Untitled Document

April 19, 2000

LEVI - SAINT FLAWED BY DEATH

PRIMO Levi committed suicide a few days before Passover, 13 years ago. It was one of the most shocking deaths of the century.

To millions he symbolised the resilience of the human spirit. Primo Levi had survived to bear witness to the Shoah. It was unthinkable that he should lack the courage to see the task through to the end.

A measure of how profoundly his death seemed to betray his life is that Levi's biography not only ends with his self-slaughter, it begins with it.

Myriam Annissimov opens the introduction of Tragedy of an Optimist (Aurum Press, £12.99) with these words: ''On 11 April 1987 Primo Levi plunged down the stairwell of the house where he was born and had always lived . . .''

The first chapter repeats: ''One Saturday morning in April 1987, a tragedy disrupted the peace and quiet of the Corso Re Umberto. Primo Levi had taken his own life.'' And 400 pages later we are standing at the same spot, with Levi's wife Lucia, staring down at the broken body: ''Primo Levi left no message for his friends and family . . . (Some of them) have always refused to believe it was suicide.''

Suicide. The word rings from start to finish, as if his felo de se was commanded by destiny. His message of hope, that man can endure anything, is shunted aside.

His story of horror, the most detailed account ever recorded of life inside Auschwitz, is relegated to the status of disputed evidence — locked airlessly in self-sealing plastic bags and exhibited on the wooden tables of Britain's libel courts, for self-serving historians to sneer over.

Suicide. So the Nazis got their man. A great, noble life is reduced to broken bones at the end.

I don't believe that. I have read Levi's story in many different ways. He told it himself, in prose as sharp as a shard of glass, in possessed, compulsive detail, clutching the reader's arm and slashing at it with his words.

It was retold, in lurid and gory splashes, by thousands of ghoulish journalists who seized on books such as The Truce and If This Is A Man, and turned them into the pornography of the camps.

Now it is told again by Annissimov, who is so careful not to glorify the unspeakable that she gives equal weight to the casual selection of gas chamber victims by an SS officer, and the theft of a tin of salted herring.

When I first heard of Levi's suicide, I supposed he had given way to the inevitable.

The liberation had come in time to postpone his death sentence, but not to save his life — Soviet troops who marched into the camp had apparently sentenced him to a lifetime of guilt.

He and the other survivors did not even deserve the title of 'witnesses', he felt — the true witnesses were the dead, the drowned, the ghosts who whispered in the night, ''I haven't dispossessed anyone, haven't usurped anyone's bread''.

We revered Levi not only because he lived through Auschwitz and dared to speak of it, but because he acknowledged his depression and trauma. He was scarred — tattooed and bruised on the outside, carved to ribbons on the inside.

He forced himself on, dragging his self-loathing and his desperation step-by-step, word-by-word.

''Finding no answer to explain why he had survived when others had died,'' writes Annissimov, ''he arrived at the deluded conclusion that 'the worst survived — that is, the fittest; the best all died'.''

It is impossible to imagine the strength and goodness this man must have possessed, to overcome his demons every day.

To find greater strength, to marry and to pursue an outstanding career as a chemist, and to tell his story over and over.

For a long time, nobody listened. Until the 1970s, Levi was unknown outside Italy, though by his death he was regarded as a future Nobel Laureate (for literature? for peace?) But in the 90s, with his work helping to propel the Shoah to the forefront of human rights debate, through Hollywood triumphs such as Schindler's List, Levi has become an icon. A saint. But a saint flawed by his death, a kind of delayed martyrdom.

I repeat — I do not believe the Nazis killed Primo Levi. It is evident that he was tormented by fears for his health and a morbid terror of cancer, provoked by his mother's illness.

It is evident too that for weeks Levi had been in the grip of suicidal depression, not for the first time, and that he was fighting it with his usual weapon, the single step. From this step to the next. This word to the next.

April 14, 2000

NASTY SHOCK IN STORE WHILE CRUSING AMAZON

Karin McQuillan, someone I have never met or heard of, is urging me to stay away from online bookstore Amazon.

Ms McQuillan did not email me directly —she started a chain letter which reached one of my lawyers in Baltimore, who forwarded it to me.

I don’t have an address for Ms McQ — neither virtual nor concrete. She may not be Jewish; McQuillan isn’t a common Jewish name.

I have a suspicion that she doesn’t really exist — just an electronic identity, a cautious cover for someone who wants to attack fascism without fascism attacking back.

