The Return of Terror

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare. —Yeats

Bombing is back in fashion: an end to thought, a flick of the killer’s arm. Add 20thcentury technology to 19th-century postures and the result, as Abbie Hoffman used to say, is “Boom!”—to which his rapt audiences would chant in reply, “Boom, boom!”

Arafat, who sends terrorists to take children hostage, is cheered at the UN Gene...