February 04, 2000FOR PETE'S SAKE, DO NOT QUESTION FAITH
THERE are many days when, the more I learn, the less I understand. Today is one of them. I have been reading a carefully-reasoned book which argues that, across the whole infinite expanse of the universe, there is probably no intelligent life except on our planet.
The book is called Rare Earth by Seattle professors Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee.
The huge timescales needed for ''slime at the bottom of the ocean'' to evolve into animal life, the uncommon steadiness of the sun's energy output, the radius of our globe's orbit, the angle of our axis which is governed by a single moon of particular size . . . change any of these factors and life fizzles out.
''The underlying theme is that the Earth is a charmed place,'' Prof Brownlee says. ''We know of no other body which is even remotely like it.''
These facts are easy to follow. They directly contradict what I believe to be true, that there is an intelligence which guides the affairs of man, an intelligence which does not come from Earth.
It is extraterrestrial. Call it God, call it aliens — its existence proves there is life throughout the universe.
But that's a matter of faith, and faith usually clashes with science. This isn't hard to understand.
What puzzles me is the cloudy memory of another book. It can't be so long ago that I read it, but the shelves in this study are so overflowing . . . there's been more room in here since I threw out the jogging machine, but the books are balanced in vertical stacks, with a framed photo on top of almost every pile, one stack in front of the next, and I know the book is here somewhere if only I can . . .
Got it! Probability 1 by Amir Aczel says it's a mathematical certainty that we are not alone. Applying gamblers' equations to the number of stars in this galaxy and the billions of other galaxies, and factoring in the ease with which carbon-based lifeforms start up, Aczel crunches the numbers and says there has to be intelligent life elsewhere. Any other conclusion is scientific nonsense.
One set of facts, two opposite theories. If I had never read either book, I would have learned far less, and understood at least as much.
It is a great tragedy that, for some people, whole lives can be lived in this ever-diminishing sea of understanding. Information scorches down from every side, and slowly knowledge evaporates.
Peter Sellers, the great comic actor who died 20 years ago, lived that kind of life. I have always felt a powerful connection to him, perhaps because he could never balance the weirdness of his showbusiness life with his Jewish upbringing.
For most of his adult life he held a deep spiritual belief which he knew to be true in every detail, though he could not understand it and did not dare discuss it with friends.
When he finally explained his experience to actress Shirley Maclaine, during shooting for his last great movie, Being There, Sellers warned her frankly: ''You're going to think I'm bonkers'' — and he had driven himself half insane, trying to unravel the truth from the facts.
Sellers had died in 1964. This was a clinically established fact. During the first of eight heart attacks, he told MacLaine: ''I felt myself leave my body. I just floated out of my physical form and I saw them cart my body away to the hospital. I went with it.
''I wasn't frightened or anything like that because I was fine; and it was my body that was in trouble. I looked around myself and I saw an incredibly beautiful bright loving white light above me. I wanted to go to that white light more than anything.
''I've never wanted anything more. I know there was love, real love, on the other side of the light, which was attracting me so much.
''It was kind and loving and I remember thinking, 'That's God'. Then I saw a hand reach through the light. I tried to touch it, to grab onto it, to clasp it so it could sweep me up and pull me through it.''
As the doctors restarted his heart, Sellers heard God's voice tell him, 'It's not time. Go back and finish. It's not time'.
Stories like this were taboo until the mid-70s, when Dr Raymond Moody published Life After Life. By 1982, a Gallup poll revealed eight million Americans claimed to have had near-death experiences. As resuscitation techniques improve, the NDE will become common-place.
Doctors in Tromso, Norway, revived a woman whose body had been trapped beneath ice for more than two hours. When rescuers pulled her out and began artificial respiration, the temperature of her corpse was 23° centigrade.
The medics patiently kept up an artificial heartbeat for three hours, slowly warming her up — until life returned. Because her mental functions had been literally frozen, the lack of blood and oxygen had not caused any brain damage.
''I'll never fear death again,'' Sellers told his wife, Britt Ekland, after his eighth heart attack. But he did fear life — ''I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do,'' he confided in MacLaine, ''or what I came back for.''
The clash between the Jewish culture which shaped him and the film world which swallowed him, between his Jewish religion and his parascientific belief, stripped Peter Sellers of confidence and understanding.
If he had trusted his faith more and questioned it less . . . But can I do the same?
Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com.
January 21, 2000 
POIROT'S SEX IS A REAL MYSTERY
'A LITTLE man with a face like a rat.'' Meet the villain of an Agatha Christie tale. ''In an Empire where rats ruled, he was the king of the rats.''
And guess what religion he was. ''His face gleamed white and sharp in the moonlight. There was the least hint of a curve in the thin nose. His father had been a Polish Jew, a journeyman tailor . . .''
The year was 1928 — though my paperback edition of The Mystery Of The Blue Train is 1975, shortly before Dame Agatha's death.
Boris Ivanovitch Krassnine, king of rats, was an anarchist, of course. Jew, anarchist, rat — what was the difference in 1928?
Over 10 million miles of travelling or more, I have read dozens of Christies. The Poirots are my favourites — I love a character who is not afraid to boast. Miss Marple is self-deprecating, and I have always regarded modesty as an over-rated virtue.
In all those mysteries, I cannot remember that a Jew was ever unmasked as the murderer on the final page. As a villain, clearly stated from the start, Jews appear constantly, at least in the earlier books. They are fixers, fences, plotters, renegades and, obviously, anarchists.
But the murderer must be unsuspected, and Christie probably assumed that all Jews were automatically suspects. Even the better sorts, like Jim Lazarus in Peril At End House: ''He's a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one.''
Her racism towards blacks was more blatant still. One of her most ingenious plots — one of my favourite detective stories ever — was called Ten Little Niggers until an American publisher, in a horribly bigoted stroke of political correctness, changed it to Ten Little Indians.
The book now sells as And Then There Were None, but the scene of the crimes is still Nigger Island —''Smelly sort of rock covered with gulls. It had got its name from its resemblance to a man's head — a man with negroid lips.''
This sort of prejudice is impossible to ignore. It stops the reader dead on the page, in a novel that rattles along at 100 pages an hour. But it does not stop the sales.
When she died, it was estimated 250 million Christies had been printed, a record beaten only by the Bible and Shakespeare.
Dame Agatha did not set out to preach contempt for Jews and blacks. The attitude was ingrained, subconscious, and it seeped into her writing. Studying four or five of her best novels for this column, I discovered something else about Agatha Christie's sub-conscious: it moulded her hero in her own likeness, far more than she ever guessed.
When she created Hercule Poirot, the retired Belgian detective with the invincible brain, millions were dying in Belgium.
In 1916, six years before publication, Christie was writing: ''Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity.
''His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.
''The moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.''
The ''I'' was Captain Hastings, Poirot's dim-but-brave disciple. The detective adored him. Later in this first adventure, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, he displays his affection —''suddenly clasping me in his arms, he kissed me warmly on both cheeks.''
