AIDS? It's all in the mind!
CAN the power of a human mind destroy the AIDS virus?
I believe so - if the medical community is brave enough to put aside its preconceptions.
One leading doctor has done just that. Professor Zvi Bentwich, a brilliant physician whose reputation as an immunologist is second to none, was so astounded when he read my autobiography that I was invited in secret to an Israeli hospital - and put to work helping AIDS patients.
For years I did not speak about this research.
But now, as this monstrous epidemic continues unchecked, I want to urge everyone fighting AIDS use your mind.
Unleash your willpower. Make your prayers work for you.
Your Mindpower could be the best weapon you've got.
Professor Bentwich became convinced of this, although it was not a position he adopted easily.
For a doctor with more than 30 years rigorous training and experience in a highly specialised field, he was naturally unwilling to see all his conventional notions blown away.
So when I arrived at the Weizmann Institute, which was closely linked to the professor's departments at the Hebrew University Medical School and the Kaplan Medical Centre in Rehovot, he wanted me to start small.
I focused on cells and tissues in culture suspended in shallow flasks or smeared on petri dishes.
Could the force of my mind alter their components? I was confident - it was years since the astronaut Edgar Mitchell helped me learn to sprout living shoots from seeds in the palm of my hand.
How tough could cells be? Cells weren't tough. They were just boring. You don't get much reaction from a dish of amoebas.
He was eager to do something positive and dramatic. Professor Bentwich, whose open-mindedness never failed to amaze me, took me one quiet weekend to a little used room. What I saw I cannot forget. I tried not to let the horror show in my face, but the three men I met were in the grip of a hideous virus - HIV, precursor to full blown AIDS. I talked to them, energising them, giving them self belief, using the most forceful words and attitudes I could summon up.
My mission was to give them new hope, new belief in their body's healing power. AIDS is a collapse of the immune system. Restore that system and the disease retreats. We all know how much more prone we are to infections and illness when our reserves are depleted. What clinical immunology probes at Weizmann and Kaplan could have discovered is that the reverse can also be true - we repel disease more easily when our mental fitness is at its peak.
In rare cases the HIV virus has apparently vanished from an infected patient - could this be Mindpower at its incredible best? I made a video for each of the men, totally determined to delay, at the very least, the onset of full AIDS symptoms. Facing the camera, I delivered a personal message to each of the three: "John (not his real name), you are strong. You can beat this thing. You will do it!"
"Come on John! Win! Beat AIDS! You can, I know you will!" I was drained by the end of the filming. But I know the value of those tapes because each Saturday, at 11am, as I sent my prayers and my Mindpower to the three, they tuned in to their video messages, wherever they were. I was not told how the three fared. I still pray for them. But the professor's reaction left me in no doubt: "Personally I can tell you that I consider what I saw with you as a truly mind blowing experience which cannot be overlooked and should certainly be made common knowledge once we have established it." Trust your doctors. But most of all, trust yourself. You have the power of health, right there inside your mind.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
29th May 1998
Why do they tell lies about me?
SPENT this morning being attacked. One by one, men and women stood up to denounce me, and I had to sit politely and listen.
My lawyer kept rapping his foot against my ankle to remind me: "Uri, let them lose their tempers. Hang on to yours." I did and I hope the judges were impressed. I am not able to explain exactly what the hearing was about, since a final decision has yet to be reached. When the full facts are out, Jewish Telegraph readers will be first to know.
Outside the hearing, in the blazing London heat, I tried to cool off. What was it about me these people hated so? Could it be personal? Surely it wasn't because I'm a Jew? Not even that I'm a high-profile Jew. It must simply be that I tell the truth and these truths are unpalatable to some people. Or do they think that I'm the liar?
Human beings can do some things that human scientific discoveries cannot yet explain. What is so hateful about that?
Some years ago I met Simon Wiesenthal, a man who told much greater truths than I ever dared. He was vilified massively, of course.
Wiesenthal made people fear, not only for their blinkered notions but for their carefully onstructed cover-ups and lies. The truth he proclaimed ought not to be controversial. Anyone with the least knowledge of this century has heard of the Nazi attempts at genocide - wiping out Jews, gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and intellectuals.
What else could have happened to entire townships of Jews in Germany, Poland and central Europe? How else could the Romany race have been almost obliterated in under a decade? It is not as if the survivors have been silent. Or as if their accounts did not tally in the smallest details. It is not as if the Allies failed to find a sickening mass of evidence, some of it recorded on film. It is not as if Hitler's intention to commit genocide had been a secret for 20 years. Or as if, with armies of stormtroopers and flocks of bombers, he did not inflict terror and mass murder on innocent communities across an entire continent.
But people called Simon Wiesenthal a liar. They accused him of inventing the Holocaust, to promote a Jewish conspiracy or discredit right-wing politics. These Holocaust sceptics were, of course, a minority but there were by no means only a few of them. Even today, when almost all of the killers have gone to their own graves, a virulent campaign to deny the Holocaust continues.
I am lost in admiration of the way that, decade after decade, Wiesenthal fought these people. It must have been like fighting water. Nothing solid to hit. No way to stop new, factless lies from pouring into the holes which Wiesenthal endlessly made in their specious arguments. How can you contradict someone who denies the frankest facts and stamps on words until all the meaning has gone out of them? How can you nail a falsehood that slips around your back When you step forward?
My battles with the sceptics have none of the heroism that distinguished Simon Wiesenthal. But as I prepare for another wrestling match with liquified lies. I am proud to have his image before me.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
5th June 1998
Comet has blown apart Anglo-Jewry
In Robert Duvall's latest movie, Deep Impact, a comet is streaming towards Earth, threatening to plough into the planet with unimaginable force. Humanity is powerless to stop it.
The film-makers are unlucky. How could they know that, just hours after their story hit the screens, a real Deep Impact would occur with devastating effect? A kosher Deep Impact…
Comet Shmuley has smashed into Britain and blown Orthodox Anglo-Jewry to Kingdom Come.
Rabbi Shmuel Boteach might as well have arrived from outer space, for all his critics can make of him. In fact, he's an American Lubavitcher, brimming with confidence and charisma, full of the American love of direct speaking.
So direct, in fact, that he labelled the United Synagogue rabbinical council as "vicious and malicious," "deaf to what the youth are saying."
Even the deafest old rabbi couldn't help hearing that. The council complained to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks that Shmuley's views were "not in accordance" with Jewish law, and they did it in a tone of voice which added, "Like The Satanic Verses were not in accordance with Islamic law, if you take our point, Chief Rabbi."
Now the Chief Rabbi has a soft spot for Comet Shmuley, which isn't surprising because anyone who has met this extra-terrestrial ball of fire discovers they can't help liking him. He's fun. Terrifying, sometimes, outrageous always, exhausting, breath-taking and exasperating, but invariably fun.
And the Chief Rabbi is a wise man, who had certainly noticed that people were being attracted to Judaism by the brilliance of the fiery comet. So how was he to reconcile the rabbinate with the renegade?
Shmuley generously solved the problem by resigning from Willesden Othodox Synagogue, as the critics wanted. He did this in his usual, self-effacing and low-key style, pausing only to accuse his enemies of "rabbinical terrorism" and warn that Anglo-Jewry was being thrust into a "Dark Age of anti-intellectuallism".
Oh, and then he mentioned his plan to launch a breakaway Orthodox synagogue in North London.
Boom! Deep Impact.
The orthodox Orthodoxy must be biting its fingernails. Shmuley has a track record at this sort of thing, the kind of track record that more usually leads to boardroom takeovers and political putsches. He is chairman of the L'Chaim society, which in Oxford has grown to be one of the strongest forces in the ancient university, second only to the Oxford Union.
So if he's establishing a new synagogue, it's going to be a success. No question. Failure is not an option in Shmuley's solar system.
At Willesden, during his two month tenure, he brought women down from the balcony to sit across the aisle from the men, separated only by a screen. He invited a woman to give her views on the Torah reading each Saturday. He introduced communal singing. And he increased the average attendance by 400 per cent.
If he was a business, you'd buy shares.
This could truly be an impact which changes the course of Jewish history. After all, any preacher who can coin phrases like, "If Judaism dies from the waist down, it also dies from the waist up," is guaranteed first-rate media coverage.
And Shmuley knows how to deal with that. The 11th Commandment, he claims, is: "Thou shalt do anything for publicity and recognition."
His critics had better pray that Robert Duvall is going to save them from the comet. Because the last time a comet struck Earth, 65 million years ago, it wiped out all the dinosaurs.
This time, it's going to be exactly the same!
