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| Secret History of My Geography Teacher, also Cofounder of Hamas - Ramzy Baroud |
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This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle.
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| Opinion: Coalition of the Unwilling - by Gwynne Dyer |
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“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons,” said Winston Churchill in 1941, defending his decision to regard Stalin as an ally after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
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| Opinion: “China’s Chechnya”: Terrorism in Xijiang - by Gwynne Dyer |
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It’s not really “China’s Chechnya” yet, but the insurgency in Xinjiang is growing fast. Incidents of anti-Chinese violence are getting bigger and much more frequent. Since March, 176 people have been killed in six separate attacks on Chinese police and government officials, local collaborators and ordinary Chinese residents of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwestern China, and the authorities don’t seem to have a clue what to do about it.
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| Opinion: On Heroes and Preachers: Gaza’s New Resistance Paradigm - by Ramzy Baroud |
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“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? In Israeli prison, of course” was the title of an article by Jo Ehrlich published in Modoweiss.net on Dec 21, 2009. That was almost exactly one year after Israel’s concluded a major war against Gaza. The so-called Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) was, till then, the deadliest Israeli attack against the impoverished strip for many years.
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| Opinion: The Legacy of the First World War - by Gwynne Dyer |
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“It was not worth even one life,” said Harry Patch shortly before he died in 2009 at the age of 111. He was the last survivor of the 65 million soldiers who fought in the First World War, and by the time he died it was a normal, quite unremarkable thing to say. But he would never have said it in 1914.
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| Opinion: License to Kill – Morgan Strong |
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“At Shifa Hospital, a girl who looked about nine yeas old was brought into the emergency room and laid on a gurney, blood soaking the shoulder of her shirt. Motionless and barely alive, she stared at the ceiling, her mouth open. There was no relative with her to give her name. The medical staff stood quietly around her. Every now and then, they checked her vital signs, until it was time. They covered her with a white sheet, and she was gone.
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| Opinion: License to Kill – Morgan Strong |
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“At Shifa Hospital, a girl who looked about nine yeas old was brought into the emergency room and laid on a gurney, blood soaking the shoulder of her shirt. Motionless and barely alive, she stared at the ceiling, her mouth open. There was no relative with her to give her name. The medical staff stood quietly around her. Every now and then, they checked her vital signs, until it was time. They covered her with a white sheet, and she was gone.
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| Opinion: Recruiting to kill - it is not just an Israeli war on Gaza – by Ramzy Baroud |
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To some, US secretary of state John Kerry may have appeared to be a genuine peacemaker as he floated around ideas during a Cairo visit on July 25 about a ceasefire between Israel and resisting Palestinian fighters in Gaza. But behind his measured diplomatic language, there is a truth not even America’s top diplomat can easily hide.
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| Opinion: American Spies in Germany: The End of Trust - by Gwynne Dyer |
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The question to bear in mind, when reading this whole sorry tale, is this. If Americans are, on average, no stupider than Germans, then why are their intelligence services so stupid?
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| Opinion: Gaza’s Resistance Will Not be Crushed - by Ramzy Baroud |
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On the 13th day of Israel’s so-called Operation Protective Edge, stories of entire families collectively pulverized, women and children keenly targeted by Israeli soldiers saturate the media. Until now, 430 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 18 Israel soldiers been killed at the hands of the Resistance. In Shejaiya, elders, mothers and children scrambled for cover as shells mercilessly rained down, stealing the souls of countless innocents.
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| Opinion: MH17 – Who Did It? What Next? - by Gwynne Dyer |
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“...and once the TAR (Target Acquisition Radar) has lock-on, this light will go green. Then just push this button here, and the rest’s automatic. Good luck! Oh, and make sure nobody’s standing behind the missile when you launch.”
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| Opinion: The Origins of War - by Gwynne Dyer |
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The 59 skeletons were found in 1964, lying together in a gravesite beside the Nile near what is now the Egyptian-Sudanese border. They died between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago, and some of them seemed to have died in battle. That was big news half a century ago, when most people still believed that organised killing was an invention of civilisation. Now they are back in the news, billed as evidence of the world’s oldest known battle.
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| Opinion: Ravaging Gaza: The War Netanyahu Cannot Possibly Win - by Ramzy Baroud |
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When the bodies of three Israeli settlers - Aftali Frenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 - were found on June 30 near Hebron in the southern West Bank, Israel went into a state of mourning and a wave of sympathy flowed in from around the world. The three had disappeared 18 days earlier in circumstances that remain unclear.
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| Opinion: Gaza 2014 - by Gwynne Dyer |
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Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, said something cryptic last Friday, shortly after the Israelis began their latest round of attacks on the Gaza Strip. Condemning Hamas’s conditions for accepting a ceasefire as “exaggerated and unnecessary,” he offered his condolences “to the families of the martyrs in Gaza who are fuel to those who trade in war. I oppose these traders, on both sides.”
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| Opinion: The Indonesian Election - by Gwynne Dyer |
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Only a very bad novelist would dare to write a scenario as simplistic as the current presidential election in Indonesia. A young, attractive, squeaky-clean man of the people running against a rich old general trailing war crimes accusations behind him: can’t you come up with a plot a bit more original than that?
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