Search: “far right”

It has been a busy – and rough – time for agencies engaged in counter terrorism of late. We have been focused on Islamist extremism for so long now – and for reasons that have been 100% justified as I have written on many, many occasions – that those agencies have been accused of not […]

All of Canada is living through a real time manhunt as I type. Three people were killed in remote northern BC on July 15, a young American woman and her Australian travel mate as well as a 64-year old man from Vancouver. The suspects in the case, Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, are believed to […]

When I left the Canadian civil service – more accurately the security intelligence world – in May 2015 I had some of the restrictions on what I can say and do lifted. Up to a point. I still cannot talk in detail about operations I was part of or intelligence I was privy to and […]

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For many in the post 9/11 world it may seem as if terrorism is something new – and terrible. We are constantly inundated with news about attacks here and attacks there, sometimes […]

News flash! The Internet is not always used for good! What are we going to do about it???? I don’t suppose these headlines strike anyone as real ‘news’, do they? We have long known that any technology can be leveraged for good or for bad (dynamite was developed by Alfred Nobel – yes, he of […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 17, 2019. It might strike the reader as odd that someone with so much invested in counter terrorism is here making the suggestion that we need to worry less about terrorism. After all, if we stopped spending so much time talking about it, wouldn’t that put […]

This post appeared in The Hill Times on May 27, 2019. As noted on many, many (too many?) occasions I am a very devoted Monty Python fan. Some of my readers may not share my taste in humour, but then again they do say that what makes you laugh is very personal. Of all the […]

Just what constitutes ‘terrorism’? Ah, that is a tricky question, the answer to which depends on the respondent. We have legal, common, informed (and uninformed) definitions galore, which makes this issue hard to nail down. And, if you add in the emotional context it gets even more complicated. We read reports all the time on […]

In many ways you have to feel for security intelligence agencies. I know full well that this is not an easy thing to ask as I cannot imagine most citizens want to cut these organisations any slack, or acknowledge that what they are called on to do – what WE demand they do, i.e. to […]

If you have never heard the comedy routine ‘The 2,000 year old man” by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, you are really missing something. The original dates back to 1961 but it is still very, very relevant and very, very funny. In one part, Mel Brooks, playing the 2,000 year-old man, says that WWII lasted […]