Poirot loved Hastings, but Christie despised Poirot. ''Why,'' she asked in the Daily Mail in 1938, ''why, why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature? . . . eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head . . . anyway, what is an egg-shaped head? . . . I am beholden to him financially . . . On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me.''
Poirot had no lady friends, though he liked to flirt and once, at the end of a cycle of short stories called The Labours Of Hercules, he sent a bunch of red roses to the villainous Countess Rossakoff.
But he understood women. He knew which men they would desire — usually the bad ones — and what would flatter them most. He knew when they would be loyal, and when treacherous.
He even knew, in Peril At End House, how best to style their hair: ''To me the natural thing seems to have a coiffure high and rigid — so — and the hat attached with many hatpins — la, la, la-et- la!''
And then he gave himself away: ''When the wind blew, it was agony — it gave you the migraine.''
It is not unknown for a woman to live as a man. Two fearsome pirates, Ann Bonny and Mary Read, were revealed as women at their trial, when both claimed to be pregnant. They were sentenced to death.
The secret of soldier Christian Davies' sex was discovered by army surgeons after she was wounded in the battle of Ramilles.
And just 11 years ago jazz pianist and band leader Billy Tipton, the father of three children by adoption, was discovered during his autopsy to have been a woman. He had married three times. The truth then is shocking and hard to comprehend, but as in all the best Christie it remains the only possible solution. Hercule Poirot was a woman.
Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@ compuserve.comJanuary 14, 2000
B-SIDE MYSELF OVER BOB DYLAN
It’s hard to find what you want when you don’t know what you’re looking for and last night I was sitting in front of my computer screen with only a vague notion of what I was seeking.
Something odd, something entertaining, something unique - some bizarre site for my weekly Weird Web column in The Times.
I’d been browsing since 10pm and now it was past 2am. I’d found a lot, but not what I needed, and my wife Hanna had long gone to bed. To keep myself company, I put on a CD.
I chose Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks because it had been delivered that morning from an online music store. The first time I bought it was in a Greenwich Village store in 1975 - I don’t use my vinyl records much now because it’s hard to play a 33-and-a-third RPM disc on a computer. Gradually I’m replacing my favourites.
As I studied the track listing, I realised this album was only half a favourite. I don’t ever remember playing the b-side of the record. I wore out the first side - I know the lines of Tangled Up In Blue and Simple Twist Of Fate like a child knows prayers and nursery rhymes, almost like an instinct.
But that first side seemed a complete work of art and I never flipped it over. A CD has no second side. And as I kept clicking and searching in the Web, the familiar music ran out and songs I did not know began to play.
The last track was a revelation. It pulled me out of my virtual world, and I sat back in the flickering darkness of my study, and played that song over and over.
It is called Buckets Of Rain, and it sounds like a traditional folk song, and it also sounds very Seventies, like Cat Stevens. It has a loose, live feel, and a lyric which seemed to sum up all the friendships which have ebbed and flowed since I lived in New York a quarter of a century ago — and how Hanna has always been my rock:‘‘I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke, Friends will arrive, friends will disappear, If you want me, honey baby, I’ll be here.’’
When Dylan became a Christian evangelist in the late 70s, one fan I knew, an accountant in Los Angeles, threw out all his albums. He had everything the singer had released since 1961, some of it autographed, and he heaved the whole collection into a skip.
I told this man, Milton, he was acting like the Bible Belt fundamentalists had when they burned Beatles LPs in protest at John Lennon’s ‘we’re bigger than Jesus’ ad-lib.
Milt wrote to me: ‘‘How can I ever listen to Dylan’s stuff again? I’ve always loved it, it’s been the score of my whole adult life - student days, meeting my first wife, hippy peace marches, my first divorce, raising a family with Judith, then that divorce . . . I did it all to the sound of Dylan.
‘‘But now that man, my idol, who was born a Jew named Robert Zimmerman, is walking onto rock and roll stages and proclaiming, ‘Christ will return to set up his kingdom in Jerusalem. There really is a slow train coming and it is picking up speed. Satan has been defeated by the cross!’
‘‘It’s a betrayal. I feel tainted with hypocrisy. Dylan talked about emigrating to Israel - he went there repeatedly, he spent time on a kibbutz, he was photographed at the Wall. It’s like finding out someone you love has been lying to you all their life.
‘‘I have to deal with that, and dealing with it means dumping the records. That’s not a protest, it’s a defence mechanism.’’
Re-reading Milt’s letter has made me think hard about what fans can expect from their heroes. Dylan did not write his songs as a soundtrack for Milt’s adventures - he wrote them for himself. So it was unreasonable of Milt to hold his idol to his personal code of conduct.
I believe Milt could have kept listening to Blonde On Blonde and Freewheelin’, without turning Christian — and without the right to insist that Dylan stayed a Jew.
Frederic Chopin was an antisemite, and that doesn’t prevent me from loving the Nocturnes and Waltzes. I don’t hear a Jew-hater when I listen to the Ballade for Piano No 1, and I don’t hear a fire-and-brimstone evangelist when I listen to Hey Mr Tambourine Man.
In the mid-Eighties, Dylan was reportedly interested in Chassidic Judaism and the Lubavitch movement. I don’t hear that either in the songs I have just discovered on Blood On The Tracks. What I hear, as Milt heard, are the echoes of my own life. If I was a Buddhist, or a Moslem, these would be Zen songs or Islamic songs.
But I am Uri Geller - and right now, Buckets Of Rain is a uniquely Uri Geller song.
Uri Geller’s novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@ compuserve.com
December 24, 1999
Let's tell all about Israel nukes
IN a New York strongbox I keep a collection of pistols. One is a traced silver colt, given to me by the wife of the president of Mexico.
Others are rare or, in their dark way, beautiful pieces of engineering. I once took pleasure in owning them but, as I saw violence senselessly increasing in the city, I hid them away.
I never look at them, I am not proud of owning them and I am bitterly aware of all the evil that has been done by firearms in private hands. But I cannot bring myself to have them destroyed. Israel must feel the same way about her nuclear arms.
The government barely admits, of course, to possessing such weapons of mass slaughter. Last year Shimon Peres, the former prime minister, remarked that Israel had ''built a nuclear option not in order to have a Hiroshima but an Oslo''.
These non-existent weapons were for peace, not massacre. And that was as near as anyone came to an admission.
But the warheads exist, about 200 of them according to reliable estimates. The world had suspected since the late Sixties, but proof was wanting until October 5, 1986, when the Sunday Times published descriptions of the atomic weapons programme from Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician in the bomb factory at Dimona.
Vanunu was forcibly transported to Israel, where he is still in prison. More than three decades ago, following the Six-Day War, Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan learned that the Soviet empire had nuclear missiles trained on Israeli cities.
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared that America would not launch into World War Three to protect the occupied territories. A national nuclear power programme was already running - Israel secretly decided to stockpile fully-primed missiles, ready for launch.
