Saad Omar Khan The imagery in Donald Trump’s latest campaign commercial speaks for itself: a horde of people at an airport passport control line dissolving into a picture of armed terrorists in balaclavas, overlaid with the words “Temporary Ban on Muslims Entering U.S.” in bold, block letters. The imagery and tone of this commercial is…
Author: Saad Omar Khan
The Paris Attacks and the New Paradigm of Terrorism
Saad Omar Khan No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people. -Albert Camus The evening of November 13, 2015 was the bloodiest single night of terror Europe has faced in years, with a reported body count of 129 deaths as of…
Why the West’s Syrian refugee crisis is unresolvable
Saad Omar Khan In the early morning of September 2, 2015, Alan Kurdi—a three-year old Syrian Kurd—boarded a flimsy inflatable raft with his parents and brother on a voyage from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. Within hours, Alan, along with his brother and mother, would be dead, drowned after their vessel capsized not…
“This threat that we face”: the Senate’s report on terrorism
We cannot try to appease this threat that we face, says Senator Daniel Lang, Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence. The unappeasable “threat” Senator Lang speaks of is international terrorism, or, more specifically, the threat to the safety and security of Canadians posed by jihadists. In July 2015, the Senate…
Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror: Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act
Saad Omar Khan The international jihadist movement has declared war on Canada. We are being targeted because jihadi terrorists hate our society and the values it represents. Jihadi terrorism is not a human right; it is an act of war. The Conservative Party uses the above quote to introduce Bill C-51 (otherwise known as the ‘Anti-Terrorism Act’)…
Fighting “Barbaric Cultural Practices” as Public Policy
Saad Omar Khan Sometime in his tenure as Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in India during a period of British rule in the nineteenth century, General Sir Charles Napier was approached by several Hindu priests regarding his aggressive crackdown on the practice of sati—the ritual burning of widows upon the death of their husbands. The priests’ objection to the colonial…
