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A realistic assessment of the security threat from ‘irregular migrants’

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on February 18, 2019. One duty that a government or state has to treat seriously is the protection of its citizenry. Police forces, militaries, security intelligence services and other bodies are created, resourced and run by various levels of government (federal, provincial, municipal in Canada) with the goal […]

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War as a catalyst for terrorism

Historical revisionism is inevitable I suppose. There are those who look back at events, both recent and less so, re-interpret them through a new paradigm, lens or self-interested agenda, re-package them, and present them to us in a way that goes against the previous collected wisdom. Sometimes this re-interpretation is necessary in the light of […]

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Was the Iranian revolution really the catalyst for modern religious extremism? Nope.

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 […]

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The parallels between school shooters and terrorists

Staying with the Lewis Carroll theme for a bit, in 1876 the English writer penned the poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. The ‘Snark’ was described as follows: Some have feathers and bite, and some have whiskers and scratch. It also sleeps late into the day. While the snark is very ambitious, and has very […]

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Why terrorist movements seldom ever really go away

This post appeared in The Hill Times on February 4, 2019 When we think of the major terrorist threats facing us today we tend to think of phenomena like Islamist extremism (Islamic State, Al Qaeda and the like). If we want to sound more avant garde we might say far right extremism (neo-Nazis, white supremacists, […]

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Finally some clarity on Canada’s foreign fighter problem

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 28, 2019. If there is one thing in the world of terrorism that touches Canada the most, at least in the minds of average Canadians, it is the issue of those among us who elected to leave to join violent extremist groups abroad. Some of these […]

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Perspectives

We might want to take the Taliban ‘peace offer’ with a bucket of sand

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 […]

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A Canadian may have had a role in this week’s Al Shabaab terrorist attack in Nairobi – no surprise there

According to breaking news a Canadian, Guleid Abdihakim, has been arrested by Kenyan police in connection with the attack on a hotel/office complex in Nairobi that killed at least 21 people and was claimed by the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab. It is vitally important to stress that Mr. Abdihakim has been arrested and is […]

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Al Shabaab shows – again – that it is still a terrorist force to be reckoned with

The attack still unfolding as I type in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi has been claimed by the Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab terrorist group. At around 3 PM local time an explosion, apparently caused by a suicide bomber, went off outside an office/hotel complex followed by the incursion of armed men into the building. Casualty […]

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Why is alleged AQ terrorist Mahmoud Jaballah still here?

I am the grandson of eastern European migrants and am very open to further, if not increased, immigration. We Canadians rightfully see ourselves as a nation generally tolerant of immigration. Yes, there are exceptions as we are seeing now with a certain percentage of us expressing concerns over the links between immigration and terrorism (which […]