Seymour Hersh's book The Samson Option explains the wholly defensive motivation behind the policy. It was a kind of self-protection-through-suicide, the same desperate thinking that drove Samson to kill the Philistines by tearing down the roof on them - and himself.
The missiles are sited in the Judean foothills, which would probably be the last part of the country to fall to invaders. If Israelis faced utter annihilation, if we had no future but to be ''pushed into the sea'', we would tear down the roof of the world.
That deterrent is now a provocation, an excuse for our enemies to taunt and mock us. As I discussed in this column a few weeks ago, Saddam Hussein tried to use Israel's N-power to pull other Arab countries into his warped worldview.
By firing Scuds at our cities, he hoped to provoke a nuclear response. Atomic missiles could not harm the cowering dictator in his bunker - and he cared nothing for the thousands of Iraqi women and children who would die horribly. If anyone doubts his callousness, look at his response to the UN Security Council's tentative olive branch last week.
The world offered to lift sanctions if Iraq could prove, during a 120-day inspection, there were no hidden chemical, nuclear or bio-war arsenals. Saddam sneered at the offer. Sanctions suit him - they keep his people too weak for rebellion.
Nuclear warheads are no deterrent against psychopaths and they are no defence against monomaniacs. The Afghan-based terrorist Osama bin Laden is widely believed to have obtained at least one portable nuclear bomb - a so-called suitcase device, in a deal for heroin with the Russian mafia. An atomic blast in Tel Aviv would delight Bin Laden's allies, and a forest of nuclear-tipped missiles in Judea could not prevent it.
There is a third disadvantage to our secret programme - it hands excuses to others. India armed herself, hinting that Israel had provided technical support. Pakistan can also demonstrate nuclear capability, claiming that with atomic enemies on either side a nuclear deterrent is essential. Now the US has opted out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, giving itself the legal option to start testing the next generation of A-bombs. Congressmen argued that, with the proliferation of nuclear nations, America had to get back in the lab to maintain superiority.
Israel built those missiles for peace. Now the most useful tactic would be to drop them onto the peace talk table as bargaining chips. We should declare our hand. Half the world has already peeked - Russian and French satellite shots of Israeli silos are said to be so detailed that every leaf on the bushes is visible.
So let's come out and say it: Israel has so many missiles, of this and that type, with the destructive ability to wipe out this, and this, and this continent. No one, least of all our enemies, would doubt the heroism of such a gesture. It could set the scene for some long strides towards peace. By bartering away our bombs, Israel could make both the Middle East and the whole planet a safer place.
And that, after all, is the purpose they were built for.
Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20.
Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
December 17, 1999 WAITING FOR RASH OF JERUSALEM FEVER
I AM asked one question constantly, ‘what will happen on January 1?’ I am asked by sarcastic sceptics and hopeful politicians, by survivalists, conspiracists and evangelists, by believers and atheists, by journalists who feign indifference and New Agers who pray day and night.
All through 1999, I have repeated the same message of reassurance: The world is not about to end.
I worked out decades ago that if I ever predicted Armageddon was nigh, the predestined date would arrive and only one thing would self-destruct - my career.
The new Millennium will dawn and we will be granted the greatest chance in history to wipe clean the slate. It is up to every one of us to seize that chance, because the world will not change if we wait for governments to change it for us.
The past 1,000 years proves that: everything that is good in our culture came from individual endeavour.There is only one factor that could provoke a cataclysm on January 1. It is not divine intervention or alien invasion or meteor strike or natural disaster. The single danger is human insanity.
It would be insanity, for instance, to leave the nuclear reactors running and the nuclear warheads primed on December 31 when all the world knows that computers could cease to behave reliably. Insanity - but none of the 433 power plants in Britain, the US, the former Soviet Union or any other part of the globe is expected to be shut down.
The nuclear generators at Visaginas in Lithuania, for example, which produce 80 per cent of the country’s electricity, will keep running, although that nation’s computers are almost totally unprepared for the effects of the Y2K bug.
The 4,400 nuclear-tipped missiles on hair-trigger alert in Russia and the US will not be placed on low priority over New Year. Defence systems will have been carefully checked for possible Y2K disruption, but no one can comprehensively predict all the chaos which nationwide computer crashes could bring. Chaos is like that - unpredictable.
US deputy secretary of defence John Hamre says: ‘‘Probably one out of five days I wake up in a cold sweat thinking Y2K is much bigger than we think. Everything is so interconnected, it’s hard to know with any precision whether we have got it fixed.’’
The defence department admits it doesn’t know how the nuclear arsenal will behave on January 1 but President Clinton refuses to command a temporary switch from full alert. The generals refuse to apply the safety catch for even a few hours.
The Y2K nuclear alert campaign, spearheaded by Nobel Peace Laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat, MIT physicist Philip Morrison and world-famous medic Patch Adams, is calling for mass phone, fax and email pleas to the White House. But that may be too little too late.
A perverse level of deeper insanity is being plumbed by maverick computer programmers who are writing viruses that mimic the Y2K bug. Your microchips could be compliant with the switch from year 99 to year 00, yet an invisible infection spread by a socially-handicapped hacker in Missouri might still shut down your operating system.
Insanity is not a high-tech disorder. It affects us wherever we are vulnerable, and at the turn of the Millennium that means in our new-born information networks. But we are also vulnerable, as we have been for thousands of years, wherever religion touches politics.
In Jerusalem, religion is constantly face-to-face with politics. It’s no surprise the city has bred a unique form of insanity - Jerusalem Fever.
The main psychiatric clinic, Givat Shaul Mental Health Centre, has reported a 50 to 60 per cent increase in madness among pilgrims and Dr Gregory Katz expects that figure to keep rising. Jews, Muslims and especially Christians are susceptible to a religious fervour which typically begins with an urge to visit the holy shrines alone.
Next follows an obsession with cleanliness, especially ritual bathing and the shaving of body hair. When the pilgrim dons a bedsheet for a robe and begins to patrol the streets, singing psalms and declaiming scripture, Katz is called in.
The symptoms cause mirth in the West, though it is mainly American and Scandinavian Christians from fundamentalist backgrounds who succumb to the fever. Israel finds it less amusing - Shin Bet is on high alert to foil Jewish and Christian terrorist attacks against the Dome of the Rock. Some extremists preach that the saviour cannot be heralded on Earth until a Jewish temple, and not a Muslim mosque, stands on Temple Mount.
If one madman succeeds in bombing the Dome of the Rock or even in carrying out an obscene act of provocation, such as hurling a pig’s head into the mosque, the political crisis could escalate to war within hours.
Israel, Syria, Iran and Iraq are all nuclear powers. A fundamentalist who truly desires Armageddon in 2000 might find it too easy to set it off.
We can only pray that, as the clocks chime midnight, a fit of simple sanity grips the world. We are all free to believe the end is nigh, if we wish. But why speed it up?
One US fundamentalist living in poverty on the Mount of Olives, Ed Daniels, spends his days attempting to convert Palestinians from Islam. He told an American newspaper: ‘‘The end of time is going to happen soon, so why should I do anything to make it happen sooner? I believe in love, not destruction.’’
