Iraq, Iran, Global Warming and The Apocalypse
David J. Jonsson
March 6, 2007
Islam has many apocalyptic prophecies; this aspect of Islam contributes to the driving force of Islam. Iran joined by Syria wants to end the democratic experiment in Iraq. Iranian money, weapons and expertise are used by terrorists to kill Americans in Iraq. Iran’s support of Hamas disrupts Palestinian peace efforts. Hezbollah, a group also backed by Iran and Syria, seeks to destabilize Lebanese democracy and restart a border war with Israel. Iran which denies that a European Holocaust ever took place is now planning to create a second Holocaust in Europe and in the U.S. with the development of nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver the weapons.
Only the sustained American policy of ostracizing Iran and Syria, galvanizing the international community to enforce financial and trading sanctions, supporting Iranian and Syrian reformers, and keeping all options for war on the table including a high-profile presence in the area offers any hope containing a potential holocaust.
In order to understand the issues faced by the Administration it is necessary to review history and look at the many factors that are currently leading to the almost intractable solution to the crisis developing in the Middle East. The solution requires thinking outside the current events in Iraq. It requires abandoning the ‘silo’ approach of addressing foreign policy, energy, environment—Global Warming, homeland security, and defense as separate issues. The solution also requires the integration of commercial/business and government sectors in the solution. Without addressing the geopolitical ramifications to the U.S., EU, Russia, and China beyond the immediate crisis in Iraq and Iran, a solution cannot be found.
Exclusively increasing military strength, diplomacy, or withdrawing from Iraq will not defer or result in a lasting peace. Whatever way the Iran and Iraq crisis is resolved, it will lead to a major shift in the geopolitical landscape. The goal is to have a soft landing. This will require sacrifice, compromise but not appeasement, and most importantly prioritizing the most important elements of our culture—faith, freedom, liberty, and democracy, as we know it in America. Decision time is fast approaching. Unfortunately both Iran and the U.S. may be underestimating the power of the other side and overestimating their own. Iran thinks it has a lot of deterrents, in Iraq and elsewhere, and in the armed forces—and it sees the US bogged down in Iraq, Washington divided, and public opinion in the Muslim world opposed to war.
We will discuss how these elements are directly interrelated and suggest potential solutions for consideration.
The Power of Apocalyptic Teaching
There is power in apocalypse. Fundamentally, the belief in the imminent end of the world changes people and gives them the strength of an absolute conviction that God is on the side of the believer, a very definite goal, and the impetus to excel above and beyond their ordinary abilities. All three of these components are present in a truly apocalyptic group and serve to mold it together into a possibly, though not necessarily, destructive organism, to which the outside world is an enemy to be conquered and dominated. While all of the above is well known and obvious after studying any of the apocalyptic groups, the question before us is: Is Islam an apocalyptic faith, and if it is, then what were and still are the ramifications for the outside world? How does the Global Warming Apocalypse relate? The ideologies are political religions that substitute the state for divine reality. Pantheist-environmentalism is apocalyptic and is a form of Gnosticism. This religion worships mother earth and its members proudly slander Jesus the Messiah and Christian sexual morals.
Global Warming Apocalypse
Ironically, the Hedonistic Left led by ex-President Al Gore supports another doctrine of apocalypses that is the Global Warming Apocalypse. Al Gore has been busy returning global warming to center stage with terrifying warnings of disaster with his best-selling book, An Inconvenient Truth, and the popular companion documentary. This same left has become key participants in the Leftist/Marxist – Islamist Alliance. This is a little hard to take from the global warming alarmists, given that they normally support live-for-today hedonism. It is further difficult in that the implementation of Shariah law would be the end for their hedonism and potentially their lives. Can a decadent elite which ushered in decades of self-indulgent, drugs-and-promiscuity-laden lifestyles credibly warn of “death and destruction,” civilizational collapse and the need for abstemiousness? Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe has now famously compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers, bringing to bear a stern moral certainty about protecting the earth she can't find in her heart for the protection of unborn children. Like Marxism, this Global Warming Apocalypse pronouncement is supposed to sustain civilization not through individual virtue but through regulation and centralized planning. Their elite whose goodness is measured not by their own moral behavior but by the brilliance of their statist schemes will apparently save the earth. And through the Leftist/Marxist – Islamist Alliance they promote appeasement with the vary forces seeking their own destruction.
The Hedonistic Left revolutionaries have a vision of the new and perfect world, the beginning of a new age when all would be different. The hedonistic left promotes ideologies which encompass political secular religions—the belief in the spirit of Gaia—the Mother Earth and that substitutes the state for divine reality.
