Mark Steyn - America Alone

President Ahmaddamatree is the globalized version of those Khartoum men who own cell phones and yet believe a handshake can make one’s manhood disappear. He owns nukes and he believes he can make the West’s manhood disappear. Indeed, his wish to obliterate Israel is one of his less nutty aspects. That can be seen as a slightly overheated version of politics-as-usual in the Middle East. What’s more significant is that he believes in the return of the Twelfth Imam — the so-called “hidden imam” — and quite possibly that he personally is the fellow’s designated deputy. The president, as mayor of Tehran, wanted the city’s boulevards widened so that the hidden imam wouldn’t be insulted by having to ride in triumph through narrow streets. He’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. (It wasn’t the “Exit” sign — or, if it was, it didn’t endow the prime minister of Canada with any similar beatific aura.) Shortly afterwards, he told Natwar Singh, the Indian foreign minister, that everything would be hunky-dory in two years’ time, which Mr. Singh took to mean when Iran’s nukes would be ready but which turned out to be the Twelfth Imam’s ETA. Human history has never wanted for millennial cultists of one form or another, but ours is the first age in which such men have the means to pull off the apocalypse. In medieval Europe, the apocalyptics had intent; President Ahmageddonouttahere is an apocalyptic with a delivery system. “The end is nigh” is an old slogan. Now the means are nigh.

One of the most enduring vignettes of the Great War comes from its first Christmas: December 1914. The Germans and British, separated by a few yards of mud on the western front, put up banners to wish each other season’s greetings, sang “Silent Night” in the dark in both languages, and eventually scrambled up from their opposing trenches to play a Christmas Day football match in No Man’s Land and share some German beer and English plum jam. After this Yuletide interlude, they went back to killing each other. The many films, books, and plays inspired by that No Man’s Land truce all take for granted the story’s central truth: that our common humanity transcends the temporary hell of war. When the politicians and generals have done with us, those who are left will live in peace, playing footie (i.e., soccer), singing songs, as they did for a moment in the midst of carnage.

Now cross to Israel, to Haifa on a Saturday night in 2003: nineteen diners were killed in a packed restaurant by a twenty-something 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 forty 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 — she decided that any target would do. She was busting to blow.

The Palestinian death cult negates all the assumptions of Western sentimental pacifism-not least that war is a board game played by old men with young men as their chess pieces: if only the vengeful aged generals got out of the way, there’d be no conflict. But such common humanity as one can find on the West Bank resides, if only in their cynicism, in the leadership. Old Arafat may have showered glory and honor on his youthful martyrs but he was human enough to keep his own kid in Paris, well away from the suicide-bomber belts. It’s hard to picture Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi or any of the other veteran terror apologists who hog the airwaves at CNN and the BBC celebrating the deaths of their loved ones the way Miss Jaradat’s brother did. “We are receiving congratulations from people,” said 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 twenty-one-year-old woman who has received kind and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, packs herself with explosives and sets off to blow apart that hospital and the doctors and nurses who’ve treated her. Oh, well. If you’re pro-Palestinian, you shrug that their depravity is born of “desperation.” If you’ve had it with the Palestinians, you figure that after decades of UN coddling and EU funding and wily Arab manipulation they’re the most comprehensively wrecked people on the planet. In either case, it’s a very particular circumstance. But what if that “desperation” goes global? What if it’s shared by large numbers of other people around the planet?

Here’s another death scene. Photographed from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it’s only when you peer closer that you realize that that’s because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They’re children. Row upon row of dead children, over a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.

It was a picture from the Beslan massacre — the pupils of a Russian schoolhouse, taken hostage and slaughtered in September 2004. And, as Ken Bigley did, the very last thing they heard as they departed this world was the voice of their killer screaming” Allahu Akhbar!” God is great.

This virus has been a long time incubating. In 1971, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton, terrorists shot the prime minister of Jordan at pointblank range. As he fell to the floor dying, one of his killers began drinking the blood gushing from his wounds. Thirty-five years later, the Palestinian Authority elections were a landslide for Hamas and among the incoming legislators was Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She’s a household name to Palestinians, known as Umm Nidal-Mother of the Struggle — and, at the rate she’s getting through her kids, the Struggle’s all she’ll be Mother of. She’s famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her seventeen-year-old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It’s the Hamas version of 42nd Street: you’re going out there a youngster but you’ve got to come back in small pieces.

It may be that she stood for parliament because she’s got a yen to be junior transport minister or deputy secretary of fisheries. But it seems more likely that she and her Hamas colleagues were elected because this is who the Palestinian people are, and this is what they believe. After sixty years as UN “refugees,” they’re now so inured they’re electing candidates on the basis of child sacrifice. When you’re there, in Gaza or the West Bank, that culture of death is pervasive. You go into a convenience store and they’re affable and friendly and you exchange some pleasantries, and over the guy’s shoulder you’re looking at the Martyrs of the Week he’s got proudly displayed on the wall. On my last visit, Palestinian schools were in the midst of a national letter-writing competition. Among the education ministry’s first-prize winners was twelve-year-old Mahmoud Naji Chalilah for this epistle to the Zionist Entity: