known that Salman Abedi was a terrorist and should have stopped him before […]

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Making deals with the terrorist devil

Terrorism is a dirty, dangerous business.  Terrorists are nasty people who  engage in nasty acts.  To thwart attacks you have to work with sources and groups whose reputations are, shall we say, unsavoury.  As former CSIS Deputy Director Jack Hooper once said, however indelicately, “sometimes you have to take the ugly girl to the dance”. […]

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Should Canada send anti-terrorist forces to Mali?

There are few places on Earth more pitiable than Mali, a landlocked country in West Africa that is about the size of South Africa.  It ranks in the bottom ten with respect to poverty, has one of the world’s largest birth rates (6 children per mother), and has a serious terrorist problem to boot. It […]

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Can ‘moderate’ Islam top ‘extremist’ Islam?

My late mother had a lot of great advice for me, much of which I followed and much of which has helped me immensely in life.  One maxim that she shared with me has been ignored however.  That would be the time she said it is a good idea never to engage in conversation on […]

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Perspectives

Freedom from fear of terrorism is in our grasp

I had the pleasure last week of hearing former Canadian Senator Hugh Segal give a talk at an event sponsored by the Canadian International Council on his book ‘Two Freedoms: Canada’s global future‘. He spoke of the famous ‘freedoms’ first put forward by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941: freedom of worship, freedom of […]