That’s OK. I’m all for caution in dangerous situations.

And the target is a worthy one. Not Amazon — that’s a loss-making business with a share value bigger than Sainsbury’s, which means it is liable to be no risk to anyone but its investors.

Ms McQ is angry about something which has done far more damage and cost many more lives than any dot.com could ever cause — a book.

The book is a hoax, exposed 80 years ago as a cheap compilation of 19th century fiction and 20th century racism. It is called The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, and Hitler praised it in Mein Kampf as authentic and incomparable.

The Protocols, in last year’s translation by Victor Marsden, is offered at $19.96. It is 299 pages, available on order within four to six weeks, and when I checked tonight it was number 1,435 on Amazon’s bestsellers.

That’s 1,435 out of 2,000,000. My Stateside publishers tell me that when my books are in the Amazon top 2,000, I’m doing OK.

Karin McQuillan’s chain letter — written with the aim of being read by as many people as possible — says: ‘‘Experts on antisemitism see The Protocols as one of the most dangerous books ever written, responsible for the loss of untold life.’’

She clearly believes it should not be for sale online, and insists: ‘‘I would not shop in a store that sells neo-Nazi hate literature. I will never buy a book from Amazon.com again.’’

I checked for The Protocols in London’s biggest bookstore, Borders on Charing Cross Road. It wasn’t there. And if it had been, I might never, like Ms McQuillan, have returned to that shop.

There would be something stomach-churning about finding this vicious, hate-laden text on a bookshelf, slipped between the diets and the detectives and the bios and the bibles.

Perhaps online is something different. I would never know The Protocols were there, unless I typed the title into Amazon’s search engine.

Like the society women who went looking for foul language in Dr Johnson’s first dictionary, I can only be offended if I want to be.

Maybe the anonymous Ms McQ is a cunning Nazi who specialises in reverse psychology — making people think one thing by saying another. She neglects to protest at the availability of Mein Kampf through Amazon, but then that is charting at a lowly 30,000.

Readers are able to review books on Amazon, and about 30 people have submitted opinions on The Protocols.

One nameless reader from Winston Salem in North Carolina writes: ‘‘When I was an undergraduate, the book was out of print and nearly impossible to obtain. A professor of mine who dealt in war memorabilia as a hobby was asked by several of his colleagues, including a rabbi, to procure copies at the next gun show. Surely buying at Amazon is better than having to buy it at a gun show.’’

Another reviewer, Beth Hartford from Northern California, awards the book a maximum five stars — ‘‘only because it’s an excellent tool to teach what lies are, and how evil rulers use such evil garbage and nonsense as a means for power and genocide.’’

Aaron Etchin in Tel Aviv is more blunt: ‘‘Antisemite book — how can you sell it?’’

Not all the reviews are negative. This is a top 1,500 book, after all, and even if it might be making the charts because a few wealthy Ku Klux Klanners in Tennessee are buying it by the crate to send to their friends, there are clearly some readers who believe in The Protocols.

These people don’t accept the book was based on a French satire by a lawyer named Maurice Joly, or that the Tsarist police mixed in segments of an 1868 novel called Biarritz by Hermann Goedsche.

Hitler was not fooled. The book was clearly a true expose of the international Jewish conspiracy — why else was it ‘‘so infinitely hated by the Jews’’?

‘‘Once this book has become the common property of a people,’’ Hitler promised, ‘‘the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.’’

The Internet proves Hitler wrong. There never was a Jewish menace, and despite everything we are not broken. But it’s not only Amazon which supplies it — I found the entire text, compressed for quick transfer via modem, on a dozen sites within seconds.

One was a white supremacist webpage, another was a scholarly collection of 20th century antisemitic texts, with commentaries by an eminent Jewish academic.

Put away your matches. Even the worst books cannot be burned now.

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

April 07, 2000

WE WILL SOON SEE GOD ON OPRAH

GOD is not dead. But He has made a major career change. No longer the supreme deity and omni-present giver of life, God has down-sized.

He has become a celebrity author, a guru of self-help. Expect to see Him on a major satellite TV chat show before Yom Kippur.

He'll probably do Oprah. God is still a very big name, after all, even if the name is something that is not supposed to be pronounced.

Any trash-TV producer knows God will work miracles on the ratings.

