Search: “Islamist extremists”

A lot of people  in Canada, particularly Muslims and even more narrowly Muslims in Quebec, are frightened today.  The massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre in the provincial capital of la belle province has many worried about their safety and mosques across the country are upping security and receiving special attention from local law enforcement. […]

Here we go again. The fact that Alexandre Bissonnette was able to get a gun, walk into a mosque, slaughter innocent people and not be detected is a failure. On whom? On everyone – CSIS, the RCMP, la police de la ville de Quebec, the Surete, the government of Canada, average Canadians for not standing […]

I am a glass half full kind of guy, someone who seeks to find the positive in life.  I am an optimist tinged with realism.  Three decades in intelligence and 15 years in counter terrorism do tend to give one a good look at the less savoury aspects of life on this planet and as […]

The list of “causes” of violent radicalisation and terrorism never seems to end.  First it was “they spring from poverty”, then “they are all mentally ill”, then “they feel alienated and marginalised from society”, then…  As if any one driver explained every case of an individual taking up a terrorist banner.  You would have thought […]

It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front.  A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine.  The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara.  And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]

As if the recently terminated (and interminable) US Presidential election campaign wasn’t bad enough, right on cue at least two terrorist groups have threatened to carry out attacks to disrupt it.  The first out of the box was apparently Al Qaeda, at least according to US officials, who warned about non-specific plots in New York […]

Terrorist groups are really good at telling a story.  This skill contributes to what we call narrative: a worldview that explains why a group does something, provides meaning and helps to draw others in.  Islamist extremists in particular have crafted what we call the “Single Narrative”, a wide historical and current canvas in which the […]

Rarely in life is there a stark choice between two polar opposites.  On most occasions responses to a problem or an issue can be spread out along a range of options from soft to hard, easy to difficult, or popular to divisive.  The ways in which we have elected to deal with violent radicalisation and […]

Wouldn’t it be great if the whole were always the sum of its parts?  That way, if we could ensure that we have all the ingredients and understand how they go together we could reliably predict what the end state would be.  If only life were like math: 2 + 3 + 4 = 9 […]

If there is one cardinal rule about the study of terrorism that everyone should commit to memory it is this: do not extrapolate unnecessarily and unadvisedly from one region to the other.  While there are certainly some fundamental commonalities to violent extremism and to particular groups or brands of terrorism, it is usually a bad […]