5 October 2003 Displacement Activity By Gwynne Dyer Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, who walked into Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa on Saturday and blew herself up, killing nineteen other people and injuring fifty, was born and raised in the West Bank city of Jenin and never left Israeli-ruled territory in her life. Nobody can cross the heavily …
2 October 2003 Old America By Gwynne Dyer Lying in bed just after 7 am, listening to the radio. The rain is pouring down, my youngest child has decided that she’d rather be driven to school today, and the BBC’s ‘Today’ programme, which completely dominates serious morning radio news, is discussing the closing day of …
29 September 2003 Russia and Kyoto By Gwynne Dyer President George W. Bush did not instantly kill the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change just by pulling the United States out of the treaty in March, 2001, but it did mean that every other major industrial country on the planet had to ratify it before …
25 September 2003 Small Is Not Always Beautiful By Gwynne Dyer It was romantics like Paul Gauguin who seduced the world into believing that tropical islands are palm-fringed paradises where people are nicer and more innocent than elsewhere, but they did have help from the ‘small is beautiful’ crowd. Surely, they murmured, much of the …
21 September 2003 The Least Bad United Nations By Gwynne Dyer Just as democracy is the least bad political system, given the alternatives, so is the United Nations the least bad international system. It’s a lot better than anarchy at one extreme, or an overbearing and unsustainable world government at the other — which is …
17 September 2003 New Gang in Town By Gwynne Dyer Something very important happened in Mexico last week. You could tell, because the European and American trade negotiators were so cross as they left the 146-nation trade talks at Cancun that they were practically spitting. The European Union’s trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, damned the World …
15 September 2003 Killing Yasser Arafat? By Gwynne Dyer “Killing (Yasser Arafat) is definitely one of the options,” said Israel’s deputy prime minister Ehud Olmert last Sunday. “We are trying to eliminate all the heads of terror, and Arafat is one of the heads of terror.” It is the first time in fifteen years that …
10 September 2003 Sweden and the Euro By Gwynne Dyer Apart from the assassination of Prime Minster Olof Palme by a lone loony in 1986 as he walked home from a movie with his wife, politics in Sweden is rarely passionate, let alone violent. The knife attack on Wednesday that killed Foreign Minister Anna Lindh …
OOPS! I LEFT THE LAST TERRORIST ATTACK IN JAKARTA OUT. PLEASE USE THE REVISED VERSION BELOW 7 September 2003 Two Years On: The Score By Gwynne Dyer Two years on, September 11th is still a raw anniversary for most Americans, who cannot forget the terrible scenes in lower Manhattan as three thousand of their fellow-citizens …
5 September 2002 Why Did the Target Change? By Gwynne Dyer Beyond grief and anger, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States should raise a question in the minds of Americans: when and why did the target change? Later this year or early next, unless the Bush administration changes course radically, there …