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Perspectives

Better gun laws will prevent some terrorist acts and lower casualties

Before I go any further it is important that I make a confession: I know next to nothing about guns. I have never owned a gun and never fired one – wait, that last bit is not 100% true. My older brother let me fire one in our family basement when I was nine years […]

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The terrorist attack in Canada that wasn’t – or was it?

I know I have written about this before but some things just bear repeating, even if that repetition is repetitive. An act of terrorism is an act of serious violence carried out for political, religious or ideological reasons. The first part of that is usually fairly easy to distinguish. After all, serious violence is an […]

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Terrorism and satire: like oil and water?

Every month or so a bunch of us who used to work together in the security intelligence community in Canada meet at a local watering hole to quaff a few pints and rib each other for an hour and a half. We are all retired more or less so the risks of disclosing sensitive/classified information […]

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The links between genocide and terrorism

If there is one activity that humans engage in that is worse than genocide I’d like to know what it is. Genocide is the deliberate intent to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth. The UN defines it as: “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or […]

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And the terrorism merry-go-round continues…..sigh

As we still try to process the horrific attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an Australian white supremacist we are also immersed into a debate, less fruitful than many think in my opinion, over whether far right extremism presents more of a menace than Islamist extremism. I and many others have taken […]

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A reality check on preventing terrorism

It has been two days or so since the massacre in New Zealand and I have already lost track of how many articles, op-Ed’s, tweets, FaceBook postings and other material have called for more action to prevent acts of that nature. Everyone seems to think that governments, and especially security intelligence and law enforcement agencies, […]

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Assigning responsibility for terrorism

In the wake of the horror that unfolded in two Christchurch mosques yesterday the Internet is abuzz with analysis of what happened and why. Op-ed pieces are pointing fingers in multiple directions, accusing multiple people of having had a role, however indirect, in the slaughter of 49 Muslims by an apparent white supremacist seeking to […]

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Will increasing political polarisation in Canada lead to an assassination?

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 4, 2019. There is a small plaque on Queen Street in Ottawa, two blocks south of Parliament Hill. It is not that prominent and easy to miss. It commemorates the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, “considered one of the eloquent of the Fathers of Confederation” (that […]

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Here’s hoping the recent decline in terrorism continues

There is a phrase I love and which I would like to share with you today as it has a lot to with the theme I want to briefly develop. It’s “past performance is no guarantee of future results”. You may have seen this before, on prospectuses for mutual funds or investments for instance. In […]

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The almost catastrophic terrorist attack no one is talking about

Remember a terrorist named Anders Breivik? He was the Norwegian self-styled Knight Templar who set off an explosion outside government buildings in Oslo in July 2011 and then proceeded to an island where the Workers’ Youth League was holding a summer camp and opened fire. 77 people in all were killed (8 in the bomb […]