Publishers have woken up to Him too. After the massive self-help hit based on pagan deities — Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus — two titles featuring God have swept the bestseller charts. And neither of them is the Bible.

This has to be a good decision by God. Nobody reads the Bible any more. The proof is in the way we talk. We use every foul, profane and scatological four-letter word, in every situation.

Words I never heard until I joined the Army are now part of basic chatter in the supermarket queues, in the office and the home. Obscenities are among the first words most children learn in America, Britain, Europe and, yes, Israel.

Remember the outrage of the naive salesman in the 1970 Paul Simon song Gotta Keep The Customer Satisfied? ''I get slandered! Libelled! I hear words I never learned in the Bible!''

God has to start inspiring the kind of books that people do read, and self-help is the natural target market.

I've read every page of Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments (Doubleday, $21) without finding a swearword spelled out in full, but essentially this book, like Rabbi Boteach's first bestseller, Kosher Sex, is about love-making.

Shmuley undersells himself hard on Page One. The reader knows it's a joke because Shmuley would never genuinely undersell himself on anything. He would rather sell his children to slave traders in Oman.

''Why am I writing yet another book on relationships?'' he asks. ''Am I a shameless author who seeks to regurgitate the same stuff he's written before, albeit repackaged like new for unsuspecting readers? You bet!''

He's writing about relationships, of course, because he does it marvellously. And God is with him in every line.

He picks up the point about swearing, of course, when he deals with Commandment Three (that's the one about not making wrongful use of His name, if it's a while since you last thumbed through Exodus).

Swearing, according to God, is not just sinful — it's boring.

''Profanity is, above all, proof of an unoriginal mind. If you must swear, do it in some exotic language like Swahili or Mandarin."

Then Shmuley translates the Third Commandment as ''Bull**** is Blasphemy''.

Commandment Seven is the big one here. God is attempting to repackage His whole legal structure as a user-friendly guide to sex, and at a crucial moment he stumbles over: ''Do not commit adultery.''

''The Seventh Commandment," Shmuley admits, ''is one of the biggies.''

The eroticism implicit in those four words of warning lights a blaze in the heart of his book. The seventh chapter is a firecracker succession of explosive one-liners, a fireworks display of the rabbi's wit.

As a comedian, Shmuley isn't just a stand-up — he's priapic.

''Don't try to be James Bond. When she asks you your name, say more than just, 'Cohen, Jack Cohen'.''

''A woman knows all about her own children; a man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.''

''It goes without saying that jumping into bed with your date before you've even exchanged telephone numbers is a big no-no.''

Personally, I try not to break the Commandments unless it's urgent, but I do enjoy causing mischief.

One mischievous act I committed last year was to introduce Rabbi Boteach to Dr Deepak Chopra. They are about the same height, and they are both dedicated to serving God in their writing. At that point, they run out of similarities.

Deepak speaks slowly, meditatively. He is capable of sitting for six hours, visualising the sun shining into his mind. Shmuley talks like a thesaurus dropped in a shredder. Even when he prays, he's fidgeting flipping a coin over his knuckles, chewing the end of his beard. They became friends instantly.

Deepak's latest book, How To Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries (Harmony, $24), his 25th, presents God as a being which evolves with us. As we become deeper, wiser creatures, God grows better.

It is a remarkable image, rooted as much in Darwinism as in the Bible, wonderfully memorable because it explains so many of the questions we have asked about God since we were children.

We can connect to God at seven levels, argues Dr Chopra, and the first level is the basic one which underlies many Bible stories — the God of fighting.

If we live at the brink of war, we get a hard, punitive God, like Job's.

If we strive to achieve, we have a powerful God, like Abraham's. If we are calm, we may worship a balanced God, like Daniel's. If we are always growing in spirit, our God, like Solomon's, grows with us.

If we are creators, like David, our God is creative and if we are miracle-makers, we worship a God of dreams, like Joseph's.

But when we are at one with God, our God becomes sacred.

This condition is more than human it is holy. I confess I find it impossible to imagine how it must be, to live life in such an exalted state.

One thing is certain — I would have to stop swearing.

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

March 31, 2000

ISRAEL MUST DEVELOP TECHNOLOGY FIRST

ALBERT Einstein’s famous formula E=Mc2 set off the atomic bomb. ‘‘If only I had known,’’ he said at the end of his life, ‘‘I should have become a watchmaker.’’

Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, is tormented by the same doubts. But Joy is at the height of his career, a software developer credited with pioneering the Internet and creating the universal programmes which make it hum.

And he believes we must stop. Right now. Before computer networks become so advanced that they don’t need people any more.

Joy’s nightmare vision, expressed in a 20,000-word essay online at www.wired.com, has shocked America’s digital entrepreneurs.

Billions of dollars have been created on the stock exchanges and no one, until now, has suggested this could be the beginning of the end of the world.

But if Joy is right, our headlong electro-lust could trigger a Holocaust virus.

The talk so far has been of bubbles bursting, shares crashing. But never of computer-assisted genocide. As the dot.com 20-something millionaires of Silicon Valley digested the new view, even President Clinton was requesting a copy of the piece Joy had headlined, ‘Why the future doesn’t need us’.

It filled me, as I scanned it for the first time, with a cold thrill of terror, like a plausible techno-novel — Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, say, or Robert Harris’s Fatherland.

It’s fun to be chilled, for a while. Then it’s good to apply what I call the ‘Prophet of Doom’ test.

Why is this visionary sharing his nightmare with us? Does he seriously think he can avert disaster? Is this altruism of the purest, highest kind? Or not?

Bill Joy fails my PoD test because he cannot honestly believe that mankind is going to voluntarily withhold from creating better, faster, cleverer microprocessors. This is the race which fell over itself to build the neutron bomb and the mustard-gas shell.

We may be like lemmings, rushing to hurl our feeble bodies over a cliff. But there’s a sea of cash at the foot of that cliff — trillions of dollars washing around, enough money to drown an army.

Bill Joy knows no one will hold back.

With this in mind, I re-read the essay. And all the prophecies turned to gibberish. All except one.

One prophecy struck a chilling note, and the cold went deeper and deeper into me over the next few days. That prophecy is the reason I’m talking about Joy in the Jewish Telegraph.

‘‘My own major concern with genetic engineering,’’ he writes, ‘‘is that it gives the power — whether militarily, accidentally or in a deliberate terrorist act — to create a White Plague.’’

He is not talking about tuberculosis, the original ‘white plague’,' or about the modern version, cocaine.

Joy is refering to a 1984 novel by Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, about a genetically-engineered virus which infects people with a specific DNA characteristics.

The warning is hidden in a long discussion on nanotechnology, the science of building computers as small as human cells. As small as the molecules in those cells.

It has been a goal of scientists since 1959, when Nobel Laureate Prof Richard Feynman gave a speech, called ‘There’s Plenty Of Room At The Bottom’, imagining computers as small as grains of dust, which would swarm like microbes to build themselves into intelligent, microscopic entities.

The science is still imaginary, but it is alluring. Think of a powder consisting of computers, which could organise itself and set off into the recesses of any machine to perform repairs.

Pour this intelligent powder onto the engine of a damaged car, and set to work rebuilding every connection. Inject it into the human bloodstream, and it would behave like an army of hospital medics, cleaning up damaged tissue and optimising every braincell.

Feynman and his fantasists seem to have forgotten that computers do what they are programmed to do. If this magic powder were programmed to destroy cells with certain DNA profiles, and them to replicate themselves to infect other carriers, a silicon plague would be effected.

Every reader will have realised that there is no human genome more distinctive than the Jewish one. Nor any genetic type whose enemies have come closer to eradicating it.

For the racial terrorist, there will be no need to wait for nanotechnologies to be perfected. The luminous singularity of the Jewish genes will be enough to attract viral terrorism.

Any biologist who can produce a flu bug which is especially strong in carriers of the Tay-Sachs gene, for instance, will possess a virulent weapon to persecute Jewish communities.

Targets will not have to suffer the disease to fall victim to the virus — and that could mean the bug hits more than half the people in any Jewish community.

When the human genome is fully decoded later this year, it will be possible to identify the gene which has been passed down the paternal line of Cohens and Levis.

This invisible quirk which has survived 6,000 years of tradition could conceivably be the trigger of a plague.

There is no question that these weapons will become possible, perhaps within a decade. Vague pleas by software maestros will do nothing to slow their development.

There is only one defence —the defence which Israel has learned painfully during the past century.

We must develop an antidote. And to do that we must invent the weapon itself, before anyone else does. In other words, we must possess the capability to strike first.

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 http://www.uri-geller.com/ and e-mail him at urigeller@compuserve.com

March 17, 2000

Prayers float up for the Rebbe’s care

IT IS hard to imagine there could be so many prayers in the world.

