14 April 2004 The Last Straw? By Gwynne Dyer You never know which straw will finally break the camel’s back, but it may have been Wednesday’s summit between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The public endorsement that Mr Bush gave to Mr Sharon’s abandonment of the ‘peace process’ in favour […]
4 April 2004 Wrong Answer in Sri Lanka By Gwynne Dyer “I have a strong belief that our nation will have peace but I am under no illusion that it will be easy,” said Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe two years ago, as his government signed a ceasefire in the civil war that had
11 January 2004 The Fate of Israel By Gwynne Dyer Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099. The subsequent battles swayed to and fro, but the Crusaders held most of the eastern Mediterranean coast (what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria) for almost two centuries. Then the local people, overwhelmingly superior in numbers then as
15 December 2003 Saddam’s Capture: Will It Make Any Difference? By Gwynne Dyer If the only reason that some Iraqis have been resisting the American occupation was that they wanted Saddam Hussein back in power, then presumably they will now lose all hope. But that is as blinkered a view of what is really going
2 November 2003 The Anti-Semites’of Europe By Gwynne Dyer Those anti-Semitic Europeans are at it again. In an opinion poll conducted in October, when shown a list of countries and asked “if in your opinion it presents or not a threat to peace in the world,” some 59 percent of European Union citizens polled said
22 October 2003 For ‘Catholics’, Read’Palestinians’ By Gwynne Dyer It’s hard to guess which group would be angrier about being compared to the other, Israeli Jews or Northern Irish Protestants. The Islamist gunmen of Hamas would be outraged to hear themselves equated to the Catholic gunmen of the Irish Republican Army, and vice versa, too
19 October 2003 Two Fanatics And An Old Fool By Gwynne Dyer “We want all Christians and Jews to go out from our Islamic countries and release our brothers from jail and stop killing Muslims or we will kill you,” said a Saudi member of al-Qaeda in a videotape released last week which he made
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
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
30 June 2003 The ‘Road Map’: A Truce, Not a Peace By Gwynne Dyer A cease-fire has rarely been breached faster than the one announced by Palestinian militant groups on Sunday. The two biggest Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, declared a three-month suspension of attacks on Israeli targets at lunch-time. By Sunday night Yasser