After viewing a few of the gruesome videos of Muammar Qaddafi’s last moments, I called Abdullah, the young translator with whom I’d worked in Benghazi last spring. “You can’t imagine how great we are feeling after forty-two years and nine months,” he said, sounding like many of the Libyans I’d seen interviewed on TV. Few of them mentioned Qaddafi without also mentioning the forty-two years. The number had been everywhere in Libya since the revolution began: One of the many posters I’d seen plastering downtown Benghazi in March read, “42 is number of shoe’s size...Read More

Once more there was to be no trial, no judgment. Over the last five years the scenario in the Arab world seems to be the same. Over and over again, the same confusion, the same dramatic end. Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden and Qaddafi were killed without a fair trial, no judge or jury brought down a verdict, in the most undignified manner. Saddam Hussein was hanged the day of the Muslim festival (after a parody of a trial) and his execution was filmed by mobile phone camera. Usama bin Laden was assassinated unarmed with no image to prove his fate. Qaddafi was caught alive, beaten and then executed, with hundreds of people around him taking pictures of his blood-covered face...Read More