SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE NOT DRIVEN BY DESPAIR BUT BY VICIOUS OLD MEN.

Christopher Hitchens is a left winger who knows his stuff and won't be held to doctrinaire views because they might be chic or fashionable. He hits the spot in his article published in yesterday's Australian - Svengalis behind the murderers:

To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Koran.)

Meanwhile, the wall still stands and grows, ironically expressing the much more banal and worldly fact that there are two peoples in Palestine. Sooner or later there will be two states as well.