When we come across a phenomenon that is new and strange to us we often struggle to gain an understanding. What we are seeing or hearing is beyond our realm of experience and hence our ‘comfort zone’, and we don’t have a readily available framework to make sense of it. As a result we have […]
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What happened in Barcelona last week has taken some interesting twists and turns. A heinous act that we all thought was yet another quasi-random example of ‘vehicular terrorism’ (Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Charlottesville…) has become a carefully planned albeit badly executed plot. We thought that the use of a van was the original intent but […]
The other day I had lunch with an old friend who, like me, worked in the Canadian intelligence community. We had a wide-ranging chat over a number of issues – Donald Trump, what each of us was up to these days – but as inevitably happens when two people with our backgrounds get together the […]
The carnage unfolding in Barcelona as I type is getting to be depressingly familiar. An individual drives a vehicle (car, van, 18-wheeler) into an unsuspecting crowd of people, strewing them like bowling pins. Innocent people are injured, some horribly, and some die (maybe mercifully quickly or agonisingly slowly). While no group has yet to claim […]
A lot of people are very worried about the rise of the far right these days in light of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia on the weekend, at least based on the number of articles and op-ed pieces that I have come across in my news scanning as well as the number of media interviews […]
A year ago Canada dodged a terrorist bullet when the almost 25-year old Muslim convert Aaron Driver climbed into a cab outside his sister’s home in Strathroy, a small town not quite 40 km from London, Ontario, set off an explosive device that didn’t do a lot of damage to either himself or the taxi, […]
Last Saturday’s arrest in Sydney, Australia of four men in an alleged terrorism plot was the latest in a series of interdictions by Australian authorities. In this supposed plot, four men are being held under special anti-terrorism powers for planning to place a bomb on an aircraft, hidden in a ‘meat mincer’. Other reports noted […]
July 1 is of course an important day for Canadians. We may not wear our patriotism on our sleeve as often as out southern neighbours in the US, but July 1 – Canada Day – is an exception. Average Canadians drape themselves in the national red and white flag, paint maple leaves on their cheeks […]
Most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the sanity behind terrorism. Surely those who knowingly and willingly kill themselves by detonating a bomb strapped to their waist or driving a booby-trapped car into a crowd of people cannot be psychologically normal, can they? It is probable that we also have a hard […]
In the wake of the Omar Khadr $10.5 million payout furour another potential point of divisiveness among Canadians has hit the proverbial fan. There are reports coming out of Iraq, yet to be confirmed, that two Canadian women have been captured in the rubble that is now Mosul and that they had been part of […]