Search: “Islamic State”

Three cheers for Saudi Arabia!  The conservative Kingdom has ruled that women can now drive and no longer need to be accompanied by a mahram (essentially a male guardian) when they are in a car.  Many are celebrating this decision although some conservative killjoys have accused the government of ‘bending the rules of Sharia’.  Some […]

In the wake of the recent storms that ravaged the eastern Caribbean and Florida a lot of Canadians were stranded in resorts and hotels and undoubtedly were suffering under horrible conditions, life-threatening ones even.  Many savaged the Canadian government and Canadian airlines for not acting more quickly to get them home and out of harm’s […]

Remember the ‘refugee crisis’ of  a few summers ago?  We all were riveted by the pictures of hundreds of thousands of desperate Syrians, Iraqis and many others, risking their lives in overland journeys or even more perilous sea voyages, fleeing danger and violence in their homelands to start a new life in Europe.  Some countries […]

I don’t get it.  We make a big deal of terrorism these days, too big in my opinion, but we have collectively decided that terrorism is a serious threat (which it is) and that we need to deal with it. Part of our response is making sure organisations like CSIS and the RCMP have enough […]

And so the debate continues on which terrorist movement(s) poses a bigger threat in the West.  Is it really Islamic State and IS-inspired extremists or is this belief a symptom of Islamophobia?  Or is it the collection of hate-filled racists and white supremacists as everyone seems to be saying?  And what about the rise of […]

Before this piece goes any further I need to spell out that I am not a big fan of the use of force unless absolutely necessary (and when necessary it is best to use it wisely while still protecting the lives of the force wielders).  Clearly it is required in some situations but if public […]

There is a theory out there that killing terrorists, especially those in leadership positions, acts to put a damper on violent extremism, especially for those not quite committed to the cause.  The idea is that if wannabes see that joining a group leads to being targeted by an airstrike or a drone or special forces […]

When we come across a phenomenon that is new and strange to us we often struggle to gain an understanding.  What we are seeing or hearing is beyond our realm of experience and hence our ‘comfort zone’, and we don’t have a readily available framework to make sense of it.  As a result we have […]

The other day I had lunch with an old friend who, like me, worked in the Canadian intelligence community.  We had  a wide-ranging chat over a number of issues – Donald Trump, what each of us was up to these days – but as inevitably happens when two people with our backgrounds get together the […]