Search: “Terrorists”

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 […]

For those who have been following me over the years you know that the title of this blog is a little facetious. I have been arguing for a long time that the phrase ‘the war on terrorism’ is not helpful and should be dropped. Hell, I even wrote a book about it! Still, even I […]

We all get a feeling of deja vu at times, don’t we? You’ll see something and remark that you definitely seen it before. Sometimes it is a little spooky while at others it is more mundane. Today’s blog is about the latter. The MacDonald Laurier Institute, a Canadian thinktank, has just published a paper by […]

If there is one nation that gets a disproportionate percentage of the headlines, especially in light of its small size (under nine million, including in lands many see as ‘occupied’ – more on that later), it is Israel. The world’s only ‘Jewish’ state (more on this later) is known for its high tech success and […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 1, 2019. If you are like me – and I really hope you are not for many, many reasons! – you probably read the news with a certain slant and through a certain filter. In my case, I read almost everything via a terrorism lens – […]

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 […]

Before I go any further it is important that I make a confession: I know next to nothing about guns. I have never owned a gun and never fired one – wait, that last bit is not 100% true. My older brother let me fire one in our family basement when I was nine years […]

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 […]

As I have written on many occasions in the past, we have ‘terrorism on the brain’. I wish I could write otherwise, but in a world where something happens somewhere on almost a daily basis it would be disingenuous of me to say that terrorism is not a frequent scourge, and hence it is on […]

Every month or so a bunch of us who used to work together in the security intelligence community in Canada meet at a local watering hole to quaff a few pints and rib each other for an hour and a half. We are all retired more or less so the risks of disclosing sensitive/classified information […]