[...]The wild pronouncements of the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have gotten sporadic press ever since he called for Israel to be wiped off the map. [...]
[The] Holocaust [was a]"myth," a "legend" that was "fabricated . . . under the name 'Massacre of the Jews.' " This brought the usual reaction from European and American officials, who, with Churchillian rage and power, called these statements unacceptable. [...]
To be sure, Holocaust denial and calls for Israel's destruction are commonplace in the Middle East. They can be seen every day on Hezbollah TV, in Syrian media, in Egyptian editorials appearing in semiofficial newspapers. But none of these aspiring mass murderers are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons that could do in one afternoon what it took Hitler six years to do: destroy an entire Jewish civilization and extinguish 6 million souls.[...]
But it gets worse. The president of a country about to go nuclear is a confirmed believer in the coming apocalypse. Like Judaism and Christianity, Shiite Islam has its own version of the messianic return -- the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. The more devout believers in Iran pray at the Jamkaran mosque, which houses a well from which, some believe, he will emerge.
When Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidential elections, he immediately gave $17 million of government funds to the shrine. Last month Ahmadinejad said publicly that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam.
And as in some versions of fundamentalist Christianity, the second coming will be accompanied by the usual trials and tribulations, death and destruction. Iranian journalist Hossein Bastani reported Ahmadinejad saying in official meetings that the hidden imam will reappear in two years.
So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is [...] near[. ...]This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.
To be sure, there are such madmen among the other monotheisms. The Temple Mount Faithful in Israel would like the al-Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount destroyed to make way for the third Jewish Temple and the messianic era. The difference with Iran, however, is that there are all of about 50 of these nuts in Israel, and none of them is president.
The closest we've come to a messianically inclined leader in America was a secretary of the interior who 24 years ago,[...] James Watt[.]
[...]missiles that are paraded through the streets with, literally, Israel's name on them. (They are adorned with banners reading "Israel must be wiped off the map.") It gets worse. After his U.N. speech in September, Ahmadinejad was caught on videotape telling a cleric that during the speech an aura, a halo, appeared around his head right on the podium of the General Assembly. "I felt the atmosphere suddenly change. And for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink. . . . It seemed as if a hand was holding them there, and it opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic Republic."
Charles Krauthammer is pretty clearly the token neo-con at WaPo given his Googled literary history. He's written for Townhall.com, Jewish Jewish World Review, the Weekly Standard, and Time.com praising the Bush Doctrine. It's not clear whether he believes this stuff or not. But clearly many Jews world wide do.
Indeed Iran is a threat to Israel. And I agree, Iran's leadership doesn't much care about casualties, they sacrificed millions of teenagers in human wave assaults beating back Sadaam's Republican Guard. And I agree that Israel would be devastated by a nuclear assault.
But he's missed the boat in a number of places. First of all, Bush appears to be another wacko who is hastening armageddon. Obviously, if he were too concerned about Christian or Jewish fanatics, he would have mentioned someone other than Watt. There are plenty who were in the adminstration who have been "believers and plenty of Bush supporters who share those beliefs".
The other piece missing in this story is the recent reports that Ahmadinejad is on the outs with the Imams in power. He appears to be playing the hate and bigotry card to try to consolidate and regain control over the government.
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