Episode 1 – In this inaugural broadcast, former Canadian intelligence analyst Phil Gurski looks at what we mean by terrorism and sets the stage for future podcasts.
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Every end of year we are inundated with two phenomena in our newspapers, TV broadcasts and Web sites. These two are: the year that was and the year that will be. The former recaps the important events of the 12 months drawing to an end and always includes, and I am not sure why, a […]
I am sure you have all heard the term ‘the folly of war’. There was even a book with that title written years ago by a historian named Donald E. Schmidt: The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898-2005. With this being 2018 (almost 2019) and all you would think that humans would have realised […]
This piece and a rebuttal both appeared on the Resilience Post Web site on December 6, 2018. One of my favourite Monty Python skits (and I have tonnes of those!) is the one in which John Cleese plays a drill sergeant who is teaching a bunch of recruits how to defend themselves against an adversary […]
Today marks a very solemn occasion in Canadian – and world – history. 29 years ago, on December 6, 1989, misogynist Marc Lepine went into a classroom at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique and, after separating the men from the women, killed 14 of the latter before cowardly taking his own life. His excuse? Lépine’s suicide note blamed […]
A little less than a month ago we marked (‘celebrated’ is definitely the wrong word) the centenary of the end of the First World War. This was a solemn occasion on which we recalled the deaths, injuries and destruction in not only the ‘Great War’ but also in WWII, the Korean War and others. It […]
I have just returned from a CVE (countering violent extremism) conference in Edmonton organised by the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV), the Canadian Practitioners’ Network for the Prevention of Radicalization and Extremist Violence, and the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS) where I gave a presentation on what we know about the extremist […]
The title of this blog is biased, of that there is no doubt. This offering is also perhaps not really necessary as Rowman and Littlefield have just published my 4th book, An End to the War on Terrorism, in which I have a much longer discussion on the premise of this much shorter piece. So […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on November 12, 2018. Australia and Canada are very similar countries in many ways. Both former British colonies, both (relatively) open to immigration, both members of the 5 eyes intelligence community. I have visited Australia on many occasions and I must admit that I always feel at home […]
I am pretty sure I have mentioned this before but here it is again. When I worked for CSIS and my colleagues and I had occasion to talk to Canadians who had traveled to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda we would often hear some lame excuse from the returnees as to what they did while in […]