Showing 1 - 10 of 27
Netanyahu did not do enough to save hostages
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 07/09/2024
» Six Jewish hostages were murdered by Hamas last week just before the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) reached them, and a controversy has erupted in Israel about whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have done more to save them, but only among the ignorant and the credulous, because everybody else knew he never intended to save them. If your child is kidnapped and you get a ransom note, do you:
Is Najib Bukele the world's coolest dictator?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 07/08/2023
» 'It's not perfect, but it's good. We've done something really good here," said El Salvador's vice-president, Felix Ulloa, defending the government's no-quarter war against the street gangs that have dominated the Central American republic for decades. President Nayib Bukele agrees, calling himself "the instrument of God".
The puzzle of who killed Haiti's Moise
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/07/2021
» The presidential dogs were still alive, which meant that something was very wrong with the official explanation of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise on July 7. In very poor countries even moderately prosperous people whose houses contain things worth stealing usually have large dogs, and those dogs are trained to attack intruders.
Objective allies: Netanyahu and Hamas militants
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/05/2021
» 'Objective allies' generally don't even talk to each other. They don't have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each other. But they share some intermediate goal, and are clever enough to realise they can both get what they want by acting together in certain ways.
Myanmar's saint who lost her way
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/11/2020
» Almost completely obscured by the blanket global coverage of the US election, they are having one in Myanmar too. The outcome is even more a foregone conclusion, although in this case it will confirm the existing government in power. But it is only by condoning a great crime that democracy there survives.
Premature to mourn death of Bolivia's democracy
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/10/2020
» The quotation is usually given as "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely", but Lord Acton's original remark went on to say: "Great men are almost always bad men." And so they are.
Last days of the Old Middle East
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/09/2020
» President Donald Trump declared "the dawn of a new Middle East" in Washington on Tuesday as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed public agreements with Israel for the first time.
Balkan-style chaos covers big area
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 16/07/2020
» 'Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown," says an old friend to Jack Nicholson as the mother is killed, the little girl is handed over to the bad guy and the police wash their hands of it at the end of the 1974 classic film Chinatown.
Fear at the root of America's race problem
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/06/2020
» It's been a bad week in the United States: six nights of protests, huge anger, rioting and looting in 50 cities, hundreds arrested or injured -- but only six dead over the police murder of George Floyd. The number may have gone up by the time you read this, but it's definitely not 1968 again.
Kristallnacht for India's Muslims?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/03/2020
» The anti-Muslim pogrom in northeastern Delhi last week only killed 43 people, and a few of them weren't even Muslims. But then on Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass") in Germany in 1938, only 91 Jews were killed. It was still a Nazi declaration of war on the Jews, and a forewarning of the 6 million Jewish deaths to come.