What would Ahmadinejad's Acquiring the Bomb Really Mean for Us?

So he gets the bomb. Several countries have the bomb, including India and a Muslim country, Pakistan. Why is the the world going into panic mode because Iran and Ahmadinejad might get the bomb? What is the difference between Pakistan and Iran that is so troubling? The concern is more than the Muslim make up of both countries, the concern is that Ahmadinejad and his cronies are Gnostics.

Most college-educated Americans have heard of Gnosticism and may even have read of Gnosticism in their studies of comparative religions or even in their own church history, but few really know anything about the detrimental effect that acting Gnostics had on European history and consequently on early American colonial history.

European religious wars lasting several centuries were very bloody. To avoid feelings of religious animosity and to build respect, very little more than that is said about them in American schools other than the eventual outcome was the impetus of desire for some European religious separatists to make their way to a new continent where they could be "free". "Free" mean free of and free to.

Free of the kind of religious strife that had plagued Europe for centuries and free to practice their religion as, at that time, there were no nearby competing Christian or Muslim sects. Eventually Americans had no knowledge of the meaning of religious strife and have no context into which they can put the concept of killing and martyrdom in the name of religion save for the vicarious experiences of a few Catholic saints and the misunderstood and infamous specter of the Spanish Inquisition.

Larent Murawiec of the Hudson Organization lays out in graphic detail why Ahmadinejad is so dangerous by linking his beliefs in coming of the Mahdi with those of Christianity's Second Coming of Christ and the past behaviors of Christian Gnostic insurrectionists, believing themselves to be the "Elect", for centuries created religious anarchy requiring a swift and brutal quelling by civil authorities and the Catholic Church. The "troubles" were eventually ended with the deaths and migration of hundreds of thousands or more until the 19th century rise of a similar strain in Islam.

There is no excuse for the cruel, vicious, and un-Christlike behaviors of Christians during between the 11th and 15th centuries. One could only ask: What would have happened if they also had had the bomb?

For five hundred years, from 1100 to 1600, Europe was wracked by Gnostic insurrections, from the Flanders to Northern Italy, from Bohemia to France: Pastoureaux, Taborites, Flagellants, Free Spirits, Anabaptists, etc. The belief-structure just described was theirs. They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, threatened kingdoms and overthrew dukedoms, they slaughtered Jews, priests and rich people, they created their own, grotesque, bloody, totalitarian 'republics.'

"Soon we shall drink blood for wine," one of the leading insurgent writers stated, "those who do not accept baptism. are to be killed, then they will be baptized in their blood." And another one: "Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ. Every believer must wash his hands in that blood. every priest may lawfully pursue, wound and kill sinners." And "the Just. will not rejoice, seeing vengeance and washing their hands with the blood of sinners." Hear Thomas Müntzer: "curse the unbelievers. don't let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn away from God. For a godless man has no right to live if he hinders the godly. The sword is necessary to exterminate them. if they resist let them be slaughtered without mercy. the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allow them. Now, go at them. it is time. The scoundrels are as dispirited as dogs.Take no notice of the lamentations of the godless! They will beg you. don't be moved by pity. At them! At them! While the fire is hot! Don't let your sword get cold! Don't let it go lame!"

The same "screed" is being spouted by certain Islamists and the same kinds of savage behaviors are being inflicted as we see nightly on the news. Why? They believe in the righteousness of their beliefs and deeds and that they will bring on the end of the world. For this reason, deterrence has no value.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the Mayor of Tehran, he insistently proposed that the main thoroughfares of Tehran should be widened so that, he explained, on the day of his reappearance, the Hidden Imam, Mohamed ibn Hassan, who went into the great occultation in 941 AD could tread spacious avenues. More recently, he told the Indian Foreign Minister that "in two years, everything will be settled," which the visiting dignitary at first mistook to mean that Iran expected to possess nuclear weapons in two years; he was later bemused to learn what Ahmadinejad had meant, to wit, that the Mahdi would appear in two years, at which points all worldly problems would disappear. This attitude, truly, is not new, nor should it surprise us: religious notions and their estranged cousins, ideological representations, determine not only their believers' beliefs but also their believers' actions. Reality, as it were, is invaded by belief, and belief in turn shapes the believer's reality. The difference between the religious and the ideologically religious is this: the religious believer accepts that reality is a given, whereas the fanatic gambles everything on a pseudo-reality of what ought to be. The religious believer accepts reality and works at improving it, the fanatic rejects reality, refuses to pass any compromise with it and tries to destroy it and replace it with his fantasy.

And Ahmadinejad is not alone: The famous Ayatollah Khomeini said: "We have not made a revolution to lower the price of melon," meaning his revolution is apocalyptic and eschatological, one in which the Mahdi, when he reappears, "will be to lead the great and final war which will bring about the extermination of the Unbelievers, the end of Unbelief and the complete dominion of God's writ upon the whole of mankind. The Umma will inflate to absorb the rest of the world."

Nothing will get their way, nothing will deter them, because nothing else exists but that which must be eradicated so that their Order of the world can be fulfilled. Contemporary jihad is not a matter of politics at all (of 'occupation,' of 'grievances,' of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and Zionism), but a matter of Gnostic faith. Consequently, attempts at dealing with the problem politically will not even touch it. The jihadis are not "crazy"...they are possessed of a disease of the mind, and the disease political religion of modern Gnosticism in its Islamic version."

Here is a description of their "gnosis" :

The believers - here, the jihadis - are the Elect: they, and only they, know God's plan for the world; they have been chosen by Him to fight and win the final, cosmic battle between God and Satan, and bring about perfection on earth, in this case, the extension of God's writ and dominion, the dar al-Islam, to mankind as a whole. Everybody else is wrong and evil, jahili, and an enemy who can and should be killed at will. Reality, Creation, that is, is irretrievably perverted. The Perfect are "an elite of amoral supermen" (Norman Cohn), who know what reality 'really' ought to be. They are engaged in transforming the world so that it conforms to the 'second reality' that they alone know, thank to their special knowledge, gnôsis. In order to get from A to B, from the evil today to the perfect tomorrow, torrents of blood have to be shed in exterminatory struggle, the blood of all those whose actions or whose very being hinder the accomplishment of the 
Mahdi's mission. Owing to their extraordinary status, the Perfects are above all laws and norms. Everything they do is willed and sanctioned by God. Their intent (niyyah) vouches for their acts. They alone are able to determine life and death. The power this ideology confers upon its believers is intoxicating. They love death more than we love life.

We thought the Nazis and Bolsheviks were the embodiment of death, destruction, and evil; they pale in comparison with the possibility of the Islamic Gnostics.

Until I read this essay, I didn't understand their fear or grasp the significane of Islamism, nor could I fathom the old maxim: "More wars and suffering have been inflicted in the name of religion."

Read it all.