3 December 2010 Egyptian “Elections” By Gwynne Dyer Egyptian elections are always highly predictable affairs, but the second round of this year’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, 5 December, was completely pointless. The first round on 28 November showed that the regime was going to suppress even the marginal role permitted to pro-democracy parties in previous …
11 October 2010 A Jewish and Democratic State By Gwynne Dyer “With this law Israel buys an exit ticket from the family of nations,” wrote Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea last week in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. “The proposed loyalty law…is really racist. It obliges non-Jews to declare that they would be loyal to the Jewish …
24 May 2010 The Nile: Water War? By Gwynne Dyer After he signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said: “The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.” Well, the world kept turning, and now a potential war over water is creeping onto Egypt’s agenda. Egypt is …
22 October 2006 Suez Lesson By Gwynne Dyer If you’re an imperial power, your troops often end up in places that most of your citizens cannot even find on the map: Mesopotamia for Roman soldiers, for example, or Afghanistan for the British. It looks foolish, viewed with the long perspective of history, and yet lots …
8 September 2005 Egyptian Election By Gwynne Dyer The Egyptian presidential election last Wednesday was a cynical farce. President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since 1981, was certain to win again, and his leading opponent, Ayman Nur of the Tomorrow party, was facing trumped-up charges of forgery that may land him in jail by …
31 October 2004 Bin Laden Speaks (But Not The Truth) By Gwynne Dyer Osama bin Laden is a master of the art of public relations, and his videotaped message on Friday, 29 October, was a little masterpiece of spin and misdirection. All that nonsense about how he decided to attack the “towers” of New York …
19 July 2004 What’s Wrong with the Arab World By Gwynne Dyer It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison’s sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about one hundred and fifty titles …
15 October 2002 ‘Revisionists’ vs ‘Rejectionists’ Part Two: End Game By Gwynne Dyer The precise shape of the disaster that is stalking the Middle East was outlined last April by Martin van Crefeld, Israel’s most respected military historian, in an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “Mr Sharon would have to wait for a suitable opportunity,” …
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 …