Maurice Strong, previously a senior advisor to United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan, is also a key participant with his involvement in the U.N. Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Strong's most significant role at the U.N. to-date has been his position as Secretary General of the 1992 U.N. Conference on the Environment and Development, the Rio Earth Summit. At the core of the UN-NGO alliance is Maurice Strong, a multimillionaire Canadian-born businessman who has devoted much of the last 30 years to orchestrating the alliance's "global governance" campaign. Through his work in UNESCO, Strong promotes Gaia, the Earth God, among the world's youth. Strong is also a part of The Temple of Understanding in New York a global interfaith organization with NGO consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council and has had representation at all of the major international conferences. He uses The Temple to encourage Americans concerned about the environment to replace Christianity with the worship of "mother earth." See also my article: Axis of Appeasement — The Inconvenient Truth
What Part Will Religion Play in Emerging Global Warming Struggles?
It is important to review the history of Global Warming Apocalypse development.
The Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival began in October 1985. While the United Nations was celebrating its 40th anniversary, ten "spiritual leaders," two each from the world's five major religions, and eight elected officials from parliaments on five continents, met together at psychology's New Age center in Tarrytown, New York to explore ideas for ecological salvation and world peace. Out of this meeting grew a working partnership between the world's religious and political leaders—something which had been unthinkable since ancient Rome.
The politicians belonged to the Global Committee of Parliamentarians on Population and Development. The religious leaders had been invited by the Temple of Understanding, long headquartered at the then "Very Reverend" James Parks Morton's infamous Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. As early as 1975 the Temple (Morton was president), known as "the spiritual UN," had sponsored a week-long "Spiritual Summit Conference" which culminated in "addresses at the United Nations by representatives of five major faiths," with Mother Teresa as the keynote speaker.
Bishop Moore transformed the Cathedral of St. John the Divine into a Gnostic stronghold for such organizations as: The Lucis Trust, founded in 1922 by Alice Bailey, a disciple of Theosophist Madame Helena Blavatsky. Originally named the Lucifer Trust, it became a mother institution of the modern New Age movement. Moore, who entered the 1970s "peace movement" by visiting with the Vietcong-controlled, underground peace movement in Vietnam, had by 1983 joined with the pro-terrorist Institute for Policy Studies and the U.S.A.-Canada Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, to mobilize the American peace movement to stop the Strategic Defense Initiative. Thirty top Soviet intelligence officers, who were joined by Bishop Moore, gave marching orders to the American peace leadership to this effect in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1983.
In April 1988 the UN Global Forum on Human Survival held in Oxford, England was co-sponsored by the Temple of Understanding and the UN Committee on Parliamentarians and Population, chaired by James Parks Morton. Gaia scientist James Lovelock [Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock], was the featured speaker. It brought together about 200 spiritual and legislative leaders from 52 countries. "For five days parliamentarians and cabinet members met with cardinals, swamis, bishops, rabbis, imams, monks....Among them: the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, the Archbishop of Canterbury...Cardinal Koenig of Vienna...Carl Sagan, Vice-Chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Evguenij Velikhov, Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova." The conference was covered by media teams from 35 countries. The same year the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
The Global Forum on Human Survival held in Moscow January 15-19, 1990 was, hosted by Mikhail Gorbachev and Javier Perez de Cuellar, and chaired by James Parks Morton. Other co-hosts included what the program called a "unique alliance": "the Supreme Soviet, the country's first freely elected parliament; all faith communities of the USSR, coordinated by the Russian Orthodox Church; the USSR Academy of Sciences; and the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity." Moscow saw more than 1,000 participants from 83 countries call for a "new planetary perspective" involving a "new spiritual and ethical basis for human activities on earth." In his address to the Forum, Mikhail Gorbachev called it "a major step in the ecological consciousness of humanity." He drew cheers from delegates when he pledged "to ban nuclear tests completely, for all times, and at any moment, if the U.S. does the same... [and] to open our territory for inspection...." See also my article: Nuclear Proliferation—Options In A Perfect Storm.
Laying the foundation for the coming world religion, ecological concerns are being expressed increasingly in pantheistic/New Age terms as though the universe were a living and even conscious entity (the Gaia hypothesis) with whom we must make peace and live in harmony. Calling spirituality "common to all humanity," New Age physicist Fritjof Capra defined it at the Moscow Global Forum as "the experience of being connected to the cosmos as a whole...a sense of belonging that gives meaning to life." Capra recently founded The Elmwood Institute, dedicated to "the convergence of politics, ecology and spirituality."
