Search: “islamic state”

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass Humpty-Dumpty delivers this famous line: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Alice replied: “he question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” I think this notion that anyone can say anything they like […]

Canada has been in the news a lot lately for things it is not normally associated with.  Things like mass shootings, online hate and an overall atmosphere of intolerance.  We here used to pride ourselves on openness, the embrace of difference and acceptance and like to highlight how we have built a social model that […]

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 […]

A lot of people  in Canada, particularly Muslims and even more narrowly Muslims in Quebec, are frightened today.  The massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre in the provincial capital of la belle province has many worried about their safety and mosques across the country are upping security and receiving special attention from local law enforcement. […]

I feel for politicians and public leaders – sometimes.  True, they do come out with some stupid things on occasion, but I want to give them credit for assuming the role they do. It cannot be an easy job. When it comes to terrorism, and more specifically talking about a specific act as terrorist or […]

Humans are really good at categorisation.  Babies learn pretty quickly how to group different objects into sets depending on a variety of criteria – colour, texture, function, etc.  This ability may actually be ingrained in us and it is believed to play a huge role in language acquisition. But sometimes our knack for categorising things […]

Thank God for reporters like Stewart Bell of the National Post.  Now that I am outside the realm of state secrets I have come to rely on people like him to do the investigative legwork that keeps me informed on what is going on in the world of terrorism, both in Canada and abroad.  Just […]

Living in a liberal democracy is generally a good thing.  Not that there are no problems that arise from time to time, but those who abide by liberal (in the classic sense of the word) values tend to be open to a lot of diversity.  They generally are okay with most things as long as […]

Did you ever have one of those days where in a matter of minutes you were exposed to things that when you compared them turned out to be polar opposites?  I had one of those days today. I had traveled from The Hague to Utrecht in the Netherlands to meet with a university professor.  I […]

We in the West think highly of democracy and for good reason.  As Winston Churchill once said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”  It is not that bad of course and democracy remains the best current option we have for ensuring freedom and security.  We like it so much […]