Mountains of prayers, paper mountains. I stood beside the grave of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, tore my prayer into fragments and let them flutter on to the mountain.

Overhead, it was midnight and the landing lights of a 747 thundered on a flightpath to Kennedy airport, less than a mile away. The lips of many of the people there, 40 or more, moved as they spoke their prayers aloud, but I could not hear their whispers above the jet’s roar.

I found myself wondering if the passengers in the aircraft were touched by the prayers as they floated up. Whether their own prayers for a safe landing were added to the pleas from the holy graveside below . . . I had often heard of the Rebbe’s grave and the custom of entrusting prayers to his safekeeping.

I had not realised how many, how very many prayers there could be, or that they fell in a ragged blizzard on the grave every hour of the day, every day of the year.

‘‘They come by fax,’’ my friend, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, told me. ‘‘They come by email and they are phoned in, dictated to secretaries. They are sent from every town and city where Jews have settled, and they are being brought personally right this minute.

‘‘Even as we’re sitting here at . . .’’ he checked his watch . . . ‘‘10.45pm. We could go there now, get there at midnight, and there would be dozens of people with their prayers, writing them down then tearing them up.’’ Naturally, I did not quite believe him. And so, naturally, he had to prove it.

Before we entered the cemetery we saw a billboard, and from the billboard the Rebbe’s vast image looked down. Beside his face I read the words, ‘‘Let’s welcome Moshiach with acts of goodness and kindness.’’ Many in the Lubavitch movement he led from the early Fifties until his death in June 1992 believe the Rebbe was the Messiah himself, and that he will return to redeem Israel. At a Chabad house on the outskirts of the Old Montefiore Cemetery, we joined more than 20 people who had already begun their prayers.

One room has been turned into a synagogue, containing a sefer Torah in a seven-foot steel safe. Videos play of the Rebbe speaking, smiling, praying, moving with the gentle grace and acceptance of God’s will that has struck me in other saintly people: Yehudi Menuhin, for instance, and Dadi Janki.

I watched one screen as the Rebbe handed out hundreds of dollar bills to a congregation, a gesture he often made to remind his followers to give generously and without question. Stacks of unlined paper were placed all over the house, with bundles of candles. We took a candle each to light beside the grave and wrote down prayers for kivitlach, for the Rebbe’s holy power to intercede with God for us. The walk is perhaps 100 yards to the mausoleum and there seemed to be gentiles there as well as Jews.

Shmuley whispered that the Rebbe touched so many lives, Reform as well as Orthodox, Christian and Muslim and atheist . . . especially atheist. It is said that an unbeliever cannot help but weep beside the Rebbe’s grave. We took off our shoes and walked into a stone hut lit by candles.

We lit ours too, and approached the burial place of Rabbi Schneerson and the man who was the Lubavitcher Rebbe before him also named Rabbi Schneerson. Their tombstones were magnificent, but what made me gasp was the truckload of shredded paper mounded over the grave. The walls around it were three feet high and the fragments were overflowing.

They had been packed down hard but still thousands were in danger of fluttering over the floor. ‘‘What happens to them? Are they just left there to decompose?’’ I asked. ‘‘Decompose? The whole cemetery would disappear under paper,’’ Shmuley replied. ‘‘Every two or three days, the grave is cleared and the prayers are incinerated.’’ ‘‘And do many people say their prayers are answered?’’ ‘‘Businessman. Teachers, Parents. Lovers. Widows. The sick, the old, the guilty, everybody. Even those who don’t believe. Especially those who don’t believe.

So many people have attested to his power anyone who doubts this is real, they’re just deluding themselves.’’ Shmuley was getting excitable, and people were starting to recognise him after his appearances on Larry King and half the world’s other TV shows this year, it would be a surprise to find a Jew who doesn’t know his face and his voice. I walked up to the grave and recited my prayer. Then I tore it in strips and let them fall.

The woman at my side was weeping. I could not hear her, because the 747 was overhead, but I saw her shoulders shaking. She was alone. I looked away, and wondered if I should offer a word of comfort. When I turned back she was smiling. Holding out her hands to the grave and smiling. Then she slipped out of the mausoleum.

And I knew another prayer had been answered.

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

March 10, 2000

PRAY LET US ACCEPT AIDS THREAT

THE headlines are saying she died of shame. But it is we who should be covered in shame we who have pretended for more than a decade that AIDS is not a Jewish problem and never could be.