In his keynote speech at Moscow, then U.S. Senator Al Gore declared: "I do not see how the environmental problem can be solved without reference to spiritual values found in every faith." He is not referring to biblical Christianity, but to an ecumenical world "spirituality" based upon what he called a "new
faith in the future of life on earth... [providing] higher values in the conduct of human affairs." The final "Moscow Declaration" called for "a global council of spiritual leaders" and the "creation of an inter-faith prayer...." It declared, "We must find a new spiritual and ethical basis for human activities on Earth: Humankind must enter into a new communion with nature...."
Strong is also associated with the United Religions Initiative (URI), a movement to “…promote an enduring, daily, interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the earth and all living beings.” The founding Trustee and President is The Rt. Rev. William E. Swing-Episcopal Bishop of California. Naturally, interfaith cooperation implies a one world religion. A one world secular, godless religion for a one world government is the objective.
Maurice Strong stated “The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” For supporters of the URI an ecumenical union of all religions is seen to be essential, for there can be no political peace without religious peace as well.
U.S. taxpayers are being forced to subsidize a new form of state religion which holds that natural resources have to be protected for the sake of Gaia, a so-called Earth spirit. This religious movement, which has cult-like qualities, is being promoted by leading figures and organizations such as Vice President Albert Gore, broadcaster Ted Turner, and the United Nations.
The Judeo-Christian culture and religion must be destroyed and replaced by the new one-world religion as a precursor for fall of the West and usher in the Islamic kingdom of God on Earth. The new world order will be a global community where our spiritual lives and our economic, legal, and governmental systems will be dictated to us all in the name of the greater good. All of these forces, in the form of NGO's, business, non-profit organizations, media, academia, and New Age cults will be working closely with the United Nations to usher in the New Age. Right under our noses the way is being paved for the prophesied one world religion and huge armies of volunteers are being amassed to usher it in.
The transformation brought about by the Global Warming doctrines had a number of consequences:
1. The power of the ruling elite rested in Environmentalism ideology as the main source of legitimacy.
2. It increased the role of Environmentalism ideology (Worship of Gaia) in the country’s internal and international politics.
3. Environmentalist revolutionaries had a vision of a new and perfect world, a New Word Order the beginning of an age when all would be different.
The elite are careful about letting Westerners know what their real goal is.
The Modern Apocalyptic Muslim
A grasp of history is crucial to the understanding of the modern apocalyptic Muslim, because of the living nature of this past for him. Therefore, our discussion must start at the dawn of Muslim history. Many theories have been proposed to explain the phenomenal Muslim conquest of the entire ancient world, from Tours in France to the borders of China in Central Asia, during the period of a century. Some scholars dismiss the idea that religious belief was a primary or even a secondary contributing factor in these conquests. Yet this prejudice is very damaging to our present-day understanding, if only because contemporary Muslims themselves believe that their absolute faith in Allah and the unifying nature of Islam are the most important reasons for their successes. Here, one must read between the lines and understand that absolute faith and unity was not enough to embark on the jihad. There had to be a third component to this equation: the imperative to conquer the world before the expected Hour of Judgment. This is the component that will interest us here.
It is not as important for us to know what impelled this conquest historically, as to understand how the modern Muslim feels about his history. This conquest, called the jihad, is closely connected in the sources to apocalyptic beliefs. In this regard, a tradition should be quoted: Behold! God sent me [the Prophet Muhammad] with a sword, just before the Hour [of Judgment], and placed my daily sustenance beneath the shadow of my spear, and humiliation and contempt upon those who oppose me. Muslims, according to this understanding, did not try to conquer the world for the sake of domination, but because God commanded them to do it before the imminent end of the world.
In Islam we have the first example of what an apocalyptic group can achieve when given a limited time frame to accomplish an impossible task: world conquest. They almost made it. Since the most revolutionary idea present in fundamentalist Islam is that modern Muslims are reenacting the situation of the Prophet Muhammad during the seventh century and that all of the rest of the world, including the so-called Muslim countries, are infidel. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the feeling that an apocalyptic-jihad is necessary to correct things is very strong.
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu Comments on the Similarity to Events Preceding World War II
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu on November 13, 2006 drew a direct analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany.
“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs,” Netanyahu told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. “Believe him and stop him,” the opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this.”
