Search: “afghanistan”

This piece appeared in the April 23 edition of The Hill Times In a very funny Monty Python skit John Cleese plays a drill sergeant who is trying to teach a bunch of skinny recruits to defend themselves against foes wielding fresh fruit (oranges, apples, grapefruit, pomegranates….)  with typical hilarious results.  Cleese gets the underwear-clad […]

One of the most difficult challenges for governments around the world is what to do with their citizens who left to join Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq from 2013ish to 2017.  As we all know, IS is a shadow of its former self. It has lost swaths of territory.  […]

I have just had the pleasure of seeing Steven Pinker give a talk at the Ottawa Writers’ Festival about his new book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress.  Picking up where he left off in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, Mr. Pinker makes a compelling case […]

Canada was long known as a nation of peacekeepers, of the multinational kind.  We used to send lots of our men and women to conflict zones around the world to do our part in keeping warring parties from slaughtering each other in the hopes that the UN, under which we served, could cobble together some […]

There is an interesting debate in Canada over what are called ‘mandatory minimums’, i.e. a government/court-imposed set of rules on how crimes are to be treated.  This is an attempt to establish minimum sentences for certain offences, supposedly tied to how society views certain criminal acts.  In jurisdictions that have such strictures judges are bound […]

If you had to come up with a recipe for a terrorist attack or an extremist movement what would you include? To my mind there are a number of ingredients that must be there in order for the finished product to succeed.  These are, among other things, a sense of grievance/anger, an identified target (meaning […]

Every year many Canadians flock to Trinidad and Tobago to escape the harsh winter climate.  In addition, there are some 70,000 Canadians of Trinidadian stock, including one of the hosts of CBC’s The National, Ian Hanomansing, and pop singer Amanda Marshall.  The ties between the two nations run deep. Alas, these ties also extend to […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 22, 2018 If there is one thing we have learned about Joshua Boyle it is that he is an odd duck.  He apparently made over 62,000 edits and contributions to Wikipedia over a 13-year span (if my math is correct that makes 15  a day) on […]

It stands to reason that senior officials, be they civilian leaders or military officers, want to provide the public with good news.  Whether it is to gain votes or to instill pride in a country’s armed forces, these individuals see the benefit of telling the (voting) population that success is at hand or that whatever […]

When I was growing up in London (Ontario) there was a famous quasi-mythical family that lived near the town of Lucan, about a half-hour away, in the 19th  century.  The Donnellys, or the ‘Black Donnellys’ as we were taught about them, were Irish immigrants who were killed by a mob in 1880 in a feud […]