Not an Onion article:

Robert Fitzpatrick, a retired transportation agency worker in New York, said he had spent more than $140,000 (£85,000) of his savings on advertisements in the run-up to 21 May to publicise the [Judgment Day] prediction.

After 1800 passed and nothing had happened, he said: "I do not understand why... I do not understand why nothing has happened."

"I can't tell you what I feel right now. Obviously, I haven't understood it correctly because we're still here."

Uriel Sinai / Getty Images

I have always been a great admirer of freelance journalist Michael J. Totten, even after he signed onto the usually laughable Pajamas Media network. A writer has to live, and since Totten continues to produce great work (now bound and available) I don't consider his slipping into Pajamas a mark of his selling out or jumping any sharks. No, I've read him long enough to know that at his weakest, he has always written passages like this:

Israel wants nothing more than peace and normal relations with its neighbors, including its Syrian neighbors, but that feeling has never been reciprocated by the majority of Syrians and is certainly not reciprocated by the Syrian government. [My italics]

And even head-scratchers like this:

The Israelis therefore have every reason to believe that a large crown of people dismantling the border fence and crossing into their territory is a threat. And as it turned out, they were at least a little bit right. Many threw rocks, and 10 Israeli soldiers were injured.

One can discern a decent writer's strain easily when he or she resorts to flabby, feeble language in an attempt to neatly sign and seal an otherwise bogus argument. The Israelis were "a little bit right" that a large crowd of people had the capacity to throw rocks. So after ten soldiers were injured (I'm expecting mildly, until it's proven otherwise) the army eschewed tear gas, opened fire, and ten protestors caught their last breath of fresh air.

To this day I've yet to wrap my head around the notion, prevalent among intelligent but uncritical supporters of Israel, that the world's second most developed, equipped and uninhibited army has anything to fear from a crowd of gangly stone-throwers. (Don't try and peg me as an Erdogan groupie: I'm well aware of the lethal hypocrisy the fumes of populism obscure.) Totten goes on to place the calamity at the border within the context of the Syrian uprising:

No doubt the Syrian government is thrilled that the Israelis opened fire. Bashar al-Assad desperately wants his furious citizens to think of the “Zionist Entity,” rather than his Arab Socialist Baath Party, as their number one enemy.

Point taken. And thrown back, if I may. Yes, Assad is the worst enemy of Syrians, but why did the Israelis have to open fire and neutralize ten people at the border rather than break up the ruckus with tear gas, like any standard pacification of an enflamed but unarmed crowd? Might the IDF pursue a strategy that doesn't have the effect of "thrilling" Arab dictatorships? Are Syrians wrong to see Israel as their enemy as well?

Regardless, Totten is right that the protests on the borders with Syria and Lebanon were, at least in part, organized political theater. As usual, I end up agreeing with his overarching point with a sour taste in my mouth after swallowing some seriously junk premises.

E. Smith

While the hands are pointing up, midnight
You're a question mark coming after people you watched collide
You can ask what you want to,
The satellite

'Cause the names you drop put ice in my veins
And for all you know, you're the only one who finds it strange
When they call it a lover's moon
The satellite

'Cause it acts just like lovers do
The satellite
A burned-out world you know
Staying up all night
The satellite

This is what's happening in Syria.

* * *Appeared in last week's Cherwell: * * *

As we tear down Highway 1 to Ben-Gurion International, the plastic cup that Jalal hands me is both flimsy and scorching. Somehow, his brother is brewing coffee in the backseat for everyone in the car. I struggle not to spill as the cup wilts in my hand. Barbed wire flies by my window as we drive alongside Israel’s “security fence,” or “apartheid wall,” depending on your politics. Taking advantage of the scenery, I ignite a brief fraternal argument over the appropriate name for the barrier. A few hours ago I didn’t know either of these men, but after spending the past six weeks at a news agency in the West Bank I’ve learned that in this place one can make fast friends so long as coffee or tea is provided.

One of the first people I shared a cup with was a protester in Bethlehem: I arrived in Palestine just as it joined the “Arab Spring”—the wave of youth-driven, democratic uprisings that began in Tunisia and is now blistering Syria. It is now referred to as the March 15 movement, to commemorate the first day of demonstrations. Rather than calling for the abdication of a dictator as in Egypt or Libya, the youth of Palestine demanded reconciliation between the secular Fatah party, which controls the West Bank and the recognized government, and the rogue Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

The young protester who treated me to a mug of Turkish syrup voiced his desperation in between sips: “This split between Hamas and Fatah has held back our struggle for a Palestinian state more than any Israeli policy could hope to do.” Having arrived at the movement’s beginning, I suppose it was only fitting that I left as its demands were finally reached. A few hours after I touched down at Heathrow, the two parties signed a unity deal in Cairo. Netanyahu is fuming, and my friends in Manara Square are celebrating.

Shopping for ceramics with a friend in Hebron, we ended up having tea with the shop’s owner, a man named Munir. Hebron is a city in the southern West Bank that provides the worst example of what Jewish settlements have done to the dynamic between Arabs and Israelis. The city has been partitioned into H1, governed by the Palestinian Authority, and H2, a section of town colonized by a small group of armed settlers and fully occupied by Israeli forces.




Shuffling around the streets of H2 I'm sure that my friend and I underwent the same bewilderment as any visitors to Hebron. It is known as the "sterile zone,” a euphemism that fails, since it fully conveys the numbness of one’s surroundings. The barricaded shops, the abandoned schools, and the glares of the settlers—some all too happy to finger the triggers on their chunky firearms—briefly placed us somewhere other than planet Earth. Eight hundred illegal residents have turned this section of town—population 30,000—into an urban husk.