We have been brutally proved wrong. AIDS has robbed us of a figure who represented everything that was best about Israel. Ofra Haza was the heart of our national culture. She recreated the music of the Middle East as a modern force, she made the poetry of rabbis into the stuff of raves and nightclubs, she won over Hollywood and still kept her faith with God.

Israel was proud to have her as our heart. And now that heart has stopped beating. If Ofra had sought treatment during the early stages of her HIV infection, she might have been granted many more years of life.

AIDS is incurable but the illness which precedes it can be fought successfully, if not indefinitely. Many people have remarked wistfully that, if she had been able to come out as an HIV sufferer, Ofra could have done as much to help fellow victims as Magic Johnson, the US basketball star who has faced the illness and the jibes without flinching.

Then she might be alive now . . . as Johnson is. But Israel is not the US even though we are lucky to have one of the most brilliant AIDS pioneers in the world, Dr Zvi Bentwich, at the Hebrew University Medical School and the Kaplan Medical Centre in Rehovot.

No, Israel is a nation in denial. We deny our people can be slaughtered by this human plague, and we deny the official evidence that up to 3,000 of our people could have the virus. In the aftermath of the revelations about Ofra's death, tests at Tel Aviv's AIDS Task Force have doubled.

Medics there believe the true number of HIV sufferers in Israel could be 12,000. We deny that people need education and that people need condoms. Israel's government spends less than 5p a head on telling people how to avoid the virus most European countries spend £1 and Health Minister Shlomo Benizri will not even permit condoms to be pictured in AIDS awareness adverts.

"We are not dealing here with stupid people in some Third World country," Rabbi Benizri said last year. But as the tragedy of Ofra Haza shows, it is not only the illiterate poor who die of AIDS. Ofra's real illness was a secret, hidden even from the hospital staff who cared for her in her last days. It seems to many there is nothing to be done now, except to pray for her soul.

There is more we can do. We can pray for all the sufferers from AIDS and HIV, not only in Israel and Britain but all over the world. We can pray that Rabbi Benizri and his pious colleagues wake up to the fact that their righteousness is killing good people. And we can pray with a growing scientific certainty that our prayers will have a measurable effect.

We can be sure that we are not merely sending idle hopes into the void because prayer is being proven to possess a truly great power. The latest investigation into the power of prayer will be launched by British evangelist Gerald Coates on Sunday as part of BBC1's The Heart Of The Matter investigating two studies by the Templeton Foundation.

The first carefully-regulated experiment, in Kansas in 1988, tracked the health of 990 heart patients who were prayed for by 75 Christians for four weeks. The 990 showed significantly better health than others who were not being prayed for in the experiment. Ten years later, the foundation tried it again in San Francisco, with similar results.

Coates believes pray plays a far bigger part in our lives than we guess. "It is worth remembering," he says, "that a much larger percentage of people pray than go to church. "I pray daily. Sometimes hourly. Sometimes all the time. And I don't go to synagogue nearly enough. Prayer is at the root of my character, conventional behaviour isn't. I am not surprised that scientists can prove the sick get well when prayers are showered on them.

One serious problem when we pray for loved ones who are ill is fear. We are frightened that the worst will happen. Our minds fill with dark thoughts. We worry, we can become depressed. And if we focus on negative images when we pray, our prayers might have completely the wrong effect.

If we admit that science proves our good thoughts can help others, then we have to face the fact that bad thoughts could harm them. When you offer a prayer for someone's recovery, hold a picture in your mind of how they were when they were healthy. Enjoy that image and pray it will hold true in the future.

Visualise the infection being washed away, leaving a pure, healthy body. See happiness in your mind. See hope and wholeness. Make your prayer one of light and laughter. Your prayers are free, and they become stronger as you practise.

Be generous with your prayers. Offer them to God for people you don't know as well as those who are close to you people you don't like as well as those you love.

Say a prayer for someone you'll never meet. Someone your life might never touch again. Someone who perhaps cannot bear to admit, even to a doctor or a spouse, that the HIV virus might have taken a grip.

Pray for strength. Pray for fresh health. Pray for peace of mind. And pray that Israel gains the courage to face up to AIDS.

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

March 03, 2000

FOR 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.

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.com

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

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.

Uri Geller's novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99. Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20.

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.’’

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

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.

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.