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
12th June 1998
Aged four, I saw the light
So I must have done something to upset Paul Dacre, but I don’t know what. Maybe he was watching one of my TV shows and his watch broke, or his cat expired, or something.
Paul Dacre is editor of the Daily Mail, and last month he printed a large picture of me under the banner, "Aliens In Our Midst?"
It wasn’t my best picture. I admit that. I’m wearing a polo-neck sweater, which my wife simply would not permit, so this must have been taken back in the Seventies before I married Hanna. I haven’t shaved for three days, and by the rings around my eyes I couldn’t have slept for about three weeks. And my hair is wild – wild in that big, big Seventies way. Remember Farrah Fawcett? Remember Huggy Bear? So this is what my hair looks like in the Daily Mail. My hair is wearing flares.
I ought to get even, find a photo of Paul Dacre in a convivial condition with his tie round his collar and the wrong end of his cigarette in his face, and publish it on my Internet pages under the headline, "Visitors from the Planet Newt". But that wouldn’t be quite fair.
Because the Mail really means it. They are genuinely asking the reader – does Uri Geller have an extra-terrestrial link?
And the truth is... should I tell the truth?
These are strange days. The Mail carries a three-page account of alien abductions, in full colour, over its centre spread, in its biggest-selling issue of the week. Saturday centres – money can’t buy a spread like that. I’m truly delighted for the writer, my good friend Colin Wilson, with whom I’ve worked on numerous occasions throughout my career. This is unbeatable publicity for his book, Alien Dawn (Virgin, £16.99).
There is no cynicism, no skepticism here. No hint of a sneer. Just look at their headline: "Can everyone who claims alien abduction be a lunatic or a fraud? And how could one, a 14-year-old virgin, possibly have been pregnant? A leading British writer and criminologist set out to investigate – and came to believe the unbelievable."
Earlier last month, the Sun – Britain’s most popular daily, with something like 10,000,000 readers – carried a very similar report. Again, the editorial line was serious and urgent. The journalists expect their readers to approach with open minds, and depart convinced.
The same willingness to believe is appearing in Israel. Look at the current rash of UFO sightings. Credible witnesses are no longer being ignored. These claims are being reported seriously. Even more extraordinary was the serious attention granted to the Moshav Blob, a lump of green goo of possibly alien origin. Or the earnest intent with which the Israeli media waited for a predicted mass UFO landing.
Five years ago, these stories barely scraped into the papers, even when they were heralded with hoots of derision. One well-known actress talked about an abduction experience, and was written off, brutally, as a woman deranged by mid-life hormone changes.
Twenty-five years ago, my biographer who discovered me in Israel broached the subject of alien contacts – not abduction, just UFO sightings – and my career was almost destroyed. For two years I had been testing the world’s depths of open-mindedness, demonstrating telepathy and psychokinesis on live television. People believed in me, because they shared my experiences – my presence on TV made weird things happen in their own homes. But talk of aliens was too much.
No sane person could credit the idea of extra-terrestrial visitations. Only a madman, the argument ran, would continue to give Geller credence. Colin Wilson admits: "Uri, by Andrija Puharich, was so incredible that – in common with most people – I found it impossible to finish... I was inclined to wonder whether Puharich had invented some of the stories."
I distanced myself from the biography pretty fast. I issued my own version, playing down the out-of-this-world stuff and emphasising the homely, spoon-bending incidents.
It was the beginning of a bad time for me. I became addicted to my own wealth, going on obscene spending sprees and almost killing myself with an eating disorder that had me gobbling everything on the menu each night before crawling into the bathroom to vomit it all away.
In the end, I had to retire from public life and restore my sanity in a Japanese hideaway.
What if I had stood by the truth? What if I’d faced the world and said, "I have had encounters with beings who could not possibly be human. I believe my powers come, not from within, but from a source beyond the tiny confines of this planet.
"When I was four years old, an inexplicable urge led me into a deserted Arabic garden in Tel Aviv, and something happened to me there which might be explained by the words, ‘Alien Abduction’. I saw a light, a shining disc in the sky. The light touched me. A figure stood before me, and it was not a human figure. Then I lost consciousness. When I came to, many hours had passed. I ran home to tell my mother and, of course, she did not believe me. But I can date the emergence of my powers from that day."
What if I had revealed the extraordinary encounters both Andrija and I witnessed in Israel – and which we agreed to keep secret, knowing that we could be locked up as maniacs if we dared to breathe a word?
What if, what if... That’s a child’s game. The question is not whether I was right to be afraid of speaking out then. The question is whether I would be wise to speak out now. The question is how much longer I can live privately with what I have seen and experienced.
Is the international media truly opening its mind? Because if that is so, when they pose the question ‘Are there aliens in our midst?’ it is time to tell them the truth.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
19th June 1998
The unkindest
cut of them all She's the
most famous Jewish woman since Golda Meir. The only thing about the Dana International
story which makes me throw my hands over my head and scream, "No! No!" - her
blood-curdling allusions to the operation that turned him into her. When she
won Eurovision the Israeli singer who used to be a boy named Yaron Cohen said:
"After several years of wearing dresses and high heels, I decided I needed a
little, well, cosmetic surgery to feel completely myself. "Of course,
I was nervous - I hate going to the dentist. But I talked to girlfriends who
had been through the process. I knew what was ahead. I knew there would be a
lot of pain, and sure, it was a tough week. But once I was through that, I was
a new person." The 'process'?
A 'tough week'? It leaves far too much to the imagination. Sex change is more
than cosmetic. It's fundamental. Thinking about the physical courage required
to lie down on a hospital matress and say, "Go ahead, Doc - chop it off" made
me realise what a true heroine Dana is. Consider
what she's fighting: her fear, her family's attitudes, her neighbours' gossip,
her government's disapproval, her religion's condemnation. Think how
much easier it would be to carry on disobeying the Torah in secret. Dana admits
she used to frequent the parks "where boys hang around to meet other boys".
According to Judaic law, boys with boys is to'evah, an abomination -
but at least a quarter of Jewish men have committed the abomination. In Israel
25,000 people are openly gay - and at least as many more would love to share
Dana's bravery and come out themselves. Nowhere
in the Torah is a sex change forbidden. This minor fact does not mollify the
Shas party, and Knesset deputy Shlomo Ben-Izri reacted to Dana's selection for
Eurovision with this attack: "Such things were unheard of, even in Sodom. This
hybrid creature, a cross between a man and a woman, is not the kind of produce
we need to represent the chosen people." By winning,
she altered that. Benjamin Netanyahu's office phoned to congratulate her - it's
doubtful whether he would have called to commiserate had she come second. Ministers
like Moshe Katsav were suddenly anxious to be photographed with her.Winning
atones for a whole lifetime of transgressions. To thousands
of Israelis who did not possess her full quotient of reckless courage, Dana
is an icon. They flocked to her Tel Aviv apartment after the victory - "cheering
for freedom," she says, "cheering for human rights, for democracy. I do not
need the rabbis to tell me I am acceptable to God. I have my own romance going
on with the Lord." At the weekend
she joined a British celebration for Gay Pride, performing at the Polo Lounge
in Wilson Street, Glasgow. Her single Diva is on worldwide release after the
Hebrew-speaking chairman of Sony Music UK, Paul Burger, signed her. She has
already sold millions of cassettes in the Middle East, particularly Eygpt and
Jordan where pirate tapes were widely available until rumours spread she was
a Mossad-trained corrupter of youth and her music was banned. Next April's
Gay Pride Week in Israel will gather huge impetus from her triumph, with organisers
already promising a march and a motorcade from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. The Jewish
world had better accept her - she's the most formidable ambassador Israel has
invented for years.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
26th June 1998
Fight
evil on the internet There is a hazy state
between nightmare and waking, and I am in that haze. A bad dream lingers in
the throat and on the tongue like a stale taste. The staleness can go on and
on, all day, poisoning everything. A bad dream is one that
can really come true. My bad dream is Israel,
crippled and ultimately destroyed by the technology I am working so hard to
promote. I was awake when I dreamed
it. I am researching a novel, something different from my psychological thriller
Ella, something in the political arena. In the first pages Israel is held to
ransom by anonymous computer hackers. My inspiration was a remark by a former
FBI agent, who warned that ten skilled programmers with Internet access could
have America at their mercy within 90 days. If this was possible, what
could those ten terrorists wreak upon Israel - a state more vulnerable, more
plotted against and more dependent on electronic defence systems than any place
on earth? There was no shortage of
research material. Half a dozen newsgroups - computerised noticeboards where
anyone can pin up a message - are devoted to discussing the subject. In a virtual
community where everyone is computer literate and many are dependent on technology
for their income, this topic affects everyone. Can computers be used to blackmail
