ns and
our wealth offer only so much insulation from a big bad world.

Our nurtured complacency and our sense of absolute security had always
been unfounded, of course. But waking up to the great existential
dilemma as suddenly as we did was a traumatic experience. It led us to
revert to old habits. Anti-Semites (and latent anti-Semites) around
the world used the catastrophe as new evidence of the 'Jewish
problem'. Tsarist and Nazi propaganda books, such as Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, hit the bestseller lists in countries like Saudi
Arabia where they are still being published by official government
presses. Newspaper stories revived blood libel (that Jews drink the
blood of murdered non-Jewish teens) and spread the disinformation that
Jews were warned about the attacks by their rabbis through special
radios they keep in their homes. Indeed, such informational treachery
is nothing new. But in the destabilised atmosphere of disrupted
narrative, it spread faster, wider and with greater effect than it
otherwise would have.

Efforts to package America's New War on news channels like CNN further
alienated the more cynical viewers from the mainstream account of what
had happened. Conspiracy theorists, web activists and open-minded
leftists, already suspicious of the narratives presented through
television, found themselves falling prey to a falsified email letter
from a Brazilian schoolteacher, claiming that video footage of
Palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot years
earlier during the Gulf War. Like any other narrative, the extreme
counterculture's saga of a 'new world order', directed by the Bush
family, had to be wrapped around the new data.

Meanwhile, many Jews and Christians who hadn't even thought about
their religion or their ethnicity for years found themselves
instinctively asking: "how will this impact Israel?" or "is the
Armageddon upon us?" They bought memberships in religious institutions
for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and
synagogues looking for reassurance, for a way to fit these
catastrophes into a bigger story. Like everyone else, they hoped to
reconstruct the narrative that had been shattered.

But surely our worldviews, political outlooks and religions aren't
functioning at their best when they provide pat answers to life's
biggest questions. The challenge to all thinking people is to resist
the temptation to fall into yet another polarised, nat