24 June 2002 Twists and Turns of Standoff By Gwynne Dyer Thirty-five years is not much as anniversaries go, but there are things to discuss so it will have to do. It is just thirty-five years since Israel won a crushing victory in the June, 1967, war and quadrupled the amount of territory it controlled …
26 April 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen By Gwynne Dyer ‘A terrifying cataclysm,” said the French finance minister, Laurent Fabius. “A thunderbolt,” said Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, announcing that he was retiring from politics. “Ashamed to be French,” read the banner unfurled by one disgusted voter. What was it that prompted this hysterical response? It was …
29 November 2007 Israel Sixty Years On: Partition or Apartheid By Gwynne Dyer Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was just back from the Annapolis summit where President George W. Bush tried to reboot the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. More importantly, last week was also the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote that divided British-ruled …
November 30, 2000 Loopholes Big As SUVs By Gwynne Dyer The Canadians and the Australians were just as bad, really. And the Saudi Arabians were absolutely outrageous: They want the world to compensate them for every barrel of oil they don’t sell if it cuts back on burning fossil fuels to slow global warming. But …
August 24, 2001 The IRA: Bungle in the Jungle By Gwynne Dyer THE IRISH Republican Army is one of the world’s oldest and most serious revolutionary organisations, but it is also full of people who love the bogus romance of their calling. Consider Niall Connolly, who called himself ‘David Bracken’ on the forged passport he …
August 14, 2001 Mideast bombs hit target By Gwynne Dyer Fourteen Israelis and at least six children were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in a Sbarro’s pizzeria in Jerusalem on Thursday. Sunday evening, a suicide bombing evening injured 20 people sitting on the patio of a cafe in a suburb of Haifa. These outrages …
Marijuana July 16, 2001 By Gwynne Dyer The dam burst last weekend. There had been cracks in the concrete of consensus and growing trickles of dissent for some time, but suddenly the issue of legalizing the use of marijuana is on the table in a major country — and an English-speaking one, at that. In …
July 14, 2001 Kyoto Accord By Gwynne Dyer “Apart from the political embarrassment it would cause, ratification of the Kyoto treaty without US participation would allow foreign energy companies to reap the benefits of the new markets that it created before their American rivals were ready. So it is not good enough to defect from …
February 03, 2001 Afghanistan and the Gods of the Little Things By Gwynne Dyer God’s preferences on dietary matters are well-known: no pork for Jews or Muslims, no beef for Hindus, and no saturated fats or refined sugar for the Western upper-middle class. But this is the first time he has taken such a strong …
27 Sep 2000 Columbia and Vietnam By Gwynne Dyer It is customary, when Washington says “Jump,” for British governments to ask “How high?” When they don’t jump, their failure to comply should be treated with the same alarm as when one of the old “pit canaries,” kept in coal mines to detect the build-up of …