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To this decade of deception, goodbye and good riddance
Just over 10 years ago I was waiting on top of the Mount of Olives, notebook in hand, for the end of the world. It was December 1999, and newspapers were peddling the spectre of a catastrophe to mark the dawn of the new millennium.
In Jerusalem the story was that a fringe Christian sect would commit mass suicide or blast open the Golden Gate in the Old City walls, unleashing a torrent of blood. The gate, through which the Messiah is supposed to enter the holy city, had been sealed by the Ottoman authorities in 1541 to keep false prophets at bay.
Around the world, reporters were on alert for signs of the "Millennium Bug", or the Y2K problem, a computer software issue that was supposed to cause aircraft to fall out of the sky and banks to lose their records as 2000 began. This scare made a lot of money for computer service companies. But none of these disasters happened.
While the media were focused on concocted threats, other far more serious developments were taking shape, largely unnoticed.