Search: “9/11”

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 […]

I have three grown children who are all well-adjusted young adults thanks to their mother. None have followed me in their career choices, entailing that there will be no future Gurskis toiling for either CSE or CSIS or any other part of the Canadian intelligence community. While it would have been cool if one or […]

I just read a really good paper on counter terrorism and the courts written by a Canadian scholar from the U of Calgary, Michael Nesbitt. This is a rare occurrence for me for several reasons. First, there are far too many offerings that are far too theoretical for me and don’t have any real data […]

In case you didn’t notice – or don’t care – today marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. It was this day in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini-led revolt against the Shah of Iran consolidated victory in what became known as the Dah-e-fajr (the ‘ten days of dawn’ in Farsi, the period between Khomeini’s […]

Breaking news out of Afghanistan is that the Taliban and US have reached a tentative deal in which the former agrees not to allow Afghanistan to be used by terrorist groups (wait! Aren’t the Taliban themselves terrorists? Read on….) and the latter would agree to pull its forces out, in the country since 2002, in […]

If you were to ask the average citizen, the eponymous ‘man in the street’ (as sexist as that may sound), about religious intolerance, hate and violent extremism and which particular faith, if any, is most guilty of these crimes, I would be very, very surprised if the answer you did not receive is ‘Islam’. We […]

Last July 22 I was in Toronto on the waterfront giving a presentation to an audience on extremism. I don’t quite recall who they were but it might have been a group that does Ontario Legislature security. My talk was well received and I even got to sell a few of my books – so […]

It is no exaggeration to say that we have ‘terrorism on the brain’. Our newspapers, magazines and Web sites are full of stories about terrorist attacks here and terrorist attacks there. Our leaders – well, some of them anyway – see terrorists lurking behind every tree (or every irregular migrant) and want to build walls […]

I am pretty sure that each and every one of us were taught as kids the following phrase/advice by our parents/teachers/elders: “If you can’t find anything nice to say best say nothing at all”. This is a good adage in that it should make us think twice before we open our pie holes, especially if […]