Search: “Islamist extremists”

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass are two of my favourite books, in large part because of the way in which the author played with language. There is so much of linguistic interest in these (allegedly) children’s novels that one of my textbooks during my undergraduate courses in linguistics at […]

I know I have written about this before but some things just bear repeating, even if that repetition is repetitive. An act of terrorism is an act of serious violence carried out for political, religious or ideological reasons. The first part of that is usually fairly easy to distinguish. After all, serious violence is an […]

I have written a few blogs about China’s counter terrorism approach when it comes to Uyghur Islamist extremists. I have dedicated a podcast to it as well as a partial chapter in my third book The Lesser Jihads. And yet it is a topic that I need to return to – again – in light […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 18, 2019. One of the many beauties of living in a liberal, secular democratic society is the freedom to disagree and debate. There are always many sides to an issue and we have the liberty to express our opinions without the fear of being arrested. Many […]

It has been two days or so since the massacre in New Zealand and I have already lost track of how many articles, op-Ed’s, tweets, FaceBook postings and other material have called for more action to prevent acts of that nature. Everyone seems to think that governments, and especially security intelligence and law enforcement agencies, […]

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 […]

Remember a terrorist named Anders Breivik? He was the Norwegian self-styled Knight Templar who set off an explosion outside government buildings in Oslo in July 2011 and then proceeded to an island where the Workers’ Youth League was holding a summer camp and opened fire. 77 people in all were killed (8 in the bomb […]

I just read a really good paper on counter terrorism and the courts written by a Canadian scholar from the U of Calgary, Michael Nesbitt. This is a rare occurrence for me for several reasons. First, there are far too many offerings that are far too theoretical for me and don’t have any real data […]

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 […]

We have a definite bias when we think of terrorism. First and foremost, and for justifiable reasons, we focus on Islamist extremism (some focus erroneously on Muslims and Islam writ large, but I hope I don’t need to deconstruct that myth again). More and more recently it seems we are concerned about terrorism and violence […]