Search: “Al Qaeda”

One of the most difficult challenges for governments around the world is what to do with their citizens who left to join Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq from 2013ish to 2017.  As we all know, IS is a shadow of its former self. It has lost swaths of territory.  […]

Look, I get it. I know why defence lawyers try to get their clients’ cases thrown out on technicalities or by feigning outrage that anyone could harbour any suspicion that the individual they represent could possibly in a million years be guilty of the offences alleged by the Crown.  That is, after all, why we […]

I would like to announce the creation of a fund for Canadian pedophiles.  Not those in prison or getting treatment but those languishing in squalid jails pending trial in southeast Asia after they were caught abusing young children, having traveled intentionally to that part of the world with the sole intention of having sex with […]

In January 1842 the British army suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in its history, a defeat memorialised in a painting entitled Remnants of an Army (shown above).  The British were massacred in retreating from Kabul in what is now known as the First Anglo-Afghan War, part of the ‘Great Game’ between Imperial Russia […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 22, 2018 If there is one thing we have learned about Joshua Boyle it is that he is an odd duck.  He apparently made over 62,000 edits and contributions to Wikipedia over a 13-year span (if my math is correct that makes 15  a day) on […]

The Globe and Mail featured a fascinating story in its weekend edition (August 12) on suicides in Toronto in which people throw themselves in front of subway cars. This has to be a particularly gruesome way to take one’s life and I really feel for the drivers of the subway.  I have heard that they […]

In November 2015 my eldest daughter and I were in northern France at a B&B near Beaumont-Hamel, the site of a day of infamy a century ago. On July 1, 1916 members of the Newfoundland Regiment went ‘over the top’ in the first action in what we know as the Battle of the Somme, a […]

I am a big Isaac Asimov fan (and a big science fiction fan in general, although I don’t get to read as much as I’d like what with all this terrorism to look at).  In his classic Foundation series we are introduced to a character right at the outset named Hari Seldon, a mathematics professor […]

In the wake of yet another horrific – but not ‘cowardly’: the terrorists most likely knew they would die in their efforts – attack  in London, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has said ‘enough is enough‘!  She added that there was ‘too much tolerance of extremism’ in her country and that the UK’s counter terrorism […]

Terrorism is a dirty, dangerous business.  Terrorists are nasty people who  engage in nasty acts.  To thwart attacks you have to work with sources and groups whose reputations are, shall we say, unsavoury.  As former CSIS Deputy Director Jack Hooper once said, however indelicately, “sometimes you have to take the ugly girl to the dance”. […]