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Perspectives

When ‘foreign fighters’ meant something very different

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 6, 2019. I do not normally read the obituaries. It is not that I have no respect for the dead: it is just that I don’t take the time to see who has passed on. This non-practice is bound to change as I get older and […]

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Perspectives

Two weeks later the IS role in the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka is becoming clearer – wasn’t that obvious?

No sooner had the smoke cleared from the multiple terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday than many immediately said, some with alarming certainty, that the acts were definitely carried out by Islamic State (IS). These claims were made despite the complete lack of evidence at the time and seemed to suggest that IS, […]

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What the FaceBook move to ban hatemongers means for violent extremism…it’s mixed

We all know that the Internet and social media, that wonderful technology that burst onto the scene, and which seems to burst more and more every day, with such promise and excitement has also spawned a darker side, a piece that is nasty and brutish and which is contributing to hatred, intolerance and, in the […]

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Perspectives

We can’t fight what we fail to label correctly

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 […]

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We must call the Poway synagogue attack what it was – Christian extremism

When did we become so reluctant to call a spade a spade? Or a terrorist a terrorist? Or a religious terrorist a religious terrorist? Are we so fearful of offending anyone for the slightest of reasons that we are incapable of labelling things what they are (NB I will not get into the inability of […]

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The return of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and the danger of over-analysis

He’s back!!!! Just when you thought – or at least when the US President thought (hey, at least he didn’t say, er I mean tweet, ‘Mission Accomplished!!’) – that Islamic State (IS) was yesterday’ problem, lo and behold a video appears in which the leader of the terrorist group and ex-‘Caliph’ (of a pretend ‘Caliphate’) […]

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When politics dictate who is a terrorist – and who is not (part 1)

The Muslim Brotherhood (or MB as it is often abbreviated to, not to be confused with MBS, which is Muhammad bin Salman, or ‘Mister Bone Saw’, Saudi Arabia’s powerful king-in-waiting) has been around for a long time – since the 1920s. It is a political party infused with Islamic principles that seeks to govern by […]

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Perspectives

What do you do if you are the parent of a terrorist?

Parenting is hard. I have first-hand experience as I am the father of three children – all wonderful of course;) But they were not always wonderful. Or rather there were challenges along the way, from fussy infants to sullen teens. Every parent goes through these phases and – one hopes – comes out still sane […]

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Are Christians targeted more by terrorists than others? No

They often say that truth is the first casualty of war. States and militaries have all kinds of reasons to hide facts if for no other one than to cover up their ‘mistakes’ (except that military ‘mistakes’ usually imply lots of meaningless deaths). A good example is the US insistence that few if any civilians […]

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Perspectives

Is tit for tat terrorism now inevitable?

When you are a child your first instinct is to hit back at others who have hit you or with whom you are frustrated (I see this a bit with my 19-month old grandson). We have to be taught not to lash out at others – in other words to resist our natural reactions. This […]