“Bernard Lewis, the influential Princeton scholar of Islam, claimed earlier Mr. Ahmadinejad and a powerful coterie around him actually wanted to provoke nuclear conflict as a means of hastening the arrival of the Mahdi, the Muslim messiah. “It would seem that he and his immediate circle really believe that the apocalyptic age is now,” he told an audience at Tel Aviv University.” … “Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies set the tone at the turn of the year with publication of its annual strategic balance, in which it warned: “Time is working in Iran’s favor and, barring military action, Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons is only a matter of time.” Reference: Financial Times, January 12, 2007, Israel braced for action.
While Iran is developing WMD and forming alliances throughout the world including Cuba just 90 miles off the coast of America, Russia and China are providing arms for the alliance and equally important Russia is finalizing the energy noose around Europe. The Islamists along with their Leftist/Marxist alliance partners meanwhile are quietly assuming key positions in the governments, the media and even financial institutions. See also: Islamic Economics and the Final Jihad: The Muslim Brotherhood to the Leftist/Marxist - Islamist Alliance by David J. Jonsson
In the article of August 7: The Origins of the Next Great War are Visible I commented:
“With every passing year following the events of 9/11 the rise of Leftist/Marxist-Islamist Alliance has increased global instability. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients–far bigger in scale than those leading to World Wars 1 and 11 and the Gulf Wars of 1991 or 2003–were in place.”
Kofi Annan Learns of the Intent of Iran
In early September of 2006, as Kofi Annan passed through the Middle East on a farewell journey as United Nations secretary general, he made a stop in Tehran. There, in a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, he heard something startling.
As later recounted to the New York Times by an Annan aide, Ahmadinejad told Annan that though Britain and the United States had won the last world war; Iran would win the next. “It wasn’t the tone and the content that stunned us,” the aide told the Times. “It was the fact that he talked like he meant it and believed it.” After all, Annan and his colleagues hadn’t realized there would be a next world war.
The War has Already Begun
In the eyes of the Ahmadinejad and his supporters, however, that war has already begun. In their way of thinking, radical Islamists have already brought the collapse of one superpower (the Soviet Union, which they believe fell because of the Afghan war) and are on route to victory in Europe. America is next.
The good news about the Iranian Ahmadinejad’s wild rhetoric is that he is not a particularly important figure in Iran’s peculiar system in which the revolutionary institutions matter more than the state. Real power is wielded by the hard-line clerics, especially Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose title accurately reflects his unchecked authority.
The post of Supreme Leader is literally the Leader of the Revolution. Leadership Authority, or Valî-ye Faqîh or Guardian Jurisprudent was created in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation. The Assembly of Experts appoints the Supreme Leader and is also in charge of overseeing the Supreme Leader and has the power to dismiss and replace him at any time. Members are elected for an eight year term. Only clerics can join the assembly and candidates for election are vetted by the Guardian Council.
Hashemi Rafsanjani is the Expediency Council Chairman. Expediency Discernment Council of the System is an unelected establishment in the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran created on 6 February 1988. Its purpose is to resolve differences or conflicts between the Majlis and the Council of Guardians [The most influential body in Iran], and also to serve as a consultative council to the Supreme Leader. The Guardian Council of the Constitution is an unelected high chamber within the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has legislative, judicial, and electoral powers. This reflects the difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and democratic states, such as the United States, which have separation of the branches of government. Guardian council represents the official will of the Supreme Leader.
The transformation brought about by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 had a number of consequences:
4. The power of the ruling elite rested in Islamic ideology as the main source of legitimacy.
5. It increased the role of Islamic ideology in the country’s internal and international politics.
6. Islamic revolutionaries had a vision of a new and perfect world, the beginning of an age when all would be different.
The bad news is that Khamenei and the other hard-line clerics entirely agree with Ahmadinezhad’s dangerous views. They are just more careful about letting Westerners know what they really think.
To audiences in the Middle East, Khamenei is more open. He has long met with Holocaust deniers and warmly endorsed their disgusting lies. In Persian, he regularly calls the state of Israel a “cancer” that must be cut out and urges Muslims never to accept the existence of the Jewish state. He has been the force behind Iran’s longstanding arms supplies to Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist group, and he has constantly urged that group to keep up the fight against Israel no matter what concessions Israel might make. He has pushed Iran to provide more support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza because of the group’s refusal to accept the state of Israel. Iran has pledged to give Hamas $250 million this year, about half of which has been delivered, making Iran by far the largest funder of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
According to a report in the Iran News & Cultural Journal of January 6, Iran’s Supreme Mullah Leader Will Be Dead Soon. “Iran’s Supreme Mullah Leader