Search: “Islamic State”

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 11, 2019 We have laws for a reason, right? Over the centuries the Western world has developed a series of traditions such as presumed innocence, the need to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to be tried before one’s peers, the right to a […]

As we still try to process the horrific attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an Australian white supremacist we are also immersed into a debate, less fruitful than many think in my opinion, over whether far right extremism presents more of a menace than Islamist extremism. I and many others have taken […]

Here is a link to the YouTube version of podcast (it is also available on iTunes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uy_S0Inojk Here are some informative links about China’s campaign against the Uyghurs https://thediplomat.com/2019/01/are-indonesia-and-malaysia-ready-to-stand-up-for-chinas-muslims/ https://www.rfa.org/english/women/suffering-01302019152956.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/02/07/uighurs-australia/?utm_term=.59e0784d5aea https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2186446/beijing-backs-patriotic-actions-chinese-students-who-reported https://ent.siteintelgroup.com/Chatter/is-supporter-calls-to-kill-chinese-in-defense-of-islam-and-uyghurs.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/21/how-china-tried-stop-my-freedom-speech-canada/?utm_term=.214ddb57f282&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/china-has-put-1-million-muslims-in-concentration-camps-mbs-had-nothing-to-say/2019/02/24/370be676-36e4-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html?utm_term=.84e60354c337&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chinas-expanding-war-on-islam-now-theyre-coming-for-the-kazakhs/2019/03/01/16ebbe76-38ff-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html?utm_term=.0e75941659e5&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1 Featured terrorist attack – Kashmir https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/02/15/a-deadly-bombing-provokes-a-crisis-between-india-and-pakistan Terrorism this fortnight (Feb 12-25) Afghanistan Afghan Intelligence forces arrested two members of […]

An interesting thing happened today. Google, that behemoth that gives us so much of our information these days, has decided not to run advertising in the lead up to this year’s Canadian federal election because it does not want to develop a registry of ads and advertisers (although it apparently did so for the US […]

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 […]

Is it just me or has there been a tendency of late, at least for some people, to see terrorists as victims? If you have been reading the many, many stories about those who joined Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups and who now want to come home, you may have noticed that they […]

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 […]

Here is the script that accompanies episode #4 of the podcast “An Intelligent Look at Terrorism”: W(h)ither Al Qaeda? There are a lot of good pieces on the status of Al Qaeda and here are links to a few of them: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/08/opinions/where-is-bin-ladens-partner-in-crime-ayman-al-zawahiri/index.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-isis-syria-iraq-iran-terror-islamic-state-washington-a8769936.html https://ctc.usma.edu/fighting-the-long-war-the-evolution-of-al-qaida-in-the-arabian-peninsula/ Here is a piece on the assessment of the Office of […]

At the risk of adding yet one more blog post to the burning question of whether or not Canada – and by extension other countries – has a ‘moral obligation‘ to repatriate its citizens who deliberately, consciously and with full agency left to join terrorist groups such as Islamic State (IS) in Syria and/or Iraq, […]

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 […]