To that, all sane Jews, Christians and Muslims say, ‘Amen’.
Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
December 10, 1999 Intuition can mean life or death
MY American editor was most unhappy. "I will never fly El Al again,'' she said. ''It may be the safest airline in the world, but nothing is worth that much trouble. And humiliation. And frustration."
She had come to Britain by Israeli 747 and her interrogation had delayed the flight by more than an hour.
"I cannot ever remember when anyone asked me the same questions so many times,'' she said. ''Even when my children are asking, 'Is it Christmas yet?' - even they take No for an answer in the end. But El Al don't seem to know the meaning of the word 'No'.
"Am I Jewish? No. Am I a member of any proscribed organisation? No. Have I left my baggage unattended? No. Am I carrying any parcel on a friend's behalf? No. Am I Jewish? NO! Am I a member of . . . " NO! And on and on it goes.
''For more than two hours. I am never late for anything, I am always early. But by the time El Al were convinced I was not Osima bin Laden in disguise, the plane had been sitting on the tarmac for about 60 minutes.
"And everyone was staring as I boarded. I felt like saying, 'I'm the terrorist you've been waiting for.' In fact, the questions had gone on so long, I was on the brink of a confession.
''It was like the Inquisition - I would have said anything to get out of there. 'Yes, I'm a hijacker. Yes, there's a bomb in every bag. Yes, I personally started the Yom Kippur war. Now can I go please?'"
I am glad she didn't say that. El Al security agents are not selected for their sense of humour.
For an Israeli Jew, travelling El Al is mildly disconcerting - where most airlines strain to emphasise the safeness and friendliness of jet travel, this company fixes its anti-terror lasers on every passenger even before the check-in desk.
Born in Tel Aviv and travelling on a national's passport, with a famous face, I am usually made to feel like a suspect for only a matter of minutes.
An American Catholic who has chosen El Al for no reason other than a travel agent's recommendation, and who is inclined to react to close questioning with anger and sarcasm, might not clear the interview room so quickly.
As I approach with my ticket, a uniformed guard - always an Israeli, whatever the airport - invites me to stand beside a desk. The questions are formal and brief, but I am aware that my face is being closely scrutinised at every moment.
I take care to use open, honest body language, keeping my hands away from my face and my chest towards the guard.
This is anti-terrorist policing at its simplest and most effective, using humankind's finest weapon - intuition.
The airline, of course, will discuss no aspect of this. Spokesman Nahman Kleiman says: "What makes El Al security better than others? Because we don't discuss matters of security or disclose our procedures within the media."
Ex-security chief Tuvia W Livneh hinted at their thoroughness when he revealed: "To search for one piece of luggage from one passenger who left the plane, and to take it out of a 747 container, can take you four hours, and here at El Al we will do it."
There are electronic scanners which can detect sophisticated devices. A decompression chamber screens every piece of cargo, simulating the low air pressure of a high-altitude flight to uncover barometric bomb triggers.
Mechanical sniffer-dogs search for high explosives such as Semtex which will not show up on X-ray.
But it was the human sixth sense, the sub-conscious signal that set off alarms when Irish passenger Ann-Marie Murphy tried to board a flight from London to Tel Aviv in 1986.
Believing she was flying to Israel to wed her Palestinian boyfriend, Ann-Marie was carrying luggage which he had instructed her to bring. She was in love and she was pregnant. And she was hours away from death at the bridegroom's hands.
As her lover had asked, this naive young woman had not inspected the bags. Unsettled by something in the woman's demeanour - perhaps the unconscious antisemitism which had been seeded by her boyfriend or perhaps by the ignorance she displayed of Israeli-Palestinian relations - the security officials decided to take her bags apart.
Sewn into the base of her hand luggage was enough high explosive to rip the Jumbo apart, killing all 387 on board. Including her. And including her unborn child.
Ann-Marie was cleared of any crime - she was the victim of an obscene act of terrorism. The hero of the hour was not an El Al guard or El Al itself, but the human mind. Intuition and a deep knowledge of the psychology of violence had revealed the plotting of a killer who was thousands of miles away.
Facts which were hidden from a woman's knowledge were plucked from her sub-conscious and hundreds of lives were saved.
Next time you hear a murmur from your mind's deep recesses, do not be afraid to take action. Sceptics, like bucket-flight airlines, might dismiss it as too much trouble for too little return. But intuition can be a matter of life and death.
Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20.
Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
December 3, 1999
Scientific approach to God
THE pollster George Gallup once said: ‘‘I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone the chance that all the functions of the individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.’’Polls aren’t always right, but they are usually accurate about landslides. And the statistical evidence that we were created, not evolved by chance, is more than a landslide it’s an avalanche on Everest.
Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg puts it like this: ‘‘Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values . . . One constant does seem to require incredible fine tuning.’’ That constant concerns the energy emitted during the Big Bang make it bigger or smaller, by one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth and life could never have existed.
The Fermilab astrophysicist Michael Turner adds: ‘‘The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimetre in diameter on the other side.’’All our natural instincts, religious beliefs, culture and myths and now even our statisticians point to the existence of God the creator.
But science points in the other direction, towards evolution and random mutation and blind chance. And science has an extraordinary record of being right. We see the miraculous rightness of science in the atom bomb, television, the space shuttle and the mobile phone all impossible fantasies a century ago.
Dr Gerald Schroeder, a former professor of nuclear physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the US Atomic Energy Commission, knows science has the power to win any existential argument. I met him in Jerusalem last month and then, by synchronicity (or a mild quirk of statistics), in London a few days later. ‘‘You can’t argue with atomic physics,’’ he told me. ‘‘I have witnessed the detonation of six nuclear weapons and my advice is, pray for peace. Pray for peace. ‘‘Mere fractions of a gram of matter were converted to energy during those tests in Nevada and the mountain I stood on was turned to a quivering, Jello-like substance''.
Schroeder talks the way he moves, in quick jerks, with an energy that is unnerving in his gaunt body. He wears a faded, embroidered kippah, clamped to his thin hair with broad silver clips and pokes fun at his piety: ‘‘When I was a kid, the synagogue I just about never went to was Orthodox.’’Not much about organised religion is sacred to Schroeder. What he believes in is the Bible, and he is battling to prove that the Bible was right all along. From Moses to Einstein is, he claims, a very short step.
The six days of creation, for instance, become a workable timeframe when Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is invoked. In his book The Science Of God, Schroeder explains that time on a planet such as Earth appears to pass with lightning rapidity to observers at points in space where gravity is immensely powerful in a black hole, for instance. To a God of universal vastness, five million years on Earth would be the blink of an eye. Schroeder sets out the days of creation in a fascinating cross-table of creation and astrophysics, beginning:
Day One, 15.75 billion years ago, when ‘‘God separated the light from the darkness’’ after the Big Bang, says Schroeder, light literally broke free as electrons bonded to atomic nuclei.
