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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2010
At the close of his verbatim drama, Talking to Terrorists, Robin Soans ascribes the following comments to a Bethlehem schoolgirl:
This year things are getting worse. Last April… the saddest day; one of the girls in the form below me, Christine, was killed by an Israeli sniper. The Israelis said it was a mistake, but they can't bring her back, can they?
When I first saw the Twin Towers on television, I felt sorry. But now I feel happy that they died. It's their turn to suffer. I could see many thousands of them die. I wouldn't feel a thing.
There is much here to ponder, and not just the question of why a young girl should feel such hate that she relishes the suffering of thousands of people she has never met, and never now will. The girl's hatred should chill us. It is one of those moments identified by Albert Camus, when it suddenly seems difficult to be ‘hopeful’ about humanity.
Writing in 1971, George Steiner asked ‘How is one to address oneself without a persistent feeling of fatuity, even of indecency, to the theme of ultimate inhumanity?’ It is an ultimate question. And it is hard, as Ariel Dorfman has rather more recently confirmed, ‘not to despair’.5 The more immediate focus of Steiner's reflection was, of course, genocide. But the question loses nothing of its pertinence in the context of mass terrorist atrocities. And neither does his sorry conclusion; that whilst we might have acquired the ‘technical competence to build Hell on earth’, we have lost the capacity to ‘bring sweetness and light to men’.
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