On my first trip to Singapore many years ago I was struck by signs placed throughout the airport that warned of severe penalties for drug trafficking. If my memory isn’t failing me, I seem to recall that those signs didn’t mince words. They made it quite clear that the penalty for peddling in illegal drugs […]
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A mother’s dilemma – and society’s
I am a parent and that means I worry about my kids. Not that I have any real reason to do so since my three are all grown up, on their own, doing well and appear for all intents and purposes to be well-adjusted, functioning human beings (thanks in no small part to their mother!). […]
When I was in high school the movie Midnight Express came out (yes, I am THAT old). This was a film adaptation of the true story of Billy Hayes, an American arrested and jailed in the early 1970s for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. The movie portrayed Mr. Hayes as the poor American […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 21, 2017 http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/12/20/australia-belgium-lead-example-returning-foreign-fighters-canada/129572 Canadians are nice people, or so we think of ourselves that way. There is not much doubt that many see Canadians as ‘nice’ and even harmless: I recently read a Doonesbury comic in which one of the characters comments that there are few things […]
There are few people, I imagine, that condone the use of torture. Well, except those countries or governments who engage in it I suppose. The list of those actors is one that most would find obvious: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. And yet Amnesty International finds that torture is practiced in 141 nations, i.e three quarters of […]
Having just spent three days in New York I have been thinking a lot about the terrorist threat to the West. The reasons for this are not solely tied to the fact that I was three blocks away from Monday’s mostly unsuccessful attack on the subway near Times Square. It is much more than that. […]
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I was a teenaged terrorist
When I was in first year of high (secondary) school – grade nine as we call it (why is it that I cannot get a BareNaked Ladies song out of my head?) – I did something really stupid. I was about to bus home from a Friday night dance when I decided that it would […]
Are we in the West suffering from collective naivete? Are we ignoring an obvious threat to public safety? Are we failing to understand that there are citizens among us who can do real harm? I am referring of course to the phenomenon of ‘foreign fighters’, Westerners who left of their own free will to join […]
I suppose that in many ways none of this should be unexpected. Its obviousness does not make it right, however. There are lots of things that we do not question that are nevertheless the wrong way of looking at things. I am referring here to the belief that we are at ‘war with terrorism’. The […]
The city of New York, the site of the world-changing events of 9/11, appears to have suffered its worst single attack of terrorism since that fateful date 16 years ago. A man drove a rented Home Depot truck onto a pedestrian pathway in lower Manhattan, striking cyclists and killing at least eight (six were declared […]