Search: “far right”

The Fisher King is a 1991 film starring the late Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges  in which the latter plays a shock jock radio host who spurs a caller into massacring people at random at a restaurant in which the former’s wife dies.  The character played by Williams loses his sanity and becomes a street […]

Every time you attend an Ottawa Senators home game there is a moment, usually during the second period, where a member of the Canadian military is honoured in a commemoration called ‘Heroes’ Ridge’.  Fans stand and give the soldier a standing ovation – even the players on the ice tap their sticks – and I […]

CVE – short for Countering Violent Extremism – gets a bad rap sometimes, and the criticism is not always unwarranted.  The term has come to mean whatever people want it to mean as its remit expands into all kinds of areas of social engineering and capacity building.  Many movements have received funding from governments by […]

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 […]

Look, I get it.  When something along the lines of the shooting in Quebec City on Sunday evening occurs, people want to know what is happening.  And they want to know NOW.  So, the army of experts – a few actual and most fake – rise up and fill the airwaves with “analysis”. The fact […]

It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front.  A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine.  The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara.  And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]

I have just returned from Oslo where I was thrilled to catch up with one of my favourite terrorist experts, Thomas Hegghammer.  Thomas and his colleagues at the FFI – Norway’s Defence Research Establishment – have published some amazing work over the last decade or so and I have personally learned much from them. When […]

The horror of what happened in Nice compounds the horror of what happened in Paris in January and November of last year.  These large-scale attacks got a lot of attention, but there were also some smaller ones like the killing of a police officer and his wife and an attempt to blow up a gas […]

The Southern Poverty Law Centre is an oddly named institution that gives little indication of what it does.  No, it is not some legal aid agency for poor people.  It is one of the most influential and comprehensive bodies that looks at hate and extremism in our southern neighbour, the US.  The SPLC looks at […]

Whenever a terrorist attack happens we collectively strive both to understand it and to look over what we may have missed.  We do so in order to figure out how we can better identify the signs of violent radicalisation and perhaps act before terrorist events occur. I have long argued that the signs of violent […]