Is Ahmadinejad Really Dangerous?

So far, not much news about the (now apparently done deal) outsourcing of the job of port security in the U.S. to the Muslims. Heard Chuck Schumer yesterday on Fox, and a blurb I was too sleepy to catch last night on the radio, but that's it.

I don't understand why this issue is being ignored--I'm still boiling mad about it. The degree to which it is not being talked about is very reminiscent of the degree to which our leaky borders are not being talked about.

Lock and load, friends.

So let's talk about something else. Ahmadinejad, our crazy uncle in the attic, is a pretty good subject, since Our Protectors are willing to make news about him.


We all know that Ahmadinejad has been throwing some pretty big threats at us and the rest of the world.

Is there anything in particular, in addition to being an ordinary Muslim, that causes him to bypass his capacity for reason and continue along this vein? He has to know that even the Europeans will be a little disturbed by, for example, a nuclear (or other major) attack on Israel. How can Ahmadinejad be so oblivious to the consequences of all his threats, should he actually act on them--and how likely is it that he WILL act on them?

He's dangerous, all right, and of course, he and the mullahs who are the power behind the throne in Iran are all operating in concert.

Here's my take on him:

Ahmedinejad, like Osama, Zarwahiri and Zarqawi, is an "apocolyptic" Muslim. The apocolyptic Muslims are the ones currently in charge in Iran, and they are deadly--no pun intended--serious about wiping Israel off the map, destroying the U.S., etc., and that's why they want nuclear weapons.

There are a lot of fundamentalist, especially Shi'ite, Muslims who believe in the "Mahdaviat," which means the "return of the Mahdi" (a rough equivalent to the belief in the return of the Messiah by many Judeo-Christian sects). "Mahdi" means "rightly-guided one" in Arabic, and "rightly guided" means one who has learned directly from Mohammed himself. The first few caliphs, who were companions to Muhammed during his lifetime, were given the title "rightly-guided." The idea of the Mahdi was born very early in Islam, and became a central belief among the Shia, but not so much a part of the Sunni.

The Mahdi is believed to have been a real person by some, a person who had actually been on earth and would one day return, but it is thought by others that he is yet to appear. His appearance was first prophesied during the 10th century, and his purpose was to "restore religion (Islam) and justice, and to rule before the end of the world. " There have been several claimants over the centuries, starting with one of the early caliphs. Some years ago, there was a movie made about a more recent claimant, who is also the most famous one. It was called "Khartoum," about a guy named Mohammad Ahmad, who carved out a little empire in the Sudan in 1884. The movie took a little poetic license, since in it, the claimant and the British defender of Khartoum, Charles Gordon, were pictured as admiring each other and meeting in person, but they never really did. Gordon was killed during that little fracas.

Anyway, Ahmadinejad, is actually, really, seriously preparing for the return of the Mahdi, and believes that the end of the world is on its way, most likely in about two to four years. For that reason, he sees no need to hold back with all his troublesome behavior. Worse yet, he is determined to help make the prophecy--the part about the end of the world--come true, and to assure that it happens, he wants to build nuclear weapons so he can kick-start the whole "end of the world" thing. He figures that if he destroys Israel, that will just about do it; if that happens, then the rest of the world will become involved in a war that would end the world, and the rest will be history as forecast in prophecy. He has even ordered the construction of a mosque devoted to the Mahdi just south of Tehran, complete with a direct rail line linking it, and has ordered a list of his proposed cabinet members dropped into a well, where they can better benefit from the divine connection the well has with Allah.

This guy is dangerously whacked out. When he was at the United Nations in September, Daniel Pipes reports that he concluded his address by uttering a prayer for the appearance of the Mahdi: "O mighty Allah, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last Repository, the Promised One, that Perfect and Pure Human Being, the One that will fill this world with justice and peace."

A lot of people are just a wee bit concerned about his use of the term "hasten the emergence," which is very consistent with his desire to help along the end of the earth thing. The justice and peace he referred to were Islam style, of course, which in turn means "lack of opposition to Islam."

After the talk at the U.N., he told the folks back home in Iran that when he said the prayer, there was a light, an aura, surrounding him, that his audience could see, and that he himself could feel, and that for the duration of his talk, the "leaders of the world did not blink" and they were "rapt" as if a hand was holding them and had "opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic."