Programming note: Tonight, Sunday, I'll be back here at SteynOnline with Part Ten of our seventy-eighth Tale for Our Time, Hugo Bettauer's pertinent satire of 1922 - The City without Jews.
~Meanwhile, welcome to this week's episode of my ongoing audio adaptation of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. I am bitter about the last twenty years, and bitterness is not conducive to one's writing. The butch boys - like Cheney - who could have changed course declined to do so when the measures required to avert our fate were more moderate. So here we are living in the world foreseen by America Alone - and the measures required to prevent what comes next are far more severe. Hence our new Civilisational Deathwatch clock the right-hand sidebar. Are today's Cheneys just going to sit back and watch it count down?
Which brings us to today's episode of our ongoing audio adaptation of my boffo bestseller - which begins with the famous Christmas Eve truce of the Great War and then moves to our own time:
Now cross to Israel, to Haifa on a Saturday night in 2003: Nineteen diners were killed in a packed restaurant by a twentysomething female suicide-bomber, her hair attractively tied in a western-style ponytail, to judge from the detached head she left as her calling card. Try to find the common humanity between the participants in that war. Try to imagine the two sides ever kicking a ball around, swapping songs. The only place in the modern Middle East where Arabs and Jews coexist is in Israel, especially in Haifa. The restaurant young Hanadi Jaradat blew apart had been jointly owned by an Arab family and a Jewish family for 40 years. It would be interesting to know whether it was targeted for that very reason, in the same way that, in Northern Ireland, the IRA took to killing the Catholic caterers and cleaners who worked at army bases. But the intifada is too primal for anything that thought out. It's more likely that once Miss Jaradat had slipped into Israel proper through a gap in the unfinished security fence the European Union and the State Department so deplore that any target would do. She was busting to blow.
The Palestinian death cult negates all the assumptions of western sentimental pacifism... "We are receiving congratulations from people," said [her brother] Thaher Jaradat. "Why should we cry? It is like her wedding day, the happiest day for her."
The problem is not the security fence, but the psychological fence - a chasm really - that separates a sizable proportion of the Palestinian population from all Jews. For one side, there is no common humanity, even with people they know well, who provide them with jobs, and much else: Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a 21-year old woman who has received kind and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheva, packs herself with explosives and sets off to blow apart that hospital and the doctors and nurses who've treated her.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-Two of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over six dozen gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Twenty-Three of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
