HyperNormalisation Page #10

the height of Tel Aviv's rush hour,

the bomb ripped apart a commuter bus.

An amateur cameraman recorded the

scene in the moments afterwards

as a dazed woman was helped out

of the smouldering wreckage.

I didn't want to believe that

under my house there is a bomb.

And when I realised it's a bomb, I...

I started to cry.

Because it was the first

time I saw it in Tel Aviv.

Hamas sent the bombers into

the heart of Israeli cities

to blow themselves up and kill

as many around them as possible.

In doing this, Hamas were going much

further than Hezbollah ever had.

They were targeting civilians,

something Hezbollah had never done.

The tactic shocked the Sunni world.

This was something completely

alien to its history.

Not only did the Koran forbid suicide,

but Sunni Islam did not have any

rituals of self-sacrifice -

unlike the Shias.

The most senior religious leader in Saudi Arabia

insisted it was wrong.

But a mainstream theologian from Egypt

called Sheikh Qaradawi seized the moment.

He issued a fatwa that justified the attacks.

"And," he added, "it was also

justified to kill civilians,

"because, in Israel, everyone -

"including women - serve as reservists.

"So, really, they are all part of the enemy army."

TRANSLATION:

It's not suicide. It is martyrdom in the name of God.

Islamic theologians and jurisprudence

have debated this issue.

Israeli women are not like women in our society,

because Israeli women are militarised.

Secondly, I consider this

type of martyrdom operation

as an indication of justice

of Allah, our Almighty.

Allah is just.

Through his infinite wisdom,

he has given the weak what

the strong do not possess.

And that is their ability to

turn their bodies into bombs

like the Palestinians do.

Hamas kept sending the bombers into Israel.

Sometimes day-after-day.

The horror overwhelmed Israeli society

and it completely destroyed

the ability of politics

to solve the Palestinian crisis.

Instead, in the Israeli election of 1996,

Benjamin Netanyahu took power.

He turned against the peace process,

which was exactly what Hamas wanted.

And from then on, the two

sides became locked together

in ever more horrific cycles of violence.

Netanyahu!

The human bomb had destroyed the very thing

that President Assad had first wanted.

A real political solution to

the Palestinian question.

REPORTER:

It was just after one o'clock

and the market was full of shoppers.

SIRENS WAIL:

Streams of ambulances came to carry

away the dead and the injured.

It was a place of appalling suffering.

But even with the first grief

came the immediate political

impact on the peace process.

Peace impossible!

This moment, it will be the end!

It must be the end of this bloody peace process.

And, in America, all optimistic

visions of the future

had also disappeared.

Instead everyone in society -

not just the politicians -

but the scientists, the journalists,

and all kinds of experts

had begun to focus on the dangers

that might be hidden in the future.

This, in turn, created a pessimistic mood

that then began to spread out from

the rational technocratic world

and infect the whole of the culture.

And everyone became possessed by dark forebodings,

imagining the very worst that might happen.

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Forever

Oh, dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Forever...

SHATTERING EXPLOSIONS

Dream, baby, dream

Oh, baby, we gotta keep that dream alive

Keep that dream alive

Forever

Oh, dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Dream, baby, dream

Oh, dream, baby, dream, baby, dream, baby

Dream, baby, dream, baby

Oh, dream, baby, dream...

SCREAMING:

PANICKED SCREAMS

RUMBLING, SHATTERING GLASS

Oh, you keep that fire, burning, baby

Oh, you gotta keep that flame

burning brightly, baby...

CRASHING EXPLOSIONS

SILENCE:

DISTANT SIRENS:

The attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs,

but now on a huge scale.

They demonstrated the terrifying

power of this new force

to penetrate all defences.

They had come to kill thousands

of Americans on their own soil.

20 years before,

President Reagan had been confronted

by the first suicide bombers.

They had been unleashed by

President Assad of Syria

to force America out of the Middle East.

But rather than confront the complexity of Syria

and Israel and the Palestinian problem,

America had retreated and left Syria -

and suicide bombing -

to fester and mutate.

They had gone instead for Colonel Gaddafi

and turned him into an evil global terrorist.

But, in the process, this

changed the way people saw

and understood terrorism.

Instead of a violence born out of

political struggles for power,

it became replaced by a much

simpler image of an evil tyrant

at the head of a rogue state

who became more like an archcriminal

who wanted to terrorise the world.

All the politics and power dropped away.

The problem was just them and

their evil personalities.

And after 9/11, this led to a

new, and equally simple, idea.

That if only you could remove

these tyrannical figures,

then the grateful people of their country

would transform naturally into a democracy,

because they would be free of the evil.

We owe it to the future of civilisation

not to allow the world's worst leaders

to develop and deploy, and therefore,

blackmail freedom-loving countries

with the world's worst weapons.

We know they've already got chemical

and biological weapons there.

We know that they're certainly doing their best

to acquire nuclear weapons technology.

If we allow them to do that,

and do nothing about it, then,

I think, later generations will

consider us deeply irresponsible.

Both Tony Blair and George Bush

became possessed by the idea

of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.

So possessed that they believed any story

that proved his evil intentions.

And the line between reality and

fiction became ever more blurred.

In September 2002, the head of

MI6 rushed to Downing Street

to tell Blair excitedly that they

had finally found the source

that confirmed everything.

The source, he said, had "direct access"

to Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons programme

which was making vast quantities

of VX and sarin nerve agents.

The nerve agents were being loaded

into "linked hollow glass spheres".

But then someone in MI6 noticed

that the detail the source

was describing was identical

to scenes in the 1996 movie The Rock,

starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

Really elegant string-of-pearls configuration.

Unfortunately, incredibly unstable.

What exactly does this stuff do?

If the rocket renders it aerosol,

it could take out the entire city of people.

- How?

- It's a cholinesterase inhibitor.

Stops the brain from sending nerve

messages down the spinal cord...

A later report into the Iraq War pointed out,

"Glass containers were not typically

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