In the middle of our tea break, a fight broke out in front of Munir’s shop, between some young settlers and a Palestinian boy; within seconds an IDF jeep rattled into view and the tussle was over. “That one, with the pink hat,” croaked Munir as he pointed, “he is around here often. He causes trouble.” As he spoke I watched the boy he identified, who was spitting at not only his Palestinian nemesis but the Israeli soldiers who had broken up their fight. Munir lowered his hand and went back to stirring his tea in silence.

Halfway through my stay actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered outside of his home in Jenin in the central West Bank and home to the most destitute refugee camp in Palestine. I had hoped to have a coffee with Juliano before I left. Having seen his film Arna’s Children a few days after arriving in Palestine, I made a plan to visit Jenin where he ran a theatre and drama school for Palestinian kids. Instead I ended up writing up a report of his assassination. On the evening of April 4 a masked gunman stepped in front of Juliano’s car, a few feet away from his home, and opened fire. While the wave of reports on his murder subsequently referred to him as “Arab-Isreali”—his mother was Jewish and his father Palestinian—Juliano once stressed that he was “one hundred percent Israeli, one hundred percent Arab.” Far be it from me to ignore his specification.

Juliano was much loved by younger people in the camp, where he erected a professional-grade theatre with all the trimmings for youths that knew only the poverty, violence and boredom of the refugee camp. But at the same time, among the godly and the literal-minded he was deeply hated for his productions at the Freedom Theatre, many of which empowered Palestinians children to reject religious and societal subjugation as well as Israeli occupation. In a recent interview, he candidly and humorously predicted his own assassination. He announced that he would die from a bullet fired by someone “very angry that we are here in Jenin,” then with a theatrical scowl and a forbidding voice, “to corrupt the youth of the Islam!” Though the investigation of his murder is not yet closed, that is most likely exactly what happened.

Not content with the demise only one innocent activist, a little more than a week later a Salafist group in Gaza kidnapped and hanged Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni in an abandoned house in Gaza City. The group in question was considerably to the right of Hamas and among other things demanded that the government release its co-religionists from prison. By the time the police in Gaza reached Vittorio’s body, however, it had been lifeless for hours, long before the Salafists’ deadline.

A few days after Arrigoni’s death I attended a vigil at Bethlehem's unity tent. There were calls for perseverance and there were calls for blood. There were tears for both Vittorio and for Juliano, from those that knew them and those who did not. A colleague of mine delivered a eulogy in short bursts, as another speaker translated her words across the circle of mourners. I scribbled them on the back of a magazine for a story on the event due later that night.

Soon a doctor in the crowd, a native of Palestine who spoke to us all in English, ended his own tribute to Vittorio with a crackling voice as he began to talk about the recent murder of his friend Juliano. He suddenly spoke very slowly, and the candle in his hands started to quiver: “We will continue to do our best, to end all the violence here...to win ourselves a normal life,” until his features withered and he began to sob, “so we can finally stop things like this, from happening anymore.” With the doctor in tears, most everyone around me began to weep. He had touched a nerve connected not only of Vittorio’s death, or Juliano’s, but the entire tragedy of Palestine in all of its confusion and violence.

At that moment I nudged my friend and fellow intern Carlos, who raised his eyebrows and shook his head, before nodding in the direction of a coffee stand nearby. I nodded in turn and we started toward the cart. We had a lot to discuss.

Imagine for a moment that you are the prime minister of what could very well be—in a few short months—a bona fides state recognized by the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank. All the world's eyes are set upon your efforts to build strong institutions, invest wisely, and pursue a constructive policy with your neighbors, who have after all been a co-belligerent in a long, bloody war spanning over sixty years.

One crisp spring day, a villain of global notoriety is shot dead; a character who has not only murdered innocents of every creed, color and nation, but also annexed the cause of your people's statehood as a justification for the mass murder carried out by his apocalyptic cult. Regardless of whether or not the platform of your political party shared certain tenets of said villain’s ideology, might it appear politically expedient—whether or not humanity is your chief interest—to solemnly acknowledge the harm caused by such a figure? Would not this be the proper response?

It would be. But that is not how Ismail Haniyeh chose to respond to the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Instead, he chose to say something like this:

If this news is true, it comes as part of the US policy of killing, destruction and the shedding of Arab and Islamic blood.

Sorry, what was that, head of government soon-to-be-voted-legitimate-or-else-once again-damned-to-diplomatic-wilderness?

[Bin Laden] is a Muslim Mojahed.

Way to go, you absolute fucking shithead.

* * * UPDATE 6:28pm: Yep. * * *

As Ahmed Rashid has just said on BBC Radio 4, the death of bin Laden is in no way the death of al Qaeda. I don't think anyone celebrating in America actually expects this, but when a figurehead perishes there is a tendency to act as though his empire is soon to crumble as well. Al Qaeda will outlive bin Laden, that is for sure.

As far as we know, the recently departed has not been the actual head of operations for quite a long time, if only because of his efforts to avoid detection: If one gives orders day in and day out it becomes very easy for intelligence services to map the diffusion of one's word and scrap together a rough idea of one's whereabouts. The highest-level Qaeda member to be involved in the management of the main organization probably remains the Egyptian al-Zawahiri.

Now we will probably see some serious reprisals for the man's death in Pakistan, and probably Afghanistan. Maybe Europe, maybe the States. But definitely Pakistan.

All the same, we've been rid of a one-of-a-kind sociopathic holy warrior. Would've liked to see a trial, but a bullet in the head will have to do.