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National Security Priorities for the Canadian Government, from ISIS Fighters to Guns

Many pundits remarked that we saw neither hide nor hair of anything related to national security or foreign policy in the platforms of any of the main parties during the election campaign.

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Today in Terrorism: November 29, 2014 – Attack in Xinjiang Province, PRC

China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims is a horrible abuse of state power, but there is a real terrorist threat to deal with.

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National security priorities for the Liberal minority government

Here’s what needs to be done by the Liberal minority government on the national security/public safety front.

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Today in Terrorism: 30 October 2008, Assam, India

Bangladeshi Islamist terrorist group suspected in 13 near simultaneous bombs that kill 66 in Assam. I often wonder why countries or governments make what are known as ‘own goals’ or unforced errors. These are decisions or policies taken for what appear on the surface to be good reasons, at least by some, but which end […]

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Today in Terrorism: September 26, 2014

In all the debates about what is more important today from a terrorism angle, i.e. where we should put the greatest concentration of resources to counter it, I find there is one glaring omission. As we go back and forth on whether to put all our eggs in the jihadi basket or the far right […]

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Another questionable act in the ‘war on terrorism’

There is so much that has gone awry in the so-called war on terrorism that a complete list is probably uncompilable – and certainly too much for a blog piece. I have already made many arguments as to why this is not a good way to view or frame our efforts at preventing or thwarting […]

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Can we please not overuse the term ‘terrorism’?

There is no question that there is a lot of terrorism about. Even a cursory glance at the news on a daily basis will uncover stories like an attack on a school by the Taliban in Afghanistan, an Al Shabaab strike on a Mogadishu hotel, yet another Boko Haram use of young girls as suicide […]

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We need to use the term genocide carefully before it loses all meaning – and impact

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 10, 2019. Boy am I ever going to get some flack from this post. I intend to take issue with some of the findings of the Canadian inquiry into the murder and disappearance of First Nations women, more specifically the use of the term ‘genocide’. For […]

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Former Guantanamo Bay inmates still a hot topic…in Canada

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 3, 2019 Canada had nothing to do with the US decision to use the anachronistic Guantanamo Bay military camp in Cuba as a highly controversial – if not internationally illegal – detention centre for suspected terrorists. That people alleged to have been linked to terrorist groups […]

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What to do with the term ‘extremism’

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass are two of my favourite books, in large part because of the way in which the author played with language. There is so much of linguistic interest in these (allegedly) children’s novels that one of my textbooks during my undergraduate courses in linguistics at […]