There are unanswered questions about Joshua Boyle and why the horrific ordeal he put his wife and kids through began in the first place.
I have long been fascinated by violence and our species’ propensity to use it. This interest does not stem from any personal experience of it – I grew up in a middle class southwestern Ontario home at a not too dangerous time in Canadian history – so I suppose that the draw for me stems […]
The word ‘assassination’ is an interesting one (NB I taught linguistics for 15 years at university so I find everything about language fascinating). It stems from a rather unique set of historical events a long time ago. From 1090 to 1275 a group of Shia Muslim fanatics known as the Asasiyun (Arabic for “those who […]
What do you remember of the dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile? Even if you are not well versed in Latin American history you are bound to know that his reign, from 1973 to 1990, was not good. Thousands of opponents, dismissed as ‘Communists’ or ‘leftists’, were killed, tens of thousands were probably tortured and close […]
(NB how’s that for an analogy?) When I was a kid I did not have a good impression of the military (Canadian in my case of course). My friends and I would laugh at those who joined the cadets or reserves, seeing them as ‘losers’. My childhood was first filled with images of US army […]
There are terrorists groups that have their rise and fall over time. Some groups are remarkably resilient and longlasting, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) which is pretty close to a century old. Others are a flash in the pan such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) which lasted only between 1973 and 1975 […]
If you go far enough back in recent-ish history one of the terrorist groups that used to get a fair bit of attention was an outfit named Black September. Named after the month in 1970 during which the Jordanian armed forces clashed with fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO – remember them?), which led […]
Far right terrorism is our #1 threat! No, jihadi terrorism is! Which one is it? What do the numbers tell us? Have a listen to episode 18 of An Intelligent Look at Terrorism with Phil Gurski.
One thing we know about terrorism is that it has no boundaries. No single language, ethnicity, religion, ideology or national entity – except maybe Antarctica: I cannot find any terrorist acts there – has an inherent wall around it to prevent terrorism from unfurling its violence on innocent people. Yes, some places suffer disproportionately from […]
When I used to work in counter terrorism at CSIS many analysts used to say that of all the terrorists and terrorist groups in the world, and there were far too many to monitor at any given time, the real ‘A-team’ was Hizballah. The Lebanon-based group which was created in the aftermath of the Israeli […]