Before I write one word more I need to emphasise that I am far from a military ‘expert’. I did once work for the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) but to be perfectly honest it was a cover for working for CSE – Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence agency. So my military knowledge […]
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An interesting thing happened today. Google, that behemoth that gives us so much of our information these days, has decided not to run advertising in the lead up to this year’s Canadian federal election because it does not want to develop a registry of ads and advertisers (although it apparently did so for the US […]
I am fairly certain that the average citizen sees terrorists as ‘not normal’. In a strict linguistic sense this is of course true as terrorists do not hew to the ‘norm’: hence they are not ‘normal’. In a larger sense, however, it is far from clear what ‘normal’ means. Are we talking about their backgrounds […]
I have three grown children who are all well-adjusted young adults thanks to their mother. None have followed me in their career choices, entailing that there will be no future Gurskis toiling for either CSE or CSIS or any other part of the Canadian intelligence community. While it would have been cool if one or […]
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Podcast #4 – W(h)ither Al Qaeda?
Here is the script that accompanies episode #4 of the podcast “An Intelligent Look at Terrorism”: W(h)ither Al Qaeda? There are a lot of good pieces on the status of Al Qaeda and here are links to a few of them: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/08/opinions/where-is-bin-ladens-partner-in-crime-ayman-al-zawahiri/index.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-isis-syria-iraq-iran-terror-islamic-state-washington-a8769936.html https://ctc.usma.edu/fighting-the-long-war-the-evolution-of-al-qaida-in-the-arabian-peninsula/ Here is a piece on the assessment of the Office of […]
A scant 48 hours ago I posted a blog in which I shared my dismay at the tone of some of the exchanges online and reactions to my posts on various aspects of terrorism. I admitted that the ad hominem attacks and nastiness had started to get to me and made me seriously ask myself […]
I’d like you to do me a favour. The next time you read a story like that of Shamima Begum, the UK Islamic State (IS) supporter who desperately wants to come home, although she does not regret her decision to join the terrorist group and thinks the Manchester bombing was justified, or see a report […]
This piece appeared on ICCT International Center for Counter-Terrorism on 21 Feb 2019 Over the past few weeks, there have been multiple news items centring on the problem of what to do with terrorist fighters that have been captured by a variety of actors in Syria and Iraq in the battle to destroy Islamic State […]
In light of the announcement by the UK government that it is considering revoking the citizenship of clearly unrepentant jihadi Shamima Begum, claiming that she is “eligible for that of another country” (Bangladeshi apparently although she has never been there), I thought I would reproduce what I wrote about citizenship revocation in my second book […]
Well the last 24 hours have been interesting for me to say the least. It started when I binge-watched season 1 of Bodyguard on Netflix, a UK series on terrorism. Although there were some aspects I found a little far-fetched, I did enjoy the series and walked away with a profound sense of sadness that […]