25 October 2006 Mo Ibrahim’s Idea By Gwynne Dyer It is very unlikely that Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh, re-elected last month to a third term with a 67 percent majority, will ever win the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. He is a stereotypical African “big man” ruler, which is precisely what the …
10 August 2006 A Massive Distraction: Cynicism Rules By Gwynne Dyer “I used to know when I was being deeply cynical and when I wasn’t,” said a friend who just made it into London before they closed Heathrow airport for the terrorist scare. “Now, I don’t.” Back in February 2003, when Prime Minister Tony Blair …
4 November 2005 Not the Paris Intifada By Gwynne Dyer “Scum,” French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the rioters who have seized control of many working-class “suburbs” around Paris every night since 27 October, when two teenagers died in an accident that many blame on the police. Accused of pouring fuel on the flames, Sarkozy …
28 July 2005 A Few Obscenities By Gwynne Dyer Let’s talk dirty. The 9/11 suicide hijackers — all Arabs — attacked the United States instead of Brazil or Japan because the US government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven’t. There is …
14 July 2005 The Bombs Had Nothing To Do With Anything By Gwynne Dyer It’s official: the four suicide bombs that killed over fifty Londoners last week had nothing to do with anything. The family and friends of the young men who committed the atrocity, all British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent, insisted that their actions …
7 July 2005 London: Not Exactly the Blitz By Gwynne Dyer Tony Blair flew down from the G8 summit in Scotland especially to be with Londoners in their time of trial, and you can hardly blame him for that. It’s not that we needed him to take charge — it was only four smallish bombs, …
3 April 2005 My Greatest Journalistic Moment By Gwynne Dyer In the days to come we will be hearing a great deal about Pope John Paul II’s impact on the Catholic Church, the candidates for the succession, and what kind of straw they burn with the ballots to get that black smoke. This is also …
11 July 2004 Perfidious Albion and Diego Garcia By Gwynne Dyer “In accordance with current regulations, no type of attire with degrading or obscene comments may be worn on or brought to Diego Garcia. This includes pictures, phrases or slogans depicting drug paraphernalia, anti-war slogans….” It’s not clear from the website whether the British customs …
18 April 2004 The Courage of the Clerk By Gwynne Dyer I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or right. Don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp. Mordechai …
27 November 2003 Destroying Pitcairn By Gwynne Dyer “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” as some US officer allegedly said during the Vietnam War. British justice is now about to do the same thing to the Pitcairn Islanders. In an attempt to avert that outcome, defence lawyer Paul Dacre recently …