Free Escape by Robert K. Tanenbaum

through since the Diaspora. And yet, they remained one people. God's Chosen People.
    "Shalom," the rabbi greeted the stranger, using the Hebrew word for peace. "May I help you?"
    "Salaam," the young man replied.
    In the moment he heard the Arabic response, Romberg knew what was going to happen. Such is the darkness of these days, he thought sadly. But haven't we been expecting this? He watched the young man open the long coat to reveal the vest beneath it. He'd never seen one before, but he'd heard a lot about them during a recent trip to Israel—about what they'd done to school buses and crowded discotheques and shopping malls.
    There was no time to give a warning that would do any good. Instead, he used the deep, resonant voice he'd worked so hard to train in rabbinical school to shout the Shema, the declaration of Jewish faith.
    "Shema Yisrael A donai Eloheinu A donai Echad!" Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
    The black man responded in kind as he reached for the cord at his waist. "La ilaha illal lah! Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!" There is no God but God! God is Great! God is Great!
     
    Those who lived told the police of the voices shouting in the ancient languages of two closely related peoples.
    "Like prophets in the wilderness," said an old man, a baker by trade. He and his wife had seen the man outside the synagogue. "He seemed sad, not dangerous," he said.
    The baker had not seen the man enter but had heard the shouts from inside the synagogue just before the explosion. "Then there was a flash and an enormous roar," he recalled, wiping tears from his eyes. "I was struck by a hot wind and flung through the air like a leaf. It is only by God's grace that I survived ... again."

5
     
    Karp listened with interest and a mouth full of peach pancakes as the old men debated at the table next to him on the sidewalk outside of The Kitchenette, a small cafe on West Broadway. One of them, a former newspaper editor named Bill Florence, had fished an article out of the day's Times about the Islamic Society of America, which had complained about television shows portraying Muslims as "the bad guys."
    "I guess I can see how they'd be concerned that sort of stereotyping might lead to antagonism against Muslim Americans," said Murray Epstein, who'd retired as one of the top defense attorneys in Manhattan, though he frequently appeared on CNN when they needed a legal mind with a liberal viewpoint.
    "Oh puleeeeze," moaned Dennis Hall, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Epstein's conservative counterpart on Fox News. "It's not like we're at war with blond Swedish Catholics. I haven't noticed any Episcopalian Icelanders becoming suicide bombers and charging into any synagogues. I guess they're saying that if somebody makes another movie about World War II in the Pacific, they shouldn't use Japanese actors because it might offend someone in Japan."
    "But isn't it true that the people attacking us are terrorists who happen to be Muslims?" a handsome man with a short gray crewcut and a priest's collar said.
    "Oh come on, Father Jim," Hall argued. "We identify them by how they identify themselves. They claim to be Islamic, to a man, and they are terrorists; therefore, they are Islamic terrorists. Now, if the rest of the Muslim world wants to disown them, or better yet, get involved in stopping them, instead of playing 'see no evil' and couching every denunciation of someone murdering other people in the name of Allah with a denunciation of Israel, then welcome to the circle of humanity."
    "Says here that Americans are insensitive to Muslims," said Florence, a short man with thick bushy dark eyebrows who looked a bit like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day.
    "Bullshit," exclaimed Saul Silverstein, an ex-Marine who'd survived Iwo Jima and then made a fortune in women's apparel. "Six months after a bunch of terrorists—who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam—murdered a few thousand