How dangerous do you think terrorism is? How often do you think about it? Do you worry about attacks where you live? Have you witnessed an attack or, heaven forbid, been the victim of one? The answer you provide will depend crucially on where you live. If you are a citizen of many parts of […]
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It is hard to admit when you have made a mistake. After all, we want to be right every time and when it becomes obvious that we are not it takes a special effort to pronounce a mea culpa. Me, I have tried to be gracious when obvious errors are pointed out to me: perhaps […]
FaceBook has pissed a lot of people off lately. If it is not their use of your data (which, by the way, you gave freely to the company) it is their inability to prevent or take down extremist material from their platform in a timely fashion or sanction those seeking to circumvent the democratic process […]
How many of you remember when Canadian PM Justin Trudeau greeted Syrian refugees a few years back at Pearson Airport in Toronto with the phrase “You are home”? Some may have seen this as a cynical ploy and there were certainly those who criticised him for telling refugees that Canada would welcome them, especially as […]
In an era, the so-called post 9-11 age, where we are obsessed with terrorism we have a very awkward question to answer, if you happen to be a Canadian (or an American I think): where are all the terrorist attacks? If terrorism is all that prevalent, as we have been led to believe, and it […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 10, 2019. Boy am I ever going to get some flack from this post. I intend to take issue with some of the findings of the Canadian inquiry into the murder and disappearance of First Nations women, more specifically the use of the term ‘genocide’. For […]
I suppose that for many people the right to travel is seen as a freedom that no one, including the state, can mess with. Humans have been on the move for hundreds of thousands (millions?) of years and the world would not be what it is if we had not had this population exchange. I […]
No sooner had the smoke cleared from the multiple terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday than many immediately said, some with alarming certainty, that the acts were definitely carried out by Islamic State (IS). These claims were made despite the complete lack of evidence at the time and seemed to suggest that IS, […]
They often say that truth is the first casualty of war. States and militaries have all kinds of reasons to hide facts if for no other one than to cover up their ‘mistakes’ (except that military ‘mistakes’ usually imply lots of meaningless deaths). A good example is the US insistence that few if any civilians […]
If I were to ask ten people chosen at random what ‘terrorism’ means, I’d likely get some combinations of the following: it involves killing or trying to kill civilians; it is inspired by an idea – religious, political, ideological or something along that line; it is usually carried out by non-state actors; terrorists want to […]