who to hate: Jews or Zionists

The scene marked another grim milestone in an insurgency that has torn apart Thailand’s three majority Muslim provinces for the past three years.

First, the attackers threw a grenade to stop the minibus. Then they shot dead the passengers, one by one. Only the driver survived. The executioners heard him gabbling to Allah for forgiveness, realised he was not a Buddhist and spared him.

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The latest insurgents borrow political and military techniques from Iraq and Lebanon. Their favoured method is the drive-by assassination by a pillion-riding gunman on a motorbike. They also slit throats and cut off heads as examples.

One officer in Thai military intelligence shows visitors photographs recording the eviscerated bodies of Buddhist monks, images so stark that they have been kept out of the Thai press for fear of igniting a pogrom.

De facto ethnic cleansing is already in progress. When the Thai-Chinese community celebrated the year of the pig, a feast calculated to incite loathing for the infidels, militants unleashed 50 bomb and arson attacks on their businesses. The targets included a large rubber factory that lost more than £5m of stock.

Many Chinese are planning to sell up and go. But Ah Seng, an elderly Chinese herbalist living with his wizened wife in an open-fronted wooden shop-house, laughed at the thought that he would ever leave.