Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
by Gwynne Dyer
One of the first scenes in the ridiculous but thoroughly nasty film Innocence of Muslims shows angry Muslims running through the streets smashing things and killing people. So what happens when a clip from the film dubbed into Arabic goes up on the Internet? Angry Muslims run through the streets smashing things and killing people.
by Gwynne Dyer
It was a welcome change from the usual dreary story: a Christian or a Hindu Pakistani accused of blasphemy on flimsy grounds, tried and sentenced to prison — or found innocent, set free and then murdered by some Muslim fanatic. This time was different.
The victim was a 14-year-old Christian girl, Rimsa Masih, who is believed to suffer from Down's syndrome. She was stopped by a young Muslim man who found the half-burned remnants of a book that allegedly included verses from the Qur’an in her carrier bag. He told the local imam, who called the police, and she was arrested.
This kind of story usually ends badly in Pakistan. Two years ago, for example, a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was arrested for insulting the Prophet Muhammad while arguing with fellow farm-workers. She was sentenced to death by hanging, but it was such a manifest injustice that the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, publicly called for the repeal of the blasphemy law. He was assassinated by his own bodyguard in January 2011.
The bodyguard was tried for murder and convicted, but he was treated as a hero by many Pakistanis, and the judge who sent him to prison had to flee the country. Two months later the only Christian member of Pakistan’s cabinet, Shahbaz Bhatti, was also shot dead when he spoke out against the blasphemy laws. Since then, almost nobody has dared to criticize them….
by Gwynne Dyer
Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi's spokesman did not mince words. He said that the "retirement" of all the senior military commanders in the country represented the completion of the Egyptian revolution. And guess what? The rest of the officer corps accepted Morsi's decision.
Even as the spokesman was announcing that Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the defence minister, and General Sami Enan, the army chief of staff, were being retired, state television was showing other military officers, Generals Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi and Sidki Sobhi, being sworn in by President Morsi as their successors.
by Gwynne Dyer
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Syria has suspended its peace mission. "The observers will not be conducting patrols and will stay in their locations until further notice," said the commander of the 300-strong multinational observer force, Norwegian Major-General Robert Mood.
by Gwynne Dyer
Abraham Lincoln was right: You can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Unfortunately, his dictum is irrelevant to modern Italian politics. In a democratic country with a number of different parties, like Italy, you only have to fool about one-third of the people all the time to get and keep political power.
There are cynics among us who would argue that the European Union's oil sanctions against Iran, which went into full effect on July 1, are a double triumph for Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
If you assume that the real reason for his apparent hysteria over the alleged threat of Iranian nuclear weapons is to divert international attention from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, then his strategy has been a spectacular success. The main reason that Israel's allies are imposing these sanctions is to head off an Israeli military strike against Iran that would destabilize the entire region — and in the meantime, nobody is talking about the Palestinians.
by Gwynne Dyer
What if China, flush with its new wealth, opened its doors to mass immigration? It would make sense from an economic and social point of view, because its one-child-per-family policy has produced a young generation far smaller than the one that now does most of the work. China's population is "aging" (ie its average age is going up) faster than any other country in history, and it could certainly do with some more young people.
by Gwynne Dyer
Imagine that you are a junior officer in a West African army. You joined the army at 18, you worked hard, you managed to get sent to the United States four times for various training courses, but somehow the promotions never came. You have just turned 40, and in 10 or 15 years you will have to retire on a captain's pension. What to do?
by Gwynne Dyer
After 11 demonstrators were killed outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo early this month, Mohammad al-Assaf, a member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), expressed his astonishment that anybody might suspect the military of wanting to rig the forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt. "The armed forces and its supreme council are committed to handing over power at the scheduled time or even before 30 June," he said.
by Gwynne Dyer
I wanted you to be the first to know. It has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy in the United States that I am on a very short list of journalists (eight in western countries, and seven others in India, Pakistan and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin Laden wanted to send "special media material" on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. To what do I owe this honour?
I can't vouch for the authenticity of the letters that the American forces seized when they raided bin Laden's house in northern Pakistan a year ago, but according to the CTC's translation the plan was to send these carefully selected and named journalists a site address and password "at the right time" so that we could download his "special material."
That never happened, because bin Laden was killed before the anniversary rolled round, but it does raise an interesting question. None of the people he named (me, Bob Fisk of the Independent in Britain, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the United States, and independent journalist Eric Margolis in Canada, for example) has actually written in favour of al-Qaida and its goals — so what did he think he would gain by sending us the stuff?
The answer, I suspect, is that he had been reduced to grasping at straws…
