Search: “CSIS”

If you live in the National Capital Region of Canada and have never been to one of the public talks organised by The Panel or – horror of horrors! – never heard of The Panel you really need to do your homework.  The Panel is an Ottawa-based organisation that hosts two live events each year […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on November 12, 2018. Australia and Canada are very similar countries in many ways.  Both former British colonies, both (relatively) open to immigration, both members of the 5 eyes intelligence community.  I have visited Australia on many occasions and I must admit that I always feel at home […]

This piece appeared  in The Ottawa Citizen (online) on November 12, 2018. I never knew my maternal grandfather.  He emigrated to Canada in the early part of the 20th century from western Ukraine (or eastern Poland, the details on that are fuzzy) and settled in Montreal where he worked at the CPR’s Angus workshops, along […]

Here we go again.  Another terrorist attack, this time in Melbourne, Australia, another chorus of ‘he was mentally ill’ and, I guess, not responsible.  Last Friday (November 9) an ethnic Somali man drove to that city’s central business district with a bunch of gas cylinders turned to the open position (seeking one surmises to cause […]

I suppose that the literal definition of a ‘moonshot’ is the act of sending a rocket to the moon.  Interestingly, there is another set of metaphorical definitions I found online which include: an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term profitability or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of […]

On at least a weekly basis I get an email or a LinkedIn message from someone, usually in Canada, who has an interest in terrorism.  Wait, let me clarify that – an interest in either studying terrorism or working in counter terrorism.  Phew!  If it were another interest I’d have to tell my friends at […]

There is a lot of debate these days about what is more important when it comes to terrorism: Islamist extremism (i.e. jihadis) or right wing extremists.  The truth is that both pose a threat but which one is scarier depends on what part of the world you are talking about.  In the US it is […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on November 5, 2018. For a country that is thankfully rarely touched by terrorism we in Canada sure seem to talk about it a lot.  I suppose I am partly responsible for this as I tend to write about violent extremism ad nauseum, but given my career in […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on October 29, 2018 Now that we are two weeks and counting away from the ‘incident’ involving Saudi dissident Jamal Kashoggi at the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul I have lost track of how many versions of the story we have received from our Saudi ‘friends’.  First Mr. Kashoggi […]

While this may strike some people as arrogant and dismissive I have to confess that when I listen to ‘experts’ talk about national security issues in the media I first look at who is speaking. Some of those who offer opinions are journalists, others are politicians or political junkies, still others are academics. All have interesting perspectives […]