As I sit looking at a torrential downpour out my kitchen window on this Saturday morning July 1 I am nevertheless quietly happy to reflect on what it means to me to be a Canadian on my nation’s 150th anniversary. For many today the weather here in Ottawa is reflective of a sour mood. Many […]
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Most people in Canada have a good impression of Sweden I would think. Whether it focuses on tall, blonde attractive men and women or the increasing number of star hockey players – the Ottawa Senators have been blessed with both Daniel Alfredsson and Erik Karlsson – the images are positive ones. And if you have […]
Terrorists are hateful people, of that there is no doubt. What they hate varies based on the underlying ideology of the group to which they belong or through which they derive their inspiration and yet there are similarities at times. Most of them hate society or governments or policies or something else and have concluded […]
Terrorism is sure getting complicated. The good old days, if I may call them that, were easy by comparison. Terrorists were easy to spot because they tended to chuck bombs or fire weapons at people, the larger the crowd the better. Then we got to the airline hijacking phase in which most incidents ended relatively […]
This is a big year for us in Canada. Sure, we are a youngish nation and celebrating 150 years may sound quaint to our older international cousins, but it is a cause for celebration nonetheless. I am looking forward to the commemoration as I was six when we marked our centennial in 1967 and don’t […]
Residents of London have undergone yet another terrorist attack. The nation that survived countless IRA attacks and threats in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and which saw the carnage of July 2005 and the attempted beheading of a military member in Woolwich in 2013 is reeling from yesterday’s events where a man ran over people […]
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass Humpty-Dumpty delivers this famous line: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Alice replied: “he question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” I think this notion that anyone can say anything they like […]
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Taking CVE in the wrong direction
CVE – short for Countering Violent Extremism – gets a bad rap sometimes, and the criticism is not always unwarranted. The term has come to mean whatever people want it to mean as its remit expands into all kinds of areas of social engineering and capacity building. Many movements have received funding from governments by […]
It is natural for like to gravitate to like. We tend to associate with people that look like us, think like us, have the same fundamental beliefs as us. We also tend to read news items with which we agree, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. There is probably something to do with evolution behind […]
Muslims in the West have a legitimate beef when it comes to how their societies see terrorism. Whenever a violent attack takes place and the perpetrator is, or merely appears, Muslim everyone yells “terrorism!” whereas if the attacker is not Muslim everyone yells “mentally ill” or “lone wolf nutjob!” Consistency this is not. Combined with that […]