Search: “far right”

It is a little past 7 PM on Monday, April 23 as I pen this op-ed in Ottawa.  A little more than 5 hours ago a rented van appeared to jump a curb and run down pedestrians near the corner of Finch and Yonge streets in North Toronto.  A man is in custody following an […]

As readers of my blog and books will well know I consider myself, and am considered by some, an expert (I prefer specialist) in terrorism.  More specifically Islamist extremism as that scourge was the topic of my four books thus far as well as my career at CSIS.  Indeed, I have studied many aspects of […]

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.  […]

Now that Alexandre Bissonnette has pleaded guilty to killing six people (and wounding 19 others) at a Quebec City mosque in January 2017  and we are seeing at last some of the evidence mounted against him (largely his 911 call and his jail cell ‘confession’), we are getting a much clearer picture of why he […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 2, 2018   Is it just me or is it strange that an independent, secular democracy cannot make simple decisions on whom it wants to allow to stay in the country?  We are speaking here of immigrants, of course, since those lucky enough to have been […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018 Of all the groups that we can describe as extremist in nature, if not necessarily violent extremist, none can be as bizarre as the one that calls itself ‘Freemen on the Land’ (a.k.a. sovereign citizens).  This small coterie of Canadians hews to a number […]

Here we go again.  Another terrorist attack by someone ‘known to police’, this time in southwestern France.  A Moroccan  hijacked a car after shooting the driver and a passenger, followed some police officers jogging nearby, shot and wounded one, went to a local supermarket where he took hostages and shot several before a tactical squad […]

This post appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018   Remember Willy Horton?  No, not the former Detroit Tigers baseball player, the former convicted murderer.  He became famous (infamous?) in 1987 when, after he was released on a prison furlough programme, he raped a white woman and assaulted her fiance (Horton was African […]

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a fascinating workshop in Montreal sponsored by Concordia University’s Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies (MIGS) entitled ‘Tech Against Terrorism’.  A number of academics, private sector entities and think tanks all came to talk about the challenges behind identifying and removing terrorist content from the Internet and […]