Search: “islamic state”

When my kids were young they liked to engage in an activity called “Mad-Lib”.  What is a “mad-lib”?  Thanks to the ever useful Wikipedia I learned that this “phrasal template word game” (!) was invented in 1953.  It is nothing more than a story or narrative in which several key words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) […]

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 finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep.  Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]

You  would have thought that after decades of study, dozens of books (including my own The Threat from Within) and hundreds of papers that we collectively would have a better grasp of violent radicalisation.  Countless individuals belonging to movements across the ideological spectrum have been adopting violent extremism for centuries.  This is not a new […]

I have just returned from the 2016 Anti-Terrorism and Active Shooter conference in Niagara Falls where I was honoured to have been asked to open the 2-day event with a talk on Western foreign fighters.  The conference, now in its fourth or fifth year, has rapidly become a go-to event and one of the premier […]

Soon to be former US President Barack Obama once famously said with respect to foreign policy “don’t do stupid shit (or” stuff” depending on your sensitivity to salty language)”.  That maxim could just have easily been applied to domestic policy.  And it is something that incoming president Donald Trump might want to pay attention to. […]

There appears to be a segment of the population that is convinced that counter terrorism is a science.  All our spies and cops have to do is gather oodles of information from multiple sources, apply some algorithm made up by smart guy (or run the data through a “threat assessment model”) and voila!  threat identified […]

There is an ongoing debate in many societies on how much power security intelligence and law enforcement agencies should be allowed to have and how technology is making catching the bad guys really difficult.  I commented on this during the Apple-FBI tussle some months ago when the law enforcement agency wanted to get the contents […]

OK, it’s done.  Donald Trump has become the US’ 45th President, markets have swung wildly, people are panicking, some fear the Apocalypse.  Take a deep breath and calm down.  As the 44th President, Barack Obama, predicted last night, the sun did indeed rise this morning (even if I cannot see it in cloudy Ottawa). A […]

As if the recently terminated (and interminable) US Presidential election campaign wasn’t bad enough, right on cue at least two terrorist groups have threatened to carry out attacks to disrupt it.  The first out of the box was apparently Al Qaeda, at least according to US officials, who warned about non-specific plots in New York […]