I'm haunted by the image of that Palestinian girl who blew herself up for God and country. I have daughters her age. I should be grateful that my own children haven't felt the need to sacrifice themselves to a cause, and I am. Maybe that's why the tape of that kid haunts me.

You may have noted that this was first opportunity you ever had to see and hear, in translation, one of these determined combatants. There are tapes of many of them, but they don't get played. Or at least they didn't until a few days after this girl destroyed herself. What changed?

What changed was the bias of the press. In line with commercial imperatives, our "free," profit-driven press has always taken the side of Jews--immigrants from the West, mostly--over Muslims, who don't drink and who tend to be hostile to Western values.

So, a few weeks ago, when reporters tried to get to a big story of armed conflict, and the Israeli army started shooting them to keep them away, a bit of cognitive dissonance started to develop. The newsmongers were used to this sort of conduct on the part of American militarists--typically, they bend over for it--but they were damned if they were going to take it from a bunch of uppity Jews.

Suddenly, a few days ago, they made a big U-turn and broadcast the tape of the girl-martyr-terrorist, a slap in the face to Israel and everything it stands for. I saw the tape several times, and I suppose that girl is haunting other people besides me.

The latest polls suggest that public opinion may be shifting away from Israel and, necessarily, toward a critical view of Jews, something that might be worth worrying about even if you don't happen to be Jewish. Public opinion can turn on a dime, and if the Western world equates Jewry with oppression and brutality, as happened in the case of Apartheid South Africa, for example, the results could be catastrophic. For one thing, Apartheid South African is not a worldwide religion, and there's not much of a diaspora when it comes to that ethnic group. Jews are everywhere, and if they become pariahs, there will be consequences.

I think the U. S. media will be brought to heel for Israel by the commercial interests that control them, but their sudden, self-interested tantrum of even-handedness did considerable damage. It proved that girl bombers can get heard, and that's going to attract a lot more girl bombers than any conventional form of reward. And each time, until it grasps reality, Israel will retaliate massively, and people's opinion of Israel and Judaism will degrade accordingly, as every potential girl bomber now knows.

Note, too, that non-Jews, even those two and three generations removed from the events in question, are aching to believe that God's chosen people earned the world's contempt in the first half of the 20th Century. Seemingly liberal-minded Americans are pointing to the holocaust in Jenin as evidence that Germany might have been right. Now there's something to worry about.

I believe it's acceptable now to advocate assassination. I see people talking about it on TV, people like our own beloved Secretary of Defense and his bosses in business and government, and I hear about similar discussions in schools, workplaces, and fast food restaurants across the country.

Most of the wrath seems to center on Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but Arafat and other lesser figures are also mentioned as candidates for homicide. At the grassroots level, outside the halls of government, cops and schoolteachers seem to get most of the attention.

If it's acceptable and legal to discuss the pros and cons of particular assassinations and not a violation of our cherished conspiracy laws, then the question arises whether there are any limits on who may be recommended as a candidate.

If I'm privileged to say, for instance, that we ought to kill Saddam Hussein, doesn't the privilege also allow me to call for the elimination of France's Le Pen or Britain's Tiny Blah or even George Bush?

Somber Protest Makes Shallow Impression

To get an idea of its size, I watched the demonstration pass by from the edge of the ellipse, and I saw three or four stadiumsfull of people before I joined the marchers. I'd been to Washington peace demonstrations before, and this one was bigger than most and the least rowdy of any I'd ever attended.

Not all peace demonstrators are gentle Quakers. Some are military veterans who have shot people, some are wrathful trashers of global capital as the source of international conflict and environmental degradation, some would sacrifice a human being to save an animal, and many are tightly-wound young people who can blow at any time.

The character of the crowd determines the natural evolution of the demonstration, and such elements tend to make it loud, scary, and potentially destructive. My son and I attended one in 1991 in which ten or fifteen thousand (out of a crowd many times that size) ended up banging sticks against the White House fence and other inanimate objects. Cops on horseback arrested dozens of them.

Just a few years ago, I marched on the Pentagon with a contingent of six or seven thousand to protest Clinton's bombing of Yugoslavia. A good part of the crowd was composed of middle-class Yugoslavian-Americans of all ages. That was a quiet mob, and one in which the underlying antimilitary and anticorporate messages resonated very little. Vendors were selling bottles of water for $4 each, and not one of them was beaten up. At the first big protest I attended in Washington thirty years ago, they would have been hung by the heels.

This latest event, which I saw publicized in December as a protest of U. S. armed force in Afghanistan, was transformed in the meantime by the actions of the Israeli government into a challenge to that fanatical theocracy. Half the marchers were Muslim, and a great many spoke with foreign accents.

Unlike the destruction of Vietnam, Iraq, Panama, and Yugoslavia, which had little in the way of a religious component, the joint adventures of Israel and the U. S. are aimed squarely at Islam, and the Muslims are more frightened than angry. The will of God seems to be to allow people like us, with religions that reflect and complement our prosperity, to kill people like them with impunity. And so they showed up sad and chastened. Although there was much shouting and drum-beating, it was more like a vast mourning party than a celebration of the power of nonviolence.

Many were mild-mannered Arabic schoolgirls in religious garb. With their flashing eyes, smooth olive skin, and strong features, you can appreciate why the men feel they have to wrap them up in so much cloth: the guys would be spending all their time looking at girls and would never get anything else done. Modest young women like these would not ordinarily be seen at a peace demonstration, and they helped set the compliant mood.

There were also undoubtedly lots of people there with visas that they would like to hold onto for awhile. When a quarter of the protesters are subject to deportation--unlike the Israeli citizens who had demonstrated earlier in the week, mostly born here--they tend to obey the police and eschew civil disobedience.

And so it was a somber and benign affair overall, deflected by events from its original focus on U. S. policy, and it attracted much less attention than it deserved, in view of the numbers in attendance. The next one may not be so restrained.

Reflect on this, as you celebrate, with the network newsmongers, the tenth anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. Ask yourself what might have happened (or not happened) if the then-sitting president GHW Bush had, on receiving news of the verdict from Simi Valley, made an announcement along these lines:

"The California verdict exonerating the police officers who assaulted Rodney King is unfortunate and unjust. Therefore I have instructed my attorney general to commence a federal prosecution against these police officers for violating Rodney King's civil rights. Justice will be done."

There would have been no riots.

As it turned out, the officers were prosecuted by the United States government, and several were convicted.

Bush was a fool and a corrupt and cowardly leader who damaged our nation irreparably. Like his misbegotten issue, our current national humiliation.