When I was in high school the movie Midnight Express came out (yes, I am THAT old). This was a film adaptation of the true story of Billy Hayes, an American arrested and jailed in the early 1970s for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. The movie portrayed Mr. Hayes as the poor American […]
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Shakespeare must have had a lot against lawyers. It was the great English playwright after all who had a character in Henry IV Part 2 say “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’. There has been a lot of debate over what this quote means – in any event it has stood […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 21, 2017 http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/12/20/australia-belgium-lead-example-returning-foreign-fighters-canada/129572 Canadians are nice people, or so we think of ourselves that way. There is not much doubt that many see Canadians as ‘nice’ and even harmless: I recently read a Doonesbury comic in which one of the characters comments that there are few things […]
We have had a couple of very good successes in terrorism trials in Canada. The Toronto 18 back in 2006. Operation Samossa in Ottawa in 2010. The VIA train plot in 2013. The Victoria legislature Canada Day plot also in 2013 (before a judge erroneously – in my opinion – dismissed the jury verdict on […]
This piece originally appeared in The Hill Times on December 11 (http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/12/11/death-terrorists-necessary-not-necessarily-death/127716) All is fair in love and war, or so the saying goes. Except that nothing is usually fair in either, especially when it comes to war. We ought to have learned over the several millennia that we have been killing each other on […]
There are few people, I imagine, that condone the use of torture. Well, except those countries or governments who engage in it I suppose. The list of those actors is one that most would find obvious: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. And yet Amnesty International finds that torture is practiced in 141 nations, i.e three quarters of […]
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I was a teenaged terrorist
When I was in first year of high (secondary) school – grade nine as we call it (why is it that I cannot get a BareNaked Ladies song out of my head?) – I did something really stupid. I was about to bus home from a Friday night dance when I decided that it would […]
Are we in the West suffering from collective naivete? Are we ignoring an obvious threat to public safety? Are we failing to understand that there are citizens among us who can do real harm? I am referring of course to the phenomenon of ‘foreign fighters’, Westerners who left of their own free will to join […]
As a parent I know what it is like to worry about my kids. I still worry about them, even though they are all in their twenties and doing very well, since that is what being a parent is all about. After all, you want what is best for them, even when they do really […]
I suppose that in many ways none of this should be unexpected. Its obviousness does not make it right, however. There are lots of things that we do not question that are nevertheless the wrong way of looking at things. I am referring here to the belief that we are at ‘war with terrorism’. The […]