Search: “islamic state”

I have spent the last week at a conference in a Central Asian country discussing terrorism and what to do about it. I have listened to a lot of presentations by those who know the region well and who have tried to put terrorism into local context. Some of the contributions were descriptive while others […]

Breaking news out of Afghanistan is that the Taliban and US have reached a tentative deal in which the former agrees not to allow Afghanistan to be used by terrorist groups (wait! Aren’t the Taliban themselves terrorists? Read on….) and the latter would agree to pull its forces out, in the country since 2002, in […]

If you were to ask the average citizen, the eponymous ‘man in the street’ (as sexist as that may sound), about religious intolerance, hate and violent extremism and which particular faith, if any, is most guilty of these crimes, I would be very, very surprised if the answer you did not receive is ‘Islam’. We […]

All the jokes about civil servants aside, governments around the world do have some useful functions. Governments have the bodies and funds to look into important matters and provide advice to their citizenry on a whole host of things. Whether we are talking about food safety (the recent romaine lettuce scare in North America is […]

We Canadians may be shy folk (at least when put next to our southern neighbours) but we also tend to point out, nauseatingly perhaps, when one of ours makes it big on the international scene. Think Saturday Night Live, created by Canadian Lorne Michaels and featuring many, many Canucks over the years: Martin Short, Mike […]

Writing as an old spy, I have despaired of late on how the Canadian justice system has dealt with national security cases, and more specifically terrorism cases. The BC loser couple John Nuttall and Amanda Korody had their jury guilty verdict overturned twice on appeal after they placed pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of […]

Last July 22 I was in Toronto on the waterfront giving a presentation to an audience on extremism. I don’t quite recall who they were but it might have been a group that does Ontario Legislature security. My talk was well received and I even got to sell a few of my books – so […]

One thing that terrorists have been doing very well is getting their messages out to audiences, both willing and unwilling.  Groups such as Islamic State (IS), Al Qaeda (AQ) and many others use a panoply of social media apps to draft, disseminate and promote material that extols their achievements and threatens more carnage, all with […]

I have been looking at Islamist extremism as a form of terrorism for a very long time – more than two decades. When we delve into this topic we have to broach the very sensitive topic of religion and one religion in particular – Islam. Many are uncomfortable with this and many have tried to […]