Search: “anarchist”

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a fascinating workshop in Montreal sponsored by Concordia University’s Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies (MIGS) entitled ‘Tech Against Terrorism’.  A number of academics, private sector entities and think tanks all came to talk about the challenges behind identifying and removing terrorist content from the Internet and […]

I have a confession to make.  I wear a mask sometimes.  I think I have a good excuse though: I play goal in pick-up hockey games in Ottawa.  My face may not be Tom Cruise-worthy, but I sure don’t want to look like Jacques Plante before he pioneered the wearing of face masks in the […]

Scientists have made great progress in eradicating diseases that once maimed or killed millions of people.  Think of smallpox.  Or polio, which a few years ago was on the verge of disappearance though state instability and war have allowed it to cling to life.  The reason why these scourges were defeated (apparently there is a […]

And so the debate continues on which terrorist movement(s) poses a bigger threat in the West.  Is it really Islamic State and IS-inspired extremists or is this belief a symptom of Islamophobia?  Or is it the collection of hate-filled racists and white supremacists as everyone seems to be saying?  And what about the rise of […]

Last week the Canadian Department of Public Safety issued its annual terrorist threat report.  You can read the whole thing here but I would like to comment on some of it in the paragraphs to follow.  The paper is unclassified and is intended to inform Canadians in a general way what the threat level is […]

In light of all the terrorist attacks that occur with disturbing frequency, it is not surprising that a lot of ink is dedicated to violent extremism.  Newspapers, journals, books (some time ago I read somewhere that 10,000 books had been published on terrorism since 9/11 – I wonder what that number is now?) and other […]

I spent almost half of my career as an intelligence analyst looking at a very specific type of extremism: Al Qaeda and its ilk.  I looked at hundreds of cases of individuals who had radicalised in tune with the terrorist organisation’s ideology, and read hundreds of academic papers and dozens of books on the topic. […]