Day Two, between 7.75bn and 3.75bn years ago, ‘‘God called the expanse sky’’ the disc of the Milky Way, including the sun, was formed.
Day Three, between 3.75bn and 1.75bn years ago, ‘‘God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of waters He called Seas’’ the appearance of liquid water was immediately followed by the arrival of bacteria and photosynthetic algae.
Day Four, between 1.75bn and 0.75bn years ago, ‘‘God made the two great lights . . . to dominate the day and the night’’ Earth’s increasingly oxygen-rich atmosphere became transparent.
Day Five, between 0.75bn and 0.25bn years ago, ‘‘God created . . . all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms’’ sealife developed the blueprints of all future animals, before colonisation of the land began.
Day Six, between 250 million and 6,000 years ago, ‘‘God created man in his image’’ following the extinction of the dinosaurs, hominids and then humans appeared.
Schroeder is not a Creationist of the US Bible Belt kind. He isn’t demanding our schools cease teaching Darwin. He states that the Bible, properly interpreted, is first-rate science. And he is fulfilling the great physicist Max Planck’s manifesto: ‘‘There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realises . . . that the religious element in his nature must be recognised and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. ‘‘And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls . . . Science enhances the moral values of life . . . because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.’’
November 26, 1999
Scroll on!This angel must be fake
I BELIEVE the Angel Scroll is a fake. The evidence for this biblical fragment, which has surfaced in Israel within the past few weeks, is overwhelmingly strong and it is the strengths, not the weaknesses, which arouse my suspicions. This Dead Sea Scroll seems just too good to be true. If the text is truly almost two millennia old, then Jesus was just one of many Essene philosophers preaching a new creed in the Holy Land during Rome’s occupation.
If the text is to be believed, the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of molecular DNA in 1953 was a mere echo of mystic knowledge about genetics, imparted in angelic visions. And if the text is genuine, Jewish mysticism and the whole of the kabbalic tradition is an offshoot not of Judaism but of Christianity.
The news broke in the Jerusalem Report, an English-language magazine edited by David Horovitz with many US and UK subscribers.
Horovitz had no doubts about the power of reporter Netty C Gross’s story the Report gave it cover status and five full pages inside.
Israel has every right to be jealously and fiercely proud of its Dead Sea Scrolls, the religious texts discovered earlier this century in Qumran. The leather manuscripts, found in jars by a Bedouin herdsman pursuing a runaway goat into a cave, were the work of an Essene commune destroyed by the Romans in CE68.
History cannot be certain about who the Essenes were, or even where they lived Roman writers disagreed, and called them widely scattered or confined to the desert, reclusive or life-loving villagers, penniless ascetics or wealthy tribes who shared their property. One thing is known they loved books. They established a library at Khirbet Qumran on the Dead Sea, and during the First Jewish Revolt they saved the manuscripts when they could not save themselves.
They bequeathed to the 20th century several versions of the Bible nearly complete, in both Hebrew and Aramaic and unique books including The War Between The Children Of Light And The Children Of Darkness. What reporter Netty Gross was shown were fragments of translations from a scroll said to have been found, not at Qumran but on the eastern bank of the Dead Sea in Jordan. One of the men who revealed the text’s existence was English-born Orthodox Jewish musician David Herman.
He claimed the Angel Scroll had been bought by Benedictine monks from an Amman dealer in antique rareties and kept in secret at a European monastery. One of the monks, known by the pseudonym Matheus Gunther, secretly made translations which he bequeathed to Israeli friends.
The manuscript is not available for inspection. There are no photographs. Matheus is dead and his notes have been transcribed onto a word processor, so even the monk’s handwritten translations cannot be inspected.
All that we have to judge is the text itself and very little of that. Stephen Pfann, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert at the University of the Holy Land, says he has seen about 25% of the translated text.
The Jerusalem Report reproduced just two passages but they were dynamite. ‘‘And the Angel Pnimea said to me, ‘And son of man, lift up your eyes and see all the secrets that are in the fourth gate which is the gate of birth.
Chambers ‘‘And I saw, and it was like the womb and the chambers of the stomach, and its waters gush and roar like the breakers of the sea on the wall of the cave.
‘‘And here is a seed of life in the water emanating from the seed of man and from the seed of the woman for male and female that He created.
‘‘And the seed that is joined from the two seeds is not like a clean slate. It is written inside and outside and it has within knowledge and understanding before its creation and before its creation in the womb.
‘‘And the beginning of the child is not in the birth or in conception nor is its end in death.’
The parallels between that ‘1st-century’ text and the 20th-century discovery of DNA’s double helix are striking. But is this an extraordinary vision merging Jewish mysticism with emergent Christianity or is it a modern-day hoaxer trying to be a little too clever? Stephen Pfann suspects the Angel Scroll is genuine. The language, with its mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic and occasional Greek words, is convincing. So is its references to ‘El’ for God and ‘belial’ for the devil.
‘‘It feels like a Qumran text,’’ says Pfann. This would suit some scholars very well, especially those who would like to prove that Judaism’s kaballah, the mysticism which grew alongside Christianity throughout Europe’s Dark Ages and Middle Ages, in fact stemmed from the early Christian movement.
My own belief is that anything so perfectly named as the ‘Angel Scroll’ must be faked. The US is crazy for angels. And scrolls. And antisemitic antiquities. It’s a hoax. A good hoax. Frighteningly good.
Uri Geller’s novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20.
Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
The Jewish Telegraph
November 12, 1999
It’s time to end the torture in Iraq
WHEN I was a few months old, a British sniper bullet shattered the window of my parents' apartment in Tel Aviv, showering my crib with glass.
MY memory, of the cold shards on my face, of my mother's screams and my own, may be images reconstructed from subconscious echoes - but I remember clearly how my father showed me, years later, the hole in the wall where the bullet struck.
I have always felt that brush with death made me forever an Israeli. Though I was sent to school in Cyprus, and made famous in America, and feted in Mexico, and though I found peace in Japan and raised my family in England, I am an Israeli.
Like Israel, I was birthed in war. In 1991, when Saddam Hussein fired salvoes of Soviet-made surface-to-air Scud missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I feared Israel would retaliate, and our state - and probably the whole world - would find its death in war.
It rapidly became plain that Saddam was not arming the Scuds with chemical or biological weaponry - much later we learned that the US-made Patriot missiles, credited with intercepting all but two Scuds, in fact missed their mark every time. . A US Army spokesman said President George Bush had not been lying, because "intercept does not mean destroyed; it means a Patriot and a Scud passed in the sky".
I do not think Israel's courage in the Gulf War has been fully acknowledged. We are a nation inured to war - but when Saddam bombed our cities to provoke us, we defied him. Now it is time for us to summon the same kind of bravery to defuse a different kind of Iraq crisis.
Since January, Allied jets have been bombing Iraq. The West does not seem to care that we will still be bombing in January 2000. Sanctions have been slowly squeezing the life out of the country since 1990. There is no sign they will be lifted by 2000.
