It is natural for like to gravitate to like. We tend to associate with people that look like us, think like us, have the same fundamental beliefs as us. We also tend to read news items with which we agree, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. There is probably something to do with evolution behind […]
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In all the articles, radio show talks, television coverage and social media posts about the massacre of innocent Muslims at prayer in Quebec City on a Sunday evening in late January the issue of whether or not this heinous crime qualifies as an act of terrorism is predominant. I have certainly devoted enough blog posts […]
Muslims in the West have a legitimate beef when it comes to how their societies see terrorism. Whenever a violent attack takes place and the perpetrator is, or merely appears, Muslim everyone yells “terrorism!” whereas if the attacker is not Muslim everyone yells “mentally ill” or “lone wolf nutjob!” Consistency this is not. Combined with that […]
A lot of people in Canada, particularly Muslims and even more narrowly Muslims in Quebec, are frightened today. The massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre in the provincial capital of la belle province has many worried about their safety and mosques across the country are upping security and receiving special attention from local law enforcement. […]
Well, if there was any doubt about what a Trump presidency means for the US, and by extension for all of us, over the next four years there is little doubt now. In the first week alone a flurry of executive orders have been signed on a whole bunch of issues that Mr. Trump promised […]
Humans are really good at categorisation. Babies learn pretty quickly how to group different objects into sets depending on a variety of criteria – colour, texture, function, etc. This ability may actually be ingrained in us and it is believed to play a huge role in language acquisition. But sometimes our knack for categorising things […]
Lawyers don’t get a good rap most of the time. After all, wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote in Henry VI, Part 2 “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. A tad harsh that. I’m not sure what it is exactly that elicits such anger and fury when it comes to lawyers. Is […]
Terrorists do awful things. We need not try to find more proof of this, what with two and a half years of subhuman brutality by Islamic State – beheadings, drowning people in cages, burning people alive, throwing people off buildings to their deaths, raping children… The list goes on and on. It would be hard […]
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Should we “ban” Salafism?
What causes terrorism? Lots of things, and that is why it is so hard to stop. We can identify, and have identified, the behaviours and attitudes that terrorists engage in, but we are very far from coming up with a hard and fast list of the why and the who and, frankly speaking, I am […]
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Almost a year ago I wrote that the Canadian government would be placed in a difficult position should one of our citizens who chose to travel to Iraq to fight the terrorist group Islamic State alongside Kurdish forces was caught by the […]