governments? To subvert justice? To kill? The answer, I quickly discovered,
is yes. Yes. Yes. And that begs another question,
to which there can be no answer - is evil unavoidably present in new technology? Up to now this argument
has centred chiefly on pornography. But the abuse of file transfers, to send
perverted pictures around the world, is of little significance compared to the
obliteration of a country, the crushing of its culture, the slaughter of its
people. It is widely believed that
the American bombing raid on Baghdad which launched the Gulf War in 1991 was
achieved by infecting Iraq's central radar computer with a virus which turned
co-ordinates to soup. What if Saddam Hussein, alerted to the practical possibilities
of developing software bugs, decided to retaliate - first blinding Israel's
electronic eyes and then sending over waves of Scuds? Worse - what if any anti-Zionist
terrorist, anywhere in the world, created the virus? No capital is needed -
just a patient, methodical mind and access to the 'net, available at any university
in the West. The nightmare deepens. All
private computer networks, even military intranets, have 'trapdoors' to give
technicians access when the system fouls up. If this trapdoor is discovered,
the damage possible is limited only by the hacker's imagination. All systems, however secure,
are built with parts manufactured elsewhere. No army makes its own chips. What
guarantee is there that Israel's most sensitive computers were not infected
at the construction stage, with chips programmed to self-destruct or corrupt
at a give signal or time? What if, even now, terrorists are waiting for a pre-programmed
date, when Israel's satellite links will implode? Or its air traffic control
systems? Its mobile phone networks? Its television stations? KGB technicians invented
an explosive device which radiates electromagnetic pulses, waves of energy that
blow out every piece of electronics in range. James Bond battled this weapon
in Goldeneye - but the KGB's secrets are on the open market now, and even superheroes
can't tell who is buying the technology of destruction today. There is no waking from
this nightmare. It is too real. All we can do is fight. And, as every Israeli
knows, the surest way to fight fire is with fire. Because we cannot ignore
this technology, we must all become acquainted with it. Everyone who values
freedom must take the trouble to understand how to access the Internet. It needn't
cost anything - there are plenty of cyber cafes where you can get a lesson in
web-surfing for the price of a cup of coffee. Learn how to contact government
organisations, and eMail them - let them know you're out there. Learn how to
download up-to-date data. Make the people who run the vital systems aware of
their vulnerability. Until now, an unspoken arrogance
has been the Achilles heel of these programmers. They imagined they were safe
from interference, because the ordinary mass of humanity would never use their
systems. They forgot that terrorists are not part of the ordinary mass of humanity. Today, using the Internet
is as simple and as basic a factor of freedom as using your vote. Learn to do
it.
Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com and
e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
3rd July 1998
Tell us truth on stolen children
I was one of nine children. My eight older brothers and sisters were all aborted before I was born. My father did not want them, so they died. A father has that power.
Why he let me come into the world alive, I don't know. He relented once. For my mother, that was enough. She wasn't asking any questions. My father has been dead almost 20 years, so I can't ask him any questions either, though I learned of this private holocaust only recently.
Holocaust is not too violent a word. Eight children, killed before they even possessed names, constitute a tribal slaughter, a systematic attempt to rip out one chapter from the book of mankind.
If I had not been allowed to live, or my mother had never spoken of her tragedy, the slaughter would have been complete. My brothers and sisters would have been utterly unremembered - they could simply not have existed. This is the way holocausts are supposed to work.
In his memoire of Auschwitz, The Truce, Primo Levi remembers a crippled boy of three called Hurbinek. The child could not speak, and one of the women had given him the meaningless name out of pity.
Though he was fiercely alive, he was unable to communicate anything - what his real name was, who his parents had been, what he needed. He died dumb, and Levi noted: "Nothing remains of him - he bears witness through these words of mine."
Levi knew his responsibility to the ones who did not survive. They were to bear witness to the holocaust through him.
I wish I could claim my brothers and sisters are alive through me, that my soul comprises their souls and that their flames flicker in my flame. But the simple fact is that nothing remains of them, except my words and my mother's thoughts.
They could not speak, and they cannot bear witness, except through me.
There is a man who, although he is untrained, believes himself a Rabbi, named Uzi Meshulam. He is imprisoned near Netanyah for trying to bear witness for 400 Yemeni children, forcibly parted from their families in the Forties and Fifties, to be sold.
Operation Magic Carpet, the evacuation of 50,000 Jews from Yemeni to the newborn state of Israel, yielded an unexpected benefit for someone. Was it the government, the refugee camp officials, the doctors or the army who arranged for children to disappear from nursery wards and reappear in the European and American homes of childless Jewish couples?
Whoever was responsible, he acted like a father who orders his wife to have abortions. His power was absolute.
The fact of this trade in human beings, which was so nearly forgotten forever, cannot now be ignored. Rabbi Meshulam though his often desperate attempts to bear witness, has seen to that.
The Yemeni parents were told their children had died and been buried before their families could see the corpses.
The evacuation had been conducted amid chaos, and fatalities were inevitable. Many of the refugee children were malnourished. Yet it seems strange that, according to Rabbi Meshulam and the Yemen Jewish group Mishkan Oahlim, it was the fair-skinned children who died.
Fair-skinned children were more easily absorbed into the families of the Ashkenazi.
When mass graves at the Sha'ar Menashe and Karkur Ein-Irron cemetaries were opened last year, they were empty. So where are the children now?
They will be about my age, wholly unaware of their true parentage, as I was ignorant of my siblings' existence. If Rabbi Meshulam, who has suffered appalling conditions in jail, is denied the right to freedom, then the truth will never come out.
No one will know who stole these children, or who sold them, and to whom. They will carry their secret tragedy with them all their lives, and not ever be aware of its existence.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
10th July 1998
Never
forget to remember Stare at
a word for long enough and it becomes meaningless. An awkward jumble of syllables
collapses at the spot where the sensible word stood. I've experienced this countless
times since childhood, and like dejá vu it is always disconcerting. Maybe
it only happens to me. Maybe it indicates latent dyslexia. But it's just happened
again. I was staring
at the word 'monument' when it tumbled down. I had wondered if, sometimes, it
could mean "of one mind, single-mindedly". (It's a thought - Mono + mental).
A trip to the dictionary pieced the word together again - 'monument' derives
from the Latin 'monere,' to remember, plus the suffix 'mentum' which transforms
a verb into a noun, and action into an object. Literally,
'monument' means 'memory made tangible'. And that is a chilling definition of
Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Berlin's monument to the Holocaust. I visited
the site a few weeks ago when I was in the German capital for a television special,
but it was difficult to see much of this major extension to the old Berlin Museum,
in the Kreuzberg district. What fascinated
me was the architect's technique in shaping the building. He took a map of Berlin
and marked the homes of celebrated Jews whose work had affected German culture.
Then he marked random addresses of people called Berlin - which is, of course,
the most common Jewish name in the city. Pairs of
homes were joined by lines. Where the lines crossed the proposed site of the
museum, a wall was built. The technique is akin to ley-lines, the paths of energy
which flow between ancient sites and sacred places. The result is chaotic -
a collision of edges and corners, jagged spaces and sheer surfaces. A building
where conventional sense has lost its meaning, like a word that collapses when
we stare too long. Descriptions
of its interior are terrifying. A staircase sinks into the ground, passing through
six voids, like a descent into hell. Two paths open up into the basement, instantly
reminding me of the dual files into which newcomers to the concentration camps
were sorted - those who marched straight to the gas chambers, and those who
marched to a living death. When the
memory is madness, the monument must take leave of reason. Libeskind signs off
from any kind of thought which can be expressed in words with an exitless void,
walled by measureless slabs of concrete and lit by a single ray of light so
slender as to be virtually extinguished. It's a long,
cold memory. Reviving, and looking around my room in Sonning, is like waking
up in a different lifetime. Maybe that is possible - I was born in 1946, conceived
a few months after the Allied liberation of Sobibor and Auschwitz. If my soul
was reincarnated, very likely it was made available by Zyklon B. What evils
will demand monuments in this lifetime? What atrocities too hideous to forget,
for fear of being repeated? There have been so many since 1946… What we
need is a monument to keep us from forgetting the current moment. We can recall
the past, but we always ignore the present. We need a monument, something which
is forever shouting, "Remember what you are doing, right now! Remember yourself!
Stop walking around in a haze of amnesia, like you can't remember all the wrongs
that surround you! Remember everything can be better! Remember to act! Remember
NOW!!" These monuments
should be everywhere. There should be one, vast and massive and huge, in Jerusalem.
Something so enormous that every Jew, Muslim and Christian in the city would
remember it every minute of the day. Something to remind us and spur us into
hope and action. A monument
to remind us - if we don't stop sleep-walking, the atrocities will engulf every
one of us, and swallow the whole world. A monument
that screams, "Remember your senses! Remember RIGHT NOW!!!" Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
17th July 1998
Thank
God for Diana's help Scene: A cloud, with a big
polished oak table. A lot of men with long white beards sit on furled cherubs,
and at their head is the biggest, whitest beard of the lot. God has called a
board meeting. And he's looking for radical action. God: So 30,000,000 Britons
watch a football match on TV. Meanwhile, and for the first time this century,
we've got less than 300,000 Jews in Britain. Isaiah, you got the flow charts,
the percentages? Isaiah: Yes, chief, that's
a one per cent conversion rate. God: One per cent! You show
me a businessman who thinks one per cent is a good return, I'll show you a bankrupt.
Moses - gimme solutions. Moses: Chief, it's a product
problem. The product is outdated, time's change, fads go fut, no one wants what
we're selling any more. God: Can we update? Repackage?
Judaism '98! Moses: We've got a rabbi,
a real livewire called Shmuley, working on that… God: He's doing good? Moses: They kicked him out
of synagogue. God: It's a start. Daniel: What we need is
original products. Brand new. God: Trust you to walk straight
into the lion's den. Any specifics? Daniel: How about an icon?
Someone dead, it saves embarassment - but with a living message. God: We tried that with
Elvis. People laughed. Daniel: He was fat, it would
never have worked. I was thinking - Diana. A new religion, Diana as the icon.
And just one commandment, people nowadays can't be bothered to read through
ten. They start channel-hopping before they get to Number Seven. God: Ain't that the truth.
OK, so what is this big commandment, this Numero Uno product message? Daniel: Thou shalt love!
God: She's great. She's
dynamite. I haven't had prayer volume like this since the Flood. And you know,
those prayers back then were very monotonous - oh Lord, teacheth me to swim!
This time it's quality. People wanting to be better parents, people wanting
to forgive and love and lose the hypocrisy. I tell you, the girl's a sensation.
And I'll tell you why it is - she's a woman. People don't feel threatened by
a female. We should have used a woman messiah millennia ago. Job: The rabbis would never
have permitted it. God: Well, they better get
permitting now or it's your Job on the line. (He chuckles warmly and deeply,
a noise like stars colliding that rumbles through the galaxies.) So Isaiah,
you going to do the Numbers-crunching? Isaiah: As you can see from
this three-D graphical representation… God: What's wrong with flip-charts?
Nobody do flip-charts any more? Isaiah: You can't log on
to the internet with a flip-chart, chief. And the net's where we're drawing
our data. Take a look at this Diana tribute index. We got 564 places where you
can point your computer to pay your respects to her memory and reflect on her
great love. God: Seriously? Isaiah: Would I lie to you?
This is how the faithful show their devotion. You don't have to go to synagogue
with our new product, but you still have to put in the time. Maintaining a web-site
is work intensive. It demonstrates real commitment. God: How are the older products
faring? Isaiah: OK, so we log onto
a search engine and run a check on Judaism sites - there's 156 listed. Or we
search on Jesus Christ, and we get back 531 sites. But remember - that 564 figure
for Diana, that's just the tribute pages. It doesn't include news reports, official
royal pages, conspiracy theories, bad-taste spoofs or pictures from the crash. God: I've had the Archbishop
of York complaining to me this is a cult, it's distracting focus from my magnificence.
How do we answer him? Daniel: Tell him if he can't
stand the heat, he ought to get out of the furnace. God: So what kind of stuff
have we got on those web-sites? Isaiah: I adore this one,
take a look - you've got Diana's name in twinkling stars, while one of those
Seventies-style home organs plays Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven. Is that
kitsch? And listen, I can download Diana's Funeral videotape labels, Diana computer
wallpaper, a list of Diana's favourite 50 things. God: Am I in the 50? Isaiah: Frankly, chief,
no. But Jeffrey Archer is. God: It's almost the same
thing. I like this one with the dolphins. Looks like a 13-year-old girl has
designed this one. Where's she from - Fort Worth, Texas. Hey, I think I've heard
some of her prayers sometimes. Nice site. This girl has got the point: dolphins
are symbols of my deep, natural love, and so is Diana. Moses: My one concern, chief,
is quality. Like the Bible - you and me went to a lot of trouble, getting the
language right, building in the secret code. And the temples and the cathedrals,
they didn't just appear overnight. They took centuries. Now I call that appropriate
devotion. God: Agreed, most of these
web-sites look like third form art projects. But I figure, that's the way Diana
was. A bit gauche, gaudy sometimes, not the smartest cookie - but all that honest
emotion, all that affection. You couldn't miss it. And that's what I see in
these internet pages. Quality shmality, this is real love. Isaiah: At least this is
one religion that isn't going to start any wars. God: That reminds me - you
got the latest on India-Pakistan? Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
(So the board passed a resolution and Diana became the official figurehead of
a worldwide religion. It enjoyed global launch advertising on an unprecedented
scale - more people had watched the Diana funeral than even the Renault Clio
ad featuring Nicole's wedding.
Market penetration was phenomenal - Diana had been the most photographed woman
in the world. And product take-up was virtually 100 per cent. Everyone bought
the message. So the following week's heavenly board-meeting was upbeat.)
24th July 1998
Stone
me! Now ornaments fly You might
find this hard to believe. OK, you won't believe it. In fact, you're going to
be sure I'm making this up. But I'm not. One of my
ornaments has teleported itself through the wall. See, I told
you - you don't believe me. Would it help you to know I couldn't believe it
myself at first? And neither could the friend who saw it happen. Sefi, who
is a highly successful Israeli architect, was staying in my home for a few nights,
and he was trying manfully to share my interest in the internet one evening
while I surfed the World Wide Web. He was trying, but his attention was wandering.
I guess watching someone else operate a computer can be thrilling for only so
long. So he started
doodling on a loose sheet of paper on top of the photocopier, and that's when
the ornament appeared. It was a small, light blue, stone globe, and it was suddenly
rolling across the photocopier lid. The stone
was carved by South African bushmen, and had been given to me by a prospector,
a real Indiana Jones type, who joined me on an expedition dowsing for minerals
in the Kalahari. We struck a vein of gold, and 'Indiana' gave me the rock because
he said it looked like Earth from outer space - I think he suspected I was an
alien. Well, this
little blue stone certainly spaced me out. It lived in the family room, on a
high shelf. How could it materialise in the air and drop softly onto a piece
of office equipment? And why would this happen? I offered
the stone to Sefi, as a permanent reminder of the realm beyond our senses, but
he didn't want it. He said he liked things in his home to stay where he put
them. Now here's
something you will be able to believe. Physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team
at the University of Innsbruck has succeeded in teleporting sub-atomic particles
across his laboratory, exploiting a loophole in reality whereby electrons become
'entangled' - mimicking each other even where there is no physical connection. You believe
Dr Zeilinger, don't you? Even though it takes ultra high-powered microscopes
to observe electrons? And even though you didn't see it happen yourself? Of course
you do. You're a modern Jew. And modern Jews trust science - even when they
don't trust the tales of columnists, and the evidence of respectable businessmen…
even when they don't believe their own eyes. So by the
same token, even if your name is Cohen, you probably didn't believe that all
Cohanim are directly descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses. Until, that
is, the scientists proved it. Being a
Jew means your mother was Jewish, but being one of the priestly caste means
your father was also one of the elect. In other words, the caste-mark passes
from son to son to son. And a story passes too - that Aaron's male descendants
served in the Temple of Solomon after the Exodus, and only their sons were admitted
into the priesthood. The tradition has been continued ever since - long after
the story was dismissed by many as a fairy-tale. When David
Goldstein, lecturer in evolutionary biology at Oxford University, conducted
a study into the genetic make-up of 306 Jewish men, he was astonished to discover
the Cohanim were indeed all descended from one man who lived 2,000 to 3,000
years ago. Their Y chromosomes, a major part of their bodies' cellular blueprints,
shared vital features - features not found in the other men. Mr Goldstein
stops short of identifying Aaron as the common ancestor. To be scientifically
certain, he would have to conduct DNA tests on Aaron's body, which is about
as likely as finding the stone tablets which his brother used to note down God's
Law, tucked in a back corner of a junk shop in Golders Green. So all we've
got as evidence is the testimony of thousands of Jews, over hundreds of years.
Half of the story has been demonstrated true - but as for the rest… it's not
what the scientists would call proof, is it? Unbelievable. Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
31st July 1998
Should
Hitler be killed if he were still alive now? In the best thrillers,
you know the ending from the very first moment. Watch Edward Fox in The Day
Of The Jackal and you'll be breathless with suspense, even though it's plain
his nameless assassin cannot kill Charles de Gaulle. History didn't happen that
way. But as the rifle sights are trained on the back of president's head, you're
squinting through the cracks between your fingers. I felt the same thrill this
week as an argument flared over the British secret service plots to assassinate
Hitler. In autumn 1941, 12 Polish resistance fighters trained by Britain's Special
Operations Executive laid explosives along the Freidorf-Schwarzwasser railway
line. The unit, armed with rifles
and grenades, split into six bomb-makers, five look-outs and a radio operator.
Their target - the Führerzug, Hitler's private train. As the locomotive
thundered through the freezing Polish countryside, several kilos of high explosive
were detonated. The line was blocked for two days. 430 Germans died. Adolf Hitler
was not among them. His train had made an unscheduled stop, allowing another
to go ahead. The secret documents which
revealed Britain's plans to finish the Führer also uncovered a deep split
of opinion, with some generals fearing that Hitler's death could help Germany.
With their insane, blundering strategist gone, the Reich could be reborn - and
even if it lost the war, a Fourth Reich might rise from the ashes, inspired
by the Holy Martyr Hitler. Incredibly, that split continues.
Historians have argued furiously this week that Hitler alive was a powerful
asset to the Allies - and Hitler dead was worse than useless. Strong hints emerged
that Churchill and Roosevelt could have agreed to hold back from assassination,
to prolong the war and give Stalin's Red Army the opportunity of annexing Eastern
Europe. Should Hitler have been
assassinated? No one has suggested putting the question to an imaginary inhabitant
of Warsaw during the massacre of August 1942. Suppose you could travel back
to a death-camp, Treblinka or Sobibor, and ask one of the skeletons in striped
rags - "Ought we kill Hitler?" What would their answer be? Poland 1941 was not the
first time Hitler had cheated death. He was gassed in the Flanders trenches
- and when police machine-gunned Nazi marchers in Munich on November 9, 1923,
Hitler's bodyguard was killed shielding the Führer from the bullets. And
it would not be the last death-plot - on July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Stauffenburg
placed at bomb at Hitler's feet in Rastenburg. Hitler escaped serious injury
- it was the colonel who died, by firing squad the next day. His ability to survive seemed
almost paranormal, as if by a series of evil miracles. He certainly believed
in his own psychic abilities - it is hard to know how much of the rumoured Nazi
obsession with black masses and occult ritual orgies was invented by propagandists,
but Hitler's reliance on astrologers is unquestioned. Karl Ernst Krafft attracted
German High Command's attention by predicting the bombing of a beer-hall in
November 1939, when seven people died in a blast minutes after Hitler left the
podium. Krafft became Nazi astrologer-in-chief,
but he was made the scapegoat when Hess was captured in Scotland, and suffered
a nervous breakdown in prison when Goebbels demanded a series of false forecasts
for propaganda. Meanwhile SOE chief Colin
Gubbins was discussing murder plots with Churchill. Marksmen with Mausers and
telescopic sights could pick off the Führer as he took his customary morning
stroll at the Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps; anthrax could be injected
into his milk or his water (Hitler was a tea addict); a hypodermic syringe disguised
as a fountain pen could be plunged into the dictator's rear end; an SAS team
could parachute in to obliterate his bullet-proof Mercedes with a bazooka. It's all chillingly fascinating
- even though we know Hitler was not blown up by partisans, he was not a victim
of bad astrology and he did not die at the point of a poisoned fountain pen.
He was left to kill himself in his bunker, to become a neo-Nazi icon despite
the best efforts of the SOE. The fact is, when governments
plot to assassinate leaders they do it in a half-hearted fashion. Hitler's name
might have been written on a death warrrant, but it was only in pencil. The
same applied to Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot and Slobodan
Milosevic. The sabre rattles, but it never applies the coup de grace. Only the
lone gunman can assassinate - and then the victim is usually not a genocidal
maniac but a man of peace, a Lincoln, a Gandhi, a Rabin. When Saddam wrote the death
warrant of the Kurds, and Milosevic the Bosnian Muslims', they did not use pencil. So imagine yourself in 1941,
in Brest-Litovsk. In Minsk. In Vilna, in Kovno, in Riga, in Jelgava, in Cernowitz,
in Marculesti, in Lvov, in David Grodek, in Pinsk, in Kamenets Podolsk, in Kishinev,
in Vienna, in Lublin, in Bremen. In Auschwitz. And answer the question:
"If it is humanly possible, should Hitler be killed today?" Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
7th August 1998
My imaginary patent takes as precedent the £125 million research deal between the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Roche Holdings with a Reykjavik biotech company, DeCode Genetics. Their aim: to identify the genetic specifics which make Icelanders what they are.
Like Jews, Icelanders have been racially isolated for countless generations. Their detachment was geographic rather than cultural, but the net effect was the same - predisposition to certain diseases, certain personality traits, certain looks. With Jews it's Tays-Sachs disease, dark eyes and hair, and an indomitable survival streak. With Icelanders, it's diabetes, blond hair and blue eyes, and a sense of humour so dry you could use it as blotting paper.
The Iceland project isn't the first of its kind. A study of 270 islanders on Tristan da Cunha - 90 per cent of that Atlantic outcrop's population - identified two genes which could cause asthma, afflicting more than half of the subjects.
But Roche and DeCode aren't spending £125 million to locate the possible causes of diabetes and Iceland's other generic illnesses, schizophrenia and colon cancer. For American women seeking fertilisation by sperm donor, the most desirable characteristic - more than high intelligence, more than height, more than good teeth - is blues eyes.
The first scientists to patent the human gene for blue eyes or blond hair will be patenting a license to print money, in high denomination bills.
So when the DNA permutation is located that provides the Jews' acute business instinct and deep family bonding, I want to be on the board of directors.
Already, patents are filed on genes determining Obesity (by Hoffmann La Roche), Baldness (Columbia University), Cardiovascular Disease (Myriad Genetics/Novartis), Alzheimer's (Glaxo) and Melanomas (Millennium Pharmaceuticals).
It seems ridiculous that the rights to basic elements of human bodies can be owned by private corporations. But where immense sums of money are involved, ridiculous things happen - and the investment worldwide on the Human Genome Project to unravel our DNA code makes Israel's defence budget look like pocket money.
How big is the project? Simon Foote of the Genetics and Bioinformatics Group puts it this way: "The human genome is comprised of some 3,000 million residues. Analysing their sequence is akin to taking 10 copies of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, all 12 volumes, ripping each page into 300 small pieces, placing all the pieces into a large barrel and thoroughly mixing them - then trying to put all the pieces together again."
And incredibly, the first stage of this mindbending jigsaw is already complete. During the past decade, scientists have charted the Physical Map - a rough aerial view with major landmarks in place, which can now be redrawn in greater and greater detail.
If the Human Genome Project was simply a means to eradicating disease in future generations, it would pose major ethical problems. Should every foetus with congenital defects be aborted or doctored? Is a predisposition to Alzheimer's or lung cancer reason enough for pregnancy termination? And if the answer to that seems easy, remember that Ashkenazi couples are routinely screened for Tay-Sachs abnormalities, and most Western hospitals test unborn children for Downs Syndrome and basic physical problems.
And it isn't that simple - it's obscenely complex. For individuals to protect their babies against gene disorders will be an expensive business. For organ donor companies, the profits will be limitless if cloning technology combines with DNA engineering to create animals which grow human body parts.
And for political regimes like Hitler's Germany, Stalin's USSR, Botha's South Africa or Saddam's Iraq, the technique will exist to identify ethnic groupings with 100 per cent accuracy.
In Russia and Europe, 50 years ago, with birth certificates and labour camps as their crude weapons, the forces of anti-Semitism made a massive attempt at genocide.
Next time the brutality will be as great. But the weapons will be genome coding and abortion. And abortion is a sentence which no one can survive.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
14th August 1998
Our end will be in Jerusalem
You can't say much in 150 words. Try it some time. Describe something, paint a verbal picture, give it beginning, middle and end, get to the point and include a brief digression, sign off with something witty or poignant - all in 150 words.
I found this out when British Airways asked me to contribute a series of 150-word travel articles to their in-flight magazine. "Anywhere weird," they said. "Mysterious ruins, paranormal places - set our readers' spines tingling." And I thought, where's weirder than Jerusalem? So I started there.
To read 150 words takes about a minute, and I spent two hours cramming what I felt about Jerusalem into that single minute. The most difficult part was censoring my feelings - there are limits to what you can say to a person sitting in a metal straw being blown through the air at 600mph. They're probably scared enough already. And when I started to analyse my feelings about Jerusalem, I realised they were terrifying.
Because Jerusalem is the one place on Earth that can plunge us all into the pit of obliteration.
It seems to act as a focus of self-destruction, as if the blazing heat of mankind's will to violence were shining through a magnifying glass and burning a hole in the map at the point marked Yerushalayim. Seeking an image to show the way religion and war complemented each other in the city, I wrote I had heard a man weeping for his sins at the Wailing Wall, and a woman crying out for her children after a suicide bomb ripped a bus apart. And the suicide bomb is an eternal symbol of this Eternal City. It's the I'm-taking-you-all-with-me death.
Jerusalem is the holy city of Christians, who believe Jesus allowed himself to be put to death to wipe out sin - a kind of transcendental suicide bomb. It's a holy Muslim city, where the Prophet Mohammed is supposed to have ascended into heaven from the Dome of the Rock. And it's the fulcrum of Judaism - where Solomon built his Temple and the Romans tore it down. When the Emperor Julian attempted to have it rebuilt in AD 363, fireballs burst from the earth and scattered his workmen.
The Holy Crusades were fought for centuries over Jerusalem. The Six Day War was fought for it too, and paratrooper Uri Geller got himself shot in the arm. What had once been a United Nations dream, as an international community without frontiers, had degenerated into a UN nightmare, as bad as Berlin - Jerusalem was all frontiers, and everyone was drawing them in different places. So Israel settled the question, and the city became a UN sulk - even now, some countries insist Tel Aviv has to be the national capital, and accordingly send their ambassadors there.
So what if the Romans had possessed the H-bomb? Would the Jewish Revolt of AD70 have ended with the sacking of a temple? Or would Vespasian have turned the Golan Heights to dust and set the Dead Sea ablaze?
Would Richard the Lionheart, repulsed within sight of the Crusade's holy goal, have accepted defeat if he'd had Scuds? With atomic warheads? Would he have wiped out what he could not possess - and died a holy death to achieve it?
If, if… Would King Hussein have defended his city borders with Pershing missiles? Would we have got our retaliation in first with nuclear Exocets? You know the answer, if you dare to face it.
History began in the Middle East, with the invention of writing. (Until we could write, we had no real history.) History records David captured Yerushalayim from the Canaanites around 1,000BC. It had probably been settled long before that. And it will continue - always, until the end of history, there will be a Jerusalem.
And if history is anything to go by, Jerusalem is where the end will come.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
21st August 1998
The Yahweh Springer Show Camera: Wide pan across
jeering, baying audience of rough, coarse-faced men and women. They all have
wings. And halos. Music: Big, blaring
and beaty. Titles: Massive, ornate
gold lettering thumps into the screen - The Yahweh Springer Show!! And then,
spinning for maximum impact, the theme of today's programme - Judgment Day!!! Camera: Yahweh Springer bounds down the stairs towards the
stage, cleaving through the adoring angels like a prophet parting seas. He's
average height, with a clipped white beard and shining white locks, but his
tanned face looks early 50s, and his hyped-up energy is pure 20-something. Angels: Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Camera: Yahweh Springer, the highest-paid chat show host in the universe,
is grasping hands and trading friendly punches with frantic delight as the audience
pants to glimpse him. His double-breasted suit glows. Even his multi-coloured
tie has its own divine aura. Yahweh: Thank-you, and if you thought last week's show, 'Hi Honey I'm The
Messiah', was going to be hard to top - get this! In tonight's studio we're
dishing out eternal damnation! Heavenly retribution! And the ultimate lie detector
test! It's… Judgment Day! Angels: Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yahweh (to fat, confidant-looking Rabbi in tubular chair onstage): Your
name's Rabbi Eli Goldstein, right? Rabbi: I got nothing to fear. Yahweh (incredulously): You don't fear me? And you a God-fearing man? Bad
start, Rabbi. Rabbi (suddenly sweating): I did everything just like you said. I kept
my family indoors on the Shabbat. I never made out with my wife when she was
menstruating. Angels: Wooo! Wooo-wooo-wooo-wooo! (Three-second bleep out, as someone in row three, very much in the Prophet
Elijah's vicinity, hurls an obscene coment) Rabbi: Everything I ate was kosher, I never touched unclean - not even
a packet of pork scratchings. Yahweh: Looks like you didn't starve on it. Rabbi: It's my hormones, is it my fault if I got a slow metabolism? Yahweh: No. But what I want to ask you, is this your fault? Camera: Backstage, a girl with black hair and dark rings round her eyes
is pushed forward by stagehands. Her legs, thin as wire, will barely hold her.
She slumps in a chair half-turned to the rabbi's and stares in terror at the
howling angels. She is 13 years old.) Rabbi: I've never seen this child. Nothing to do with… (he starts to grin,
and lets off a fat, smarmy chuckle) Are you going to suggest this is my illegitimate
daughter? The big surprise? Because I got news for you - your researchers have
goofed. My private life has been blameless! Angels: Lie test! Lie test! Lie test! Rabbi: Sure. (He sits back while a pillar of salt is levelled at his head.
The pillar crumbles. Angels cheer and chant, and the rabbi grins and brandishes
his fists aloft.) Yahweh: This girl's no relation of yours. She just happens to live ten
miles down the road from your Jerusalem apartment… Rabbi: She's Palestinian! Anyone can see that! So maybe I've seen her running
around in those roadside gangs - maybe she's hurled a rock at my car once in
a while, yeah? What am I supposed to do - get out and pat her on the head? Yahweh: I don't know if you've seen her before. Well, OK, I do know, because
I'm omniscient… Angels: Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yahweh:... but what I don't know is this. How come you're well-fed and
she's not? Rabbi (baffled): It's the political situation. Yahweh: OK, I'm not expressing myself very clearly. How come you're well-fed
and she's not, and you don't seem to care? This girl sits down, you quite rightly
think immediately, 'She's young enough to be my daughter'. And then you decide,
'No, she can't be, and what the hell, she's not Jewish. She's an Arab.' Isn't
that what went through your mind? Rabbi: Well… Yahweh: Am I right? (He points his microphone at another pillar of salt.) Rabbi: Yes! Yes! Yahweh: So it doesn't matter if she starves? Just so long as some of your flock,
the ones who get government-issue batons and guns, so long as they make sure
she doesn't hurl too many rocks at your car? Right? Rabbi (screaming): Haven't I got enough to do looking after Jewish souls? You
want me to care about Muslims too? (Long series of bleeps as the Prophet Elijah blows his cool and plunges out
of of the third row onto the stage, fists flailing. He slaps the rabbi's glasses
off his face and plants a foot in the large, absorbent stomach before four crew
men drag him off and back into the heavenly congregation. Yahweh watches, mouth set in prim disapproval and arms folded.) Cut to - Yahweh's Final Thought: Judgment's never easy. It's something no deity
takes lightly. And believe me - when it comes to your turn, I'll be reading
my research carefully. But ask yourself this question now: Am I living by the
rules? Or just by the rulebook? Until next week, when we're going to be confronting
Noah with his alcohol problem… shalom. End title: Five raucous angels bawl out "Tell Yahweh he's groovy" to the tune
of Tell Laura I Love Her. Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published
by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline
Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
28th August 1998
If only Diana had been a Jew
She was always the Fairytale Princess, and fairytales are vicious stories, full of curses and misery and bloodshed. Perhaps we should have expected her to die.
But when it happened, the world was so terribly shocked that our reactions became a bigger issue than her death.
I heard the news on CNN, very early on the Sunday morning, in the gym of a Berlin hotel. The previous night I had recorded a light-hearted TV show, and I was planning to take the family shopping on the Ku'damm after breakfast. I have to bicycle hard for 50 or 60 minutes, to damp down my energy levels, first thing in the day. At home, I write while I cycle, but in Berlin I didn't have my specially adapted machine. So I watched TV.
I'm telling you this to emphasise the mundanity of it. I was in an anonymous hotel. I wasn't doing anything special at that minute, and I wasn't planning anything special for the whole day. But I can recall everything about 6.15am European Time on August 31, as if it happened an hour and not a year ago. The sports shirt I was wearing and the squeak in the right pedal of my bike and the wary, disbelieving tone in the newscaster's voice as she relayed the first announcement, that Diana had been seriously injured in a car crash in Paris, and then the second - that Diana was dead.
The roomful of books published about her since then have interpreted the fairytale in every possible light. Andrew Morton made her death the tragically inevitable consequence of a royal soap opera, like the demise of Bobby Ewing in Dallas. One of the weird qualities of grief is to make everything unreal, and half the world believed with Morton for months that the twisting plotlines dreamed up by Buckingham Palace must eventually mean Diana would be written back into the story.
Internet conspiracists agreed - the crash was a mock-up, engineered by the super-rich Fayeds, to give the young lovers freedom from the ever-watching world. Or it was a secret service murder - the central character was being dropped because the actress had become too demanding.
As the soap washed off, the psychologists stepped in. Diana was claimed as an icon for the Freudians, the Jungians, the nihilists, the New Agers, the post-moderns, the post-feminists, the far Left, the far Right, the monarchists and the anarchists. Books with titles like Deconstructing Diana and The Id And Di claimed her as a sexual liberator, a victim of food fascism, a media manipulator and a paparazzi puppet. In the hands of her brother she became a weapon, as he stood in the Abbey and took arms against her estranged in-laws. In the eyes of mourners who laid 10,000 tons of flowers at Kensington Palace, she was simply a saviour.
In Britain, the predominately Christian media have struggled with this multi-faceted icon. A saviour who dies without absolving her own sins? The virgin mother of the future King, who has a succession of brutally painful love affairs? She is a muddle of sin and saintliness and sex and celibacy. Diana, even as a goddess, is a very different kind of goddess to Mary.
One year on, the world is much more confused about its fairytale princess than ever it was when she was alive.
And yet I don't feel confused. All the talk of ritual significance and religious symbolism sounds like a foreign language. To me, Diana was a woman and a mother. To her children - to all children, in fact - she behaved as a good mother. To her husband, and her lovers (including the press), she behaved as a capricious woman. Is that hard to understand?
Perhaps this is a Jewish perspective. The Jews abandoned all worship of goddesses when Moses brought the tablets down from Mount Sinai. We don't expect women to achieve transcendent holiness, just because they want to help sick youngsters. The God of the Jews is male. The women of the Jews are noble and inspiring - Judith and Ruth, Esther and Bathsheba. They are not icons or saviours. To make them into goddesses would be a sin against God.
This is the great strength of Jewishness - it's simplicity. Men are men and women are women. There are good acts and bad deeds. There is love and family and faith and prayer. We are all equal, and the impossible is expected of no-one.
If Diana had been treated as a woman and not a myth, a girl and not a goddess, we would have understood her a great deal better. And perhaps hounded her less. If Diana had been Jewish...
But that, of course, would have been quite impossible.
Uri Geller's Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99
Visit his website at www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
4th September 1998
Spoonmobile
dream of peace A snap-happy
American rolled up on my drive this week in a 1972 Dodge van covered in cameras. I don't mean decorated,
or festooned, or dotted. I mean covered. There was not one inch of this vehicle's
bodywork visible. Poloroids and Instamatics and Nikons and Kodaks and box brownies
and Apple digitals hung from fender to fender. There was a camera dangling from
the aerial. There were cameras on the windscreen wipers, and on the door handles,
and glued to the tyres. 1,705 cameras. The driver's name was Harrod
Blank, and when he set off the flash a searing burst of light erupted that fried
fish in the river and registered on spy satellites as a possible nuclear blast.
The photograph it took picked out all the bones of my skeleton. Harrod has been driving
round Britain for a couple of weeks, and he dropped in on me because he'd heard
about my Peace Cadillac - a custom-built Cadillac Brougham, a 1976 gas-guzzling
sleek chrome monster I bought at the height of my Seventies excesses, when I
was very rich and very famous and wanted everybody to appreciate these facts.
The Caddy is now a glittering mass of cutlery, all of it bent. The police have been no
trouble to Harrod, but the insurance people gave him a major headache. I sympathised.
When I told my insurers I'd been pinning twisted forks to the bonnet, there
was a sort of strangled laugh down the phone. The woman said, "You understand,
we can't insure if any mascot protrudes above the height of the bodywork - a
badge, the Spirit of Ecstasy, nothing like that, I'm afraid." "It's nothing like that,"
I assured her. "We are talking about five thousand eating utensils all sticking
straight up. Bristling with sharp points." "Can you imagine," she said,
"what would happen if you ran someone over in that?" I thought it would almost
be worth it for the headlines - Uri Geller Carved Me Up On The M4. But then
I thought about the lawsuits. So I never insured the Caddy
since it became a work of art. But I have this crazy idea it might be fun to
drive it round the Middle East. Very slowly. For peace. The craziness started when
the Israeli sculptor Avi Pines came to my house and we started bolting my favourite
trophies to the doors. John Lennon's spoon was the first - he gave it to me
in New York City one strange night after telling me how visitors from another
galaxy had come to his bedroom (he hadn't even been stoned, he insisted). JFK's fork is there. And
Elvis Presley's. Three forks are wrapped around a giant crystal given to me
by Salvador Dali, a man who really appreciated crazy ideas. Chopin's spoon,
Clint Eastwood's, Archbishop Makarios's, Adnan Khashoggi's, Federico Fellini's,
Danny Kaye's, Andy Warhol's, David Bowie's and Gary Cooper's. Not to mention
Diego Maradona's spoon, Christiaan Barnard's, David Frost's, Elton John's, Elizabeth
Taylor's, Franz Mesmer's, Charlie Chaplin's and Barbra Streisand's. And cutlery
once owned by Freud, Shimon Peres, Golda Meir, Winston Churchill, Muhammad Ali,
Al Gore, Sophia Loren, David Ben Gurion, Richard Branson, Mikhail Gorbachev,
Moshe Dyan, Rasputin, Houdini, James Dean, Wernher von Braun, Yasser Arafat,
Rock Hudson and Pablo Picasso. I sometimes look at all
those utensils, touched by so many famous hands, and think - what a dinner party
that would have been. We twisted the cutlery so
that, seen from above, a giant peace symbol is visible. It's easy to see this
from an upstairs window, but I once flew a helicopter over the car, just to
check. Imagine the effect of driving
such an artwork across the Middle East. From presidential palaces to hillside
settlements, across the wide hot tarmac of diplomat's private roads and the
yellow dust trails leading to the poorest refugee shanties. How the politicians
would beam, and clasp each others' hands across the jewelled bonnet. How the
children would shriek and run barefoot over the stones for miles after us, Arab
and Jewish children alike in a hubbub of disbelief. What a propaganda coup for
peace. The world will stare, and chuckle, and reflect: "Anything is possible.
Just like Uri says. Anything. Even peace." The ultimate destination,
after a meander across the Sinai into Israel, excursions into Lebanon and Syria,
a short motor along the West Bank and a long lunch with King Hussein, would
be... Iraq. I have a vision of my spoon-encrusted car rolling through the avenues
of Baghdad, to a rendezvous in an underground, N-blast resistant mansion with
800 secret service men and Saddam Hussein. I told my close friend,
the concert pianist Byron Janis in New York, and he said: "When you do it, I
want to come too." I said: "Byron, that's nice,
but this is a very personal thing. Something I need to do alone." "You'll need me to read
the maps," he answered, "or you'll drive straight from Cairo to Ethiopia. Or
Morocco, anywhere but East. Plus, you never worked out where the gas went in
that car." So my idea for a peace pilgrimage
acquired a concert pianist. Oh, but I forgot the craziest
bit. When Byron saw what Avi and I had done to the Caddy, he said: "You're taking
the cutlery - fine, I'm taking the piano." He's serious. He has a Steinway
Concert Grand, which plays like no other instrument in the world, and without
it he frets. I said we could tow it, like a caravan, but Byron thinks that would
detune it. So we're going to hitch a pantechnicon to a juggernaut, and hire
a team of drivers to follow us. By now, you think I'm joking.
I'm not. The idea started with a car, and grew bigger and crazier every year,
and I think we'd better hurry up and get the trip made before one of us adds
an even more lunatic ingredient to the brew - parking the car in the Space Shuttle,
for instance, and flying it to the moon... Come to think of it,
why not? Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
4thth September 1998
'Flaming'
rough ride awaits me I was expecting
to get flamed. 'Flamed' is an internet nerd-word, meaning to get roasted by
your critics, to come under fire and to find yourself generally in a very hot
spot. So this
is nothing unusual for me. I was being flamed when the internet was science
fiction and computers were a military secret. What I was
not expecting, when I published my novel Ella in the Spring, was to get flamed
by Jews - for writing about Christians. And now
it's appearing in paperback, I'm bracing myself for a rough ride from the rabbis.
I've lost count of the number of Jews who have demanded: "Why are you writing
about gentiles?" One interviewer even accused me of converting to Christianity. Ella is
the story of a teenage girl in an English city who causes paranormal chaos.
Windows shatter, fires start, objects fly around or disappear. Anyone who has
witnessed a poltergeist haunting would recognise the symptoms. As a child, she
could sometimes sense other people's thoughts but, like all psychic children,
she imagined this was normal. Until we reach our teens, we think anything's
normal. The book
begins on her 14th birthday. Adolescence is the commonest time for sensitives
to suffer uncontrolled phenomena. As they grow up, the powers fade - or, less
often, the psychic learns to harness them. Except in rare cases where injury
triggers some node in the brain (Peter Hurkos, the crime-solving psychic, gained
his ability when he fell off a ladder) paranormal gifts arrive at puberty. Ella's family
are working-class, born-again Christians. Her father's first reaction, when
his daughter's behaviour becomes too odd to ignore, is to beat her. When that
fails, he has her exorcised. Ella is
not a clever girl, and I didn't feel clever when I wrote the story. She doesn't
think things out, she feels them - and that is the way I visualised her world,
as a mass of sensations and inexplicable shocks. She doesn't even search for
the explanations: she simply tries to deal with everything that's happening
to her. And she can't deal with it, because nobody could. I couldn't, when the
same kind of phenomena were engulfing me, and I was much more in control than
Ella. She tries
to take charge of her body by eating greedily and then, in secret, vomiting
everything up. I did the same thing. It's called bulimia, and it provides an
illusion that your life is your own. In fact, bulimia takes your life away from
you. Literally. What I felt
about Ella, from the moment her character took hold in my mind, was that nothing
had prepared her for being 'odd' and 'unusual' and 'not normal'. She is a loving
child, who likes animals and trusts her parents and believes in God and wants
to be exactly the same as her friends. She doesn't become different by choice.
When the world rejects her because she is different, she feels betrayed. Everyone
can relate to that, because everyone has been rejected by the world at some
time in their lives - because every one of us is different. That is the kernel
of the book. To make
Ella as outwardly 'normal' as possible, I made her a Protestant Christian, like
most English girls. Not a Jew, because being Jewish might have already taught
her to cope with the Outsider syndrome. And then I gave her Christianity a twist
- her father and uncle are lay preachers at an evangelical church, and her mother
has secretly clung to her Catholic faith. Religion is like that - we never divulge
our deepest beliefs, and in return our beliefs sometimes demand strange rituals
from us. In any Jewish
marriage you might find the same situation. Outward orthodoxy might be tempered
in at least one of the two hearts by an outrageous belief - the man kneeling
in the synagogue might possess a secret intuition, too powerful to deny, that
life really is an unending circle as the Buddhists say, or that Mohammed's prophecies
are as valid as Isaiah's. His wife might know, no matter how hard she beats
the truth down from her mind, that death is a doorway to the spirit world, or
God is a word to fill the gaps in science, or aliens are coming again and again
in the night to make experiments on her womb. Belief exists
in a region of the soul far beyond intellect. Belief can be irrational, and
it won't be explained away. If we believe something is impossible, no amount
of proof will change our minds. Ella learns this, and it is a destructive lesson. So when
a Jew criticises me for writing about Christians, I wonder how much more obvious
I have to make it: I'm writing about people. And people are people, whatever
label they happen to be wearing.
Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
18thth September 1998
Sound
waves of the shofar are uplifting Rosh Hashanah goes by many
names, because it means many things. I believe its most beautiful name, and
its deepest meaning, is 'The Day of Sounding the Shofar'. The notes of the Shofar
set the whole body trembling, as though the music is resonating through every
level of our being, as though God is calling to us. The mediaeval teacher Maimonides
wrote that the shofar's voice was created to proclaim a spiritual revival. "Awake,
ye sleepers," he declared, "and ponder your deeds. Remember your creator and
go back to him in penitence. Be not of those who miss reality in their hunt
after shadows, who waste their years in seeking after vain things which cannot
profit or deliver. Look well to your souls and consider your acts. Forsake each
of you his evil ways and thoughts and return to God, that he may have mercy
on you." Awake ye sleepers. Centuries
after Maimonides lived, humanity is waking from a psychic slumber which may
have lasted almost a thousand years. We are rediscovering the spiritual core
of our souls. I believe this is part of
a cycle. In the centuries before we learned to write - in the years before history,
because history is writing - we had psychic powers beyond our imagination. Powers
so vast that even now we talk of them, and are thrilled by the memories passed
down from generation to generation. Superhuman strength, as
Samson possessed. The power to become animals, as the Greek gods and the native
Americans possessed. The gift of knowing all languages, telepathically - a faculty
of the mind which was drummed out of our brains as we began living in cities,
with too many of us crowded in upon each other. Imagine the telepathic confusion
of a tenement block - now you know the meaning of the Tower of Babel. All cultures hark back to
a Golden Age, an Atlantis, a Dreamtime. Even Western man, in his culture of
science, has created a myth of Von Däniken days, when aliens came to teach
us geometry and architecture. Earlier this year archaeologists, using laboratory
experiments, demonstrated that the massive blocks transported by Egyptian pharaohs
to build the pyramids may have been moved by sound waves. Trumpets sounded and
vibrations were set up and 100-ton rocks floated. Does this science explain
the Bible story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho? Or is the idea born of the
myth? We lost those powers. But
they returned, when the Roman Empire was collapsing and Islam was being born.
In Britain another Golden Age is remembered, when Celtic magic crackled throughout
the country, and lake-spirits presented kings with swords of immortality, and
men could put on the faces of their enemies. Vikings sailed to Iceland and America,
and found lands where psychic powers had not been crushed by disbelief. And once again we lost those
powers. They came crashing down with the Crusades, when the West became infected
with bloodlust and marched on the East. What followed? A millennium of war.
There has not been a day since the First Crusade when one nation was not at
war with a neighbour, or with itself. Mindpower is a spiritual commodity, of
a part with peace and love. It does not thrive in wartime. And almost since
proper records began, it has been wartime. Awake ye sleepers. War doesn't
have to go on for ever. We can use our minds to conquer the physical urge for
fighting. The cycle that took our gift away is bringing it back. Everyone sees
it. For the first time in my lifetime, it is acceptable for anyone to discuss
paranormal realities - telepathy, mind-over-matter, life after death, even aliens.
And even God. The Day of Sounding the
Shofar is here, not just for this year but for a new millennium. We must let
the sound waves lift us, and shatter our vicious ways. Then a 1,000-year regime
of war can be destroyed - just as the walls came tumbling down when Joshua sounded
the shofar.
Uri Geller's Little
Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella
by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit
his website at www.urigeller.com
and e-Mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
25th September 1998
FRONT PAGE
WHO
SHOT RABIN? 'Amir's
bullet hit PM in back. It was one at point blank range in chest that killed
the Israeli leader' EXCLUSIVE
by URI GELLER AN ISRAELI journalist
insists that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated - but not by Yigal
Amir. And he believes he has evidence
that despite videa footage showing Amir shooting Rabin in the back, medical
reports indicate that he was shot point-blank in the chest. Journalist Barry Chamish,
editor of the political intelligence report Inside Israel, has put the
evidence under a microscope, and found facts that appear to leave no room for
question. Rabin was murdered. Police
and medical reports obtained by Chamish show the PM was shot point-blank in
the chest. The video of ultra-rightist Yigal Amir, flashed round the world by
news stations, shows him firing at Rabin from behind. How can a shot in the back
become a fatal chest wound? "The conspiracy is proved
beyond a shadow of doubt," Chamish told me. "This isn't a conspiracy
theory, it's a crime exposé. My country has sunk into such sick criminality
it is unbelievable." Chamish in full flow is
an impressive sight. He's a bear-like man with restless eyes and a ferocious
energy that makes him punch home his argument with swinging, driving gestures. He crashes through objections
and doubts like a 38-tonne juggernaut loaded with facts. This can be counter-productive
- no one is right all of the time, and there are too many insoluble mysteries
in every crevice of Israel's political history to allow anyone to be certain
about anything. But without that conviction,
that infallibility, Chamish could not spread his message. And it's taking hold
- he claims to have convinced more than 30 per cent of Israelis. The official version has
anti-peace protestor Amir, an activist with the Organisation of Jewish Warriors
(Eyal), stalking Rabin at a Tel Aviv rally, slipping behind him and gunning
him down with two bullets - the second fired as bodyguards wrestled the assassin
to the ground. Fatally wounded, Rabin is bundled into his limousine, but dies
that night in Ichilov Hospital. We see it on the video -
the figure in the crowd, the gunflash, the confusion, the scramble to get Rabin
in