We will enter the new millennium waging a one-sided war against Iraq, because its mad despotic leader once threatened us with a conflict too awful to contemplate. I do not underestimate the Arab threat to Israel. I believe that terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden's massively-wealthy organisation, have acquired portable nuclear "suitcase" devices.
Washington sources say Bin Laden paid $30 million in cash and $700 million worth of Afghan heroin to Chechens In return for several of the 43 atomic suitcases missing from the ex-Soviet arsenal.
Alexander Lebed, former Russian head of security, has told the US House of Representatives that a single suitcase detonated in a city could kill 100,000 people.
But it is not probable that any of these cases are in Saddam's hands, or that he dictates Bin Laden's strategy.
And it, is certain that no nuclear weiapons are held by babies or young children in Iraq. Yet it is the children who are dying.
Disease
The bombs are killing some. When an American AGM-130 missile ploughed into a Basra housing complex in February, 17 people died and 100 were wounded.
These are United Nations figures. Ten of the dead were children. Six more were women.
The figures are negligible compared to the human cost of sanctions.
The UN children's fund, UNICEF, estimated that ,between 5,000 and 6,000 Iraqi children die of disease and starvation every month.
The mortality rate for under-fives has more than tripled since sanctions were imposed, and a quarter of infants are malnourished.
Nasra al Sa'adoun, the Sorbonne educated grand-daughter of an Iraqi prime minister, told Western journalists In Baghdad: 'We have no electricity, no clean water, no trains, no safe cars, and you are bombing us every day.
I tell you, we would rather have a real war than this slow death. This is genocide."
Genocide is not too strong a word. The 10-year total for child deaths caused by sanctions is put at 500,000. Unicef the World Health Organisation (WHO) and ex-officials of the U14 such as Denis Halliday, who was humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, all testify to these estimates.
Health-care has dwindled to nothing. The UN reported: "Public health services are near total collapse - basic medicines, life-saving drugs and essential medical, supplies are lacking throughout the country."
Useless components for vital equipment gather dust In Iraq's warehouses because sanctions make it impossible to import even life-saving products in practical ways. Syringe Plungers arrive one year - medics are still waiting for the needles 12 months on.
The, UN, struggling to render such a humanitarian blunder in bureaucratic jargon, says this is a problem of uncomplimentarity.
Most horrific of all is the tenfold increase in cancers. Within 10 years 44 per cent of Iraqis will develop cancer, according to John Hopkins University and Baghdad's Professor Mikdeni M Saleh.
Radiation levels in Basra are 84 times above WHO safety limits, and the city hospital sees grotesquely deformed foetuses and babies every day.
This horror has been caused by the radioactive DU (depleted uranium) which is used to coat Allied warheads. DU is increasingly used instead of titanium as a low-cost, armour-piercing outer shell on missiles.
Some estimates suggest 900 tonnes of radioactive waste, which will cease to be hazardous only after 4.5 billion years litters Iraq. Resisting Saddam's mocking call to arms was the toughest decision Israel ever took. Now we must take another, even tougher - and demand an end to the devastation in Iraq.
*Uri's novels Dead COld and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is Published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
The Jewish Telegraph
November 5, 1999
Weaving web of virtual artistry
I LOVE TV shopping. I love watching 40-inch hands turning diamonds as big as tennis balls on my wide-screen televisions.
I love turning up on QVC's live shows, to promote a novel or a Mindpower product, and watching the computers tracking thousands of calls from shoppers.
I love those 30-minute infomercials, giving me the hard sell for products I never imagined could exist - hair restorers that could make a beard sprout on a baby, personal security pendants that blast stinging clouds of pepper at assailants while screaming out a 118dB siren, car waxes so impenetrable that a troop of baboons could fail to put a scratch on your shining bodywork.
I tested the infommercial market a couple of years ago, tempted by the concept of staging an Oprah-style event to showcase a product. The statistics are daunting - for every half-hour ad you see on a mid-morning satellite channel, dozens have been filmed and tested on focus groups. Millions of pounds are spent creating a commercial with the glossiest production values, an ad so opulent that viewers can't help but believe.
Except they don't. We are armchair cynics, all of us, unwilling to accept anything we see, oblivious to the most expertly scripted patter of the most radioactively sincere host. Almost all infommercials achieve zero credibility, and are consigned to the rejects bin before ever being screened on international TV.
Even with dedicated shopping channels and hundreds of network controllers desperate for advertising Income, TV is too small to be the perfect sales medium. Time is limited. Prime time on top channels is very limited. So it's expensive - expensive to make the ads, expensive to test-run them, expensive to show them.
But now there's another way to advertise on a TV screen - every screen, in theory, on the planet. The worldwide web can be viewed via television: soon every TV will feature internet access as standard, the one indispensable channel.
For anyone with a computer and a modem, setting up a website costs nothing. The potential market is mind-boggling, with 300 million users expected online by 2001.
The biggest sellers, the ones every new web-surfer inspects during their first week online, have become instant multinationals - the bookseller Amazon.com is judged on the stock markets to be worth more than Sainsbury's. The smallest sellers are worth nothing at all - and if you set up a website today to sell produce from your allotment or your unwanted CDs, then you'll join the small guys. Low-traffic websites are much more microscopic than minnows they're electronic plankton.
How do you get to be a big fish? Not by eating the other little ones, but by merging with them. The internet is a mass of world-wide communities, and smart communities thrive onliiie.
One of the smartest is ARTcnet.com, a virtual gallery of Jewish artists. The sales set-up is smooth, the images are expertly displayed and the work is of a breathtakingly high standard.
These are not world-famous artists, but they are brilliant and successful people whose pieces are desirable, and collectable. It's a long way from the high-budget, lowest-common-denominator mindset that drives infommercials - many of the ARTcnet.com paintings are offered at $5,000 or more.
The project was pioneered by ARTcnet president Phyllis Zombie, based in Gladwyne, Philadelphia. Next year she will be taking groups of US collectors to Israel to meet some of the artists who sell through the site - Jan Menses, for instance, and Yoram Ra'anan, Frank Meisler, Nili Kook, Dorit Levinstein, Yitshak Greenfield, Yaacov Xaszemacher, Blyah Succot, Boruch Nachson, Lana Rubinstein and Yitszhak ben Yehuda.
Ra'anan's glorious paintings are easily spotted on the webpages. He works in dazzling, light colours with an inner, fire, transforming every scene into a blazing sunset. Greenfield's collages, Kook's sculptures, Kaszemacher's silkscreens and ben 'Yehuda's lithographs are all as fascinating.
The gallery is divided into virtual roomms, one for religious paintings, another for sculptures and so on. You can work at viewing the pieces, visiting each artist's online studio, reading the notes or you can simply leave the main page running, where a simple programme endlessly shuffles through some of the most popular images.
Or, of course, you can take out your credit card and buy one.
Last month I was raving about MP3, the digital format which makes every kind of music, by even the most obscure of musicians, globally available, with CD quality and no pricetag. MP3 guarantees that Jewish music will reclaim its audience.
