Doug Saunders

month

July 2011

17 posts

How Xenophobic Extremism Crept Into Northern...

Oslo One Monday in February, the Oslo media were ushered to the headquarters of an agency known as the Police Security Service for a surprising announcement. Intelligence agents had concluded that the most serious threat to Norway’s security had become the combination of extreme right-wing international organizations and “Norwegian anti-Islamists.” “The combination of Russian neo-Nazis –...

The Popular Fiction Behind Norway's Terrorism

Oslo Every act of terrorism is built on a foundation of widely repeated ideas. To convert an ordinary person into a believer who’s willing to commit murder, those ideas must warn of an urgent threat of devastating proportions, one whose resistance and exposure will turn the terrorist into a hero and martyr. They must be repeated so often that they can be perceived as a crystalline truth that will...

The "Eurabia" Movement Struggles to Distance...

Oslo As self-confessed Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik waits behind bars for a late-September trial for at least 76 killings he committed, attention has turned to the circle of anti-immigrant writers, bloggers and political figures whose ideas he cited as motivations for his atrocities. As they learned that their ideas had formed the ideological basis for one of the deadliest acts of...

Norway's Breivik: The Terrorist Wing of Europe's...

Oslo Norwegians, reeling at the death of at least 93 adults and children in Friday’s mass shootings and bombing attack, are being forced to confront the fact that the perpetrator is not a lone madman, but a highly organized Norwegian political terrorist who claims to be part of a Europe-wide movement opposed to Muslim immigrants and multiculturalism. The confessed killer, 32-year-old Anders...

From Oslo Bombing Site, a Hole in the Norwegian...

I deliver a video talk from the heart of Oslo’s July 22 terrorist atrocities. View video at The Globe and Mail Original Article

How Britain Saved Itself From Corruption, With a...

London I was greeted with incredulous stares when I told my Libyan hosts this week that I’d make a 17-hour drive across the Sahara followed by a six-hour flight from Cairo to London in order to watch an uprising against a government that had become intertwined with a corrupt police force and a power-seeking media. The folks in Benghazi were hardly alone in raising an eyebrow. From the beginning,...

The Political Thinking of Anders Behring Breivik

These are the collected writings of Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing more than 84 young people at a Labour Party gathering in Norway and at least seven in a car bombing in Oslo. These are comments he posted on the right-wing site document.no Thanks to my Norwegian friends for translating this. Anders Breivik From Document No// < ![CDATA[ (function() { var scribd =...

Freed from Gadhafi, Some Libyans in East Now Begin...

Benghazi One of the few really steady jobs in liberated eastern Libya these days is that of caricaturist, and guys such as Adil Mansur are cleaning up. The 30-year-old history student has drawn posters of dictator Moammar Gadhafi as a dog, a snake and a hanging victim. Today he is producing a large image of rebel interim-government leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil as a mellow and saintly figure. ...

The Morning After Libya's Night Before May Prove...

Benghazi, Libya Six months ago, a typical week in Sadus Jahmi’s life was defined by her high-school class in Green Book Studies, in which she spent three hours memorizing lessons from the baroque and solipsistic manifesto penned by Col. Moammar Gadhafi to justify his one-man rule. Large pictures of the man, in sunglasses and curls, hung in every room, including her parents’ parlour. There was one...

The Elusive Libyan End Game

Benghazi, Libya As rebel forces carried their wounded back from a failed assault on the oil town of Brega amid rocket explosions and NATO helicopter fire here in eastern Libya on Friday, a more quiet battle, one with potentially larger consequences, was taking place much farther down the Mediterranean coast in the closed meeting rooms of Istanbul. There, ministers from 30 countries, including...

The Paradox of the Refugee

Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What to Do About It, by Andy Lamey, Doubleday, 408 pages Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the evolution of european Frontiers, by Ruben Zaiotti, University of Chicago Press, 263 pages In August of 2010, a rusty and dangerously overcrowded ship departed from Indonesia and made a long passage across the Pacific Ocean to Canadian coastal...

As Oil and Cash Run Dry, Libya's Struggle Grinds...

Benghazi As she changed the dressings on a burn victim at this Libyan city’s main hospital, Intensive Care Unit nurse Judith San Pedro patiently listed all the things she’s missing. “Antibiotics, we’re out of the good ones and we’ve got two days’ supply of the others. Sutures and gauze, we’re down to five days. Most cancer and HIV drugs, we’ve run out. Plasma and albumin, there’s none. We can’t...

Libya's Rebels in Training: A Teenage Remake of...

Tobruk, Libya Ahmed Abdelrahmin is 15, but he is small for his age and his voice hasn’t changed. On Sunday, he sat patiently in the yard of a former high school in the east Libyan city of Tobruk as a Qatari instructor showed how to dismantle and clean a 50 mm anti-aircraft gun. Then he practised operating a battlefield radio set. In between, there was lots of marching. Like all of the 350...

Egypt's Revolution, Reloaded -- With Less...

Cairo The Egyptian revolution has returned in force to central Cairo, with the same huge crowds of young protesters, the same overnight encampments and rhythmic slogans of February’s historic protests, but with none of the violence and danger, and little of the euphoric optimism. Almost five months after the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square succeeded in driving president Hosni Mubarak out of...

Not Rich or Poor, But the Struggling Middle are...

Istanbul As you fly into Istanbul, what you see below is a vivid illustration of our era’s great economic rebalancing: Expanding across endless rolling hills like frost crystals on a pane of glass are hundreds of thousands of houses and apartments, most of them owned by the more than 10 million new residents of this city who just a generation or two ago were shack-dwelling peasants in the...

Why Much of France Expects Dominique Strauss-Kahn...

One day, he was a possible rapist; the next, a plausible victim of American perfidy. And that, in the political alchemy of France, may be enough to turn Dominique Strauss-Kahn from political pariah into electoral gold. Never has a political career fallen so fast and so far, and then immediately rebounded with such stunning speed and symmetry, as that of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who as recently as...

In Iran, We Learned that Information Grenades Are...

London The moment when the new politics of the Middle East first revealed its face may well have occurred three years ago when an Iranian Canadian found himself screaming in pain in a fluorescent-lit room shortly after his torturer had repeated, over and over, the angry demand: “Who is Pauly Shore?” Maziar Bahari, the journalist and filmmaker who had come to Iran to cover the 2009 election, was...