Online salesrooms, like ARTcenet, are doing the same for Israeli artists. Yoram Ra'anan doesn't need an infommercial to sell his paintings. There are already I50 million people worldwide with instant access to his images.
The Jewish Telegraph
October 29, I999
Being Jewish is worth fighting for
DON'T very much care if you think I'm a fake. After 30 years of proving my powers and of least II,000 bent spoons, I am used to sceptics.
Many people would prefer to call me a liar than to admit they might have been wrong about the paranormal.
You can think what you like -- if you imagine I'm a conman, I'll happily try to prove you wrong, but I can’t help it if you refuse to accept scientific evidence and hard facts.
Your thoughts are one matter - your words are another. Publish an attack on me and my honesty, claim that I am a conjuror or a fraud, and I will force you to retract. If that means a court battle, I will fight. And I do fight, frequently.
Friends sometimes advise me to be less litigious. They say that if I truly don't mind whether one person regards me as a cheat, I shouldn't trouble to prevent that person from speaking out.
Freedom of speech, they say, first amendment, sticks. and stones. But they're missing the point. I accept I can't convince all of the people all of the time but that doesn't mean I’m going to give up in disgust and refuse to convince anyone.
If I allow a few vocal sceptics to broadcast their contempt at will, the hundreds of millions of people who don't have much of an opinion either way about Uri Geller will soon assume there's no longer any controversy, that the matter is settled, that I am not psychic, that I have been lying all these years.
The most important opinion about Uri Geller is my own. You don't have to agree with it, but take care if you decide to challenge it.
This is not the stance of an egomaniac. Anyone with any self-respect will make the same stand: "Think what you like, but watch what you say."
I felt strong sympathy for TV magnate Michael Grade when the Chief Rabbi declared earlier this month that he wasn't Jewish as his mother was a gentile.
The law is based on the halacha, which ordains Jewish descent must be traced down the maternal line: "Your son, by an Israelite woman is called your son, but your son by a heathen woman is not called your son." (BKid, 68b) Halacha or hokum, the Chief Rabbi’s remark crosses the line, it goes beyond opinion - it is commanding other people to revise their own most fundamental opinions of a man's personality.
It must be challenged because, if Grade ignores the attack, many people will assume he simply has no defence.
He did hit back, angrily "If people want to,live their lives the way it was 2,000 years ago, I say good luck to them. It's wonderful. Don't try to impose it on me."
Sarcasm
That sentiment matches mine. For Grade, however, it was just the first salvo. "Don't try to tell me I'm not a jew", he said. "I'll decide. When the Gestapo knocked on the door in the middle of the night, did they say, 'Oh are you a liberal Jew? You don't have to get on the train. You're not Jewish.. You're only half-Jewish'."
His sarcasm veils a serious message. Being Jewish - or being psychic - is often a matter of who you ask. The rabbis might sniff at a Jew's credentials - the Nazis never did. The media have rarely probed too deeply either.
Charlie Chaplin famously refused to deny accusations throughout his career that he was a Jew - first a Jewish draft-dodger in World -War One, then a Jewish profiteer in the depression, then a Jewish communist during the McCarthy era.
Chaplin's courageous belief, which could have cost him his success, was that his religion was nobody's business and there was no shame in being a Jew, any more than being a Christian had any special merit.
As it happened, his mother was not Jewish and for most of his life Chaplin was an an atheist. The rabbis would never have called him a Jew - but Hitler would have paid anything to see the Little Tramp branded with a yellow star and herded onto a wagon bound for Auschwitz.
I have nothing to gain speaking out for Grade - quite the Opposite. When he was head of Channel 4 he commissioned an, Equinox documentary which included a vicious assault on my character.
In the absence of any evidence against me, the film-makers used relentlessly negative imagery.
The programme made no firm accusations and presented no hard facts, but its insinuations were so powerfully framed that many viewers were left with the definite impression that I had been unmasked, exposed, debunked.
I lodged a formal complaint and made my point at a tribunal. I wrote to Grade and he did not answer. The broadcasting bigwig was crossed off the long list of people I would sit next to at dinner.
My feud with him and his programme-makers is in the past. His fight with People who would deny him his right to be a Jew is right here in the present and it is a fight which has powerful implications for countless people.
I have no doubt at all and I'm happy to declare it: : of course Michael Grade is a Jew.
Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail urigeller@compuserve.com
October 22, 1999
LOGGING ON TO A NEW WORLD OF MUSIC
I'M in a hotel room in Toronto, it's 2.30 am and I'm listening to klezmer. Not live - even if 1 could hire a Chassidic wedding ensemble at this time in the morning, 1 suspect the night manager would prevent us from staging a full-tilt dance in the suite. It's that kind of hotel.
I'm not listening to my Walkman either. All the CDs I've brought on this trip are pop and disco - music for exercising to.
The bittersweet, joyful keening of a violin is flooding from my laptop even while I'm writing. This is klezmer direct from the Net.
And it's good, powerful stuff. The soloist's name is Steven Greenman - scanning web-sites designed to promote this music world- wide, 1 see Greenman's name again and again. He is making an impact on the scene.
One enthusiast, Art Davidow, has included a 20- minute sample of Greenman's music on his vast Klezme@Shack.com pages.
Qualify
The tracks download and start to play with a single click, leaving me free to search for more detail for this column.
One thing I love about the web is that it's always open. The clock says 2.36am, east Canadian time; my body says 24 minutes to eight, London time; the Klezmer Shack says, "So who's counting the minutes? Let's dance!"
There is so much klezmer on the web. 1 have to qualify this by pointing out that there's so much of every- thing on the web - some estimates say north America sees one million new users log on every day.
Web sites are devoted to any type of music ever recorded, partly because recordings are the kind of non-perishable product which can be easily sold over the Internet.
Any band playing any music can sell Its CDs on the web. If they can't afford to make CDs - and it only takes a home computer to record, onto CD now - they could download their songs straight onto the Net.
Millions already have. An ultra-compressed recording technology called MP3 means top-quality can be Imported via a and stored on your PC -'no need for CDs, or record labels, or, publishing companies. MP3 files can be e-mailed to friends or played back on palm-sized gadgets that are much more robust than CD players - the inuF3le@ never skips, blurs or sticks. , 1 For the first time, it is simpler for me to' obtain music by an unsigned, unknown band than it is to walk to a record store and buy the current Number One album. Where will 1 find a CD shop open in the s 'mall hours in Toronto?
I could order by credit-card, over the net from Amazon.com or a hundred other places, but the music won't be delivered before lunchtime at the earliest.
Preserved
I can enjoy free samples by unsigned Jewish musicians - klezmer and every other style - all night long. Maybe a record deal is the last thing any rising band needs now.
Twenty years ago, who could have imagined that musicians like Steven Greenman would find the encouragement and the audiences and work they desperately needed for their music to survive ?
Klezmer was historians' music - it deserved to be preserved on hissy reel-to-reels before the last of the old-time wedding minstrels got too arthritic to draw a bow. But could anyone have called it "a vibrant, burgeoning tradition"?
Today, there's no other description. Pick up one compilation, such as A Marriage Of Heaven And Earth on Ellipsis CDs.
Twelve tracks which follow the pattern of a wedding, from the procession, via the greetings and the dances and the ceremony and the march to the canopy and the procession from the canopy, to the final journey home of the in-laws - it's all chronicled by bands called the Klezmatics, the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble, Brave Old World and the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band.
Ari Davidow points out that klezmer was once a derogatory word - derived from "kleizemer" meaning musical Instruments, but it was sometimes a word of abuse. With the reclaiming of the music came a new freedom in the word.
In the next two years, 1 predict, more traditional Jewish music will be recorded and distributed world- wide than has been created in a century. A tradition that was fit for the museum in 1979 is now wild and raving like a wedding guest who refuses to go home.
It's not alone. The rebirth of ethnic music all over the globe, decried as a fad by many music business execs, has become an unstoppable movement
Geriatrics
The South African singers Ladysmith Black Mambazo sell baked beans on British TV, and US rock star Ry Cooder turns a band of Cuban geriatrics into an international sensation - and that's just the topmost layer of this phenomenon.
Scratch the surface and there’s more music, from all over the world – dig deeper and every kind of musician, of every age and culture, is spreading their sounds.
It's a paradox that the Internet, while making American English even more the planet's dominant language, is helping every type of music Imaginable to revive and survive.
That's a healthy paradox. Electro-encephalographic scans show we use only one part, of our brains to process verbal language. Music lights up the whole of the,. mind - we use every part of' our thinking apparatus to appreciate it,
Stroke victims and children with learning difficulties can be helped to build new neural pathways with music.
The worldwide web is evolving into the brain of the planet. It is wonderful that every kind of music is already coursing through it.
*Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and
e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com
October 15, 1999
DID MOSES SET FOOT ON THIS STONE ?
SOMETHING the reporters don't know about Michael Jackson: there is a profoundly moving aura of peace around this strangely attired, agonisingly shy man.
This peace is not apparent in his videos and his stage shows, all blistering special effects and crowd choreography. When he dances he seems possessed by music, offering himself up as a sacrifice.
Until I met him in New York this summer, I had no idea about the peacefulness. He looks at you, when he finds the courage to meet your gaze, and you feel your heartbeat slowing.
That is a rare gift I have felt it before in the saintly presence of Dadi Janki, an elderly Indian woman who is a UN ambassador for peace and a figurehead for the meditation movement Brahma Kumaris.
Michael seems an unlikely saint. When I flew from Tel Aviv to join him for his first visit to a synagogue, at the Carlebach Shool on West 79th earlier this month.
I wanted to make him a gift which would strengthen his power ot peace.
Tel Aviv is where I grew up. It's where I was living when the Six Day W@ar erupted. And it is where I returned with my father when the killing was over.
My father, Tibor, was a professional soldier, I had already abandoned my plans to be an officer in a parachute regiment, or a spy.
He fought with something close to relish, a fierce patriotism and a joyful love for his comrades. I was just terrified. He was not wounded, I was.
When I was able to walk out of hospital, I drove with my father in his army jeep into the Sinai desert. This land was newly ours and anciently ours, a conquest which represented the fulfilment of a prophecy and a new era of peace.
At the foot of Mount Sinai, instead of going to the walls of the Monastery of St Katerina, we tried to imagine the place where God had spoken to Moses from the centre of a blazing bush.
At first, I think', my father joined me in this search, which we, made quite seriously, because we felt a bond which we,@er'y rarely felt I can think of only two other occasions when I sensed myself so close to him.
And also, perhaps, he did not want to have a disagreement with me in such al@holy place.
Within a few minutes, he was inspecting boulders and crevices as earnestly as I was. When I sensed I had. found the place and I can still feel the electric tingle in my palms and.fingers, the dowser's sensation that 'decades later told me when I had discovered gold or oil my father helped me dislodge a stone.
Moses' foot may have trodden on this triangular piece of rock. We prised it out of the ground and brushed the sand off it, and carried it to the jeep. I told my father its three sides rearesented Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
He joked he was going to break off two of the sides and then we realised that was impossible. The religions could not exist without each other.
I did not tell him what I wanted to do with the triangle of stone, but in my heart I was already calling it The Stone Of Peace.
We drove back across Sinai, past burnt-out wrecks of Egyptian tanks, and photographed each other beside charred and warped heaps of metal.
My father took a picture of the torso of an Egyptian soldier, whose blackened corpse stood in the sand like a bronze bust with its arms clawing at the sky.
We parted in Tel Aviv, and I took a bus the following day to Jerusalem. The stone was wrapped in an old tunic, and I walked with it under my arm to the Western Wa-il, because the Wall too was part of Israel's reconquest.
No one saw me take the riangul-ar rock and press it into the earth, as close to the Wall as I dared.
Whenever I have been in Jerusalem, I return to look at my stone. Two million feet have stepped on it, but it has never been moved or damaged. I was in the city when I learned Michael Jackson was promising to go to shool. I wanted to take him a gift of peace. I brought him thestone.
It was not easy to do. I had to visit the wall in the dead of the night, and bribe a soldier to look away while I dug my stone out of the ground. I had to plead, threaten, and bend 50 spoons to Trans-Atlantic airline staff to let me bring a delicate, weighty relic on board in my hand luggage.
The New York customs simply didn't believe my story till I'd told it four times.
I brought my Stone Of Peace to the Carlebach Shool, and when Michael Jackson arrived I presented It to him.
I made a brief explanation of its history, but I cannot imagine he could ever divine its significance to me. I wonder myself what impelled me to give It away.
That triangle of rock possesses a holy force which can magnify humanity's potential for peace. Michael Jackson has a power of the same kind. In the years to come, I hope the Stone Of Peace will create a new international significance for itself.
*Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99.Mind Medicine is published W Element at £I8.99. Visit him at www.uri-geller.com and e-mail him at urigeller@Compuserve.com
The Jewish Telegraph,
Friday October 8, 1999
JACKO WAS MY SECRET YOMTOV GUEST
Someone grabbed my arm and hissed in my face of synagogue on Friday night. 1 have never been more shocked.
The synagogue was on New York's West 79th Street, the Carlebach Shool, and I had flown there to be with Michael, Jackson for the Simchat Torah service.
Michael wanted to learn how Jews worshipped through music. I introduced him to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and they instantly became friends. It was inevitable that Shmuley's brand of brash, confident persuasion would coax Michael out of his reclusive shyness for one evening.
I thought that no one in the Carlebach could believe their eyes. We had told no one of the arrangement - Shmuley was to be guest rabbi and the rest was up to Michael's security team. When he walked up the steps of the shool in a black fedora, sunglasses, a shining pink-and-green tie and White socks like spats, with a bunch of flowers in his hand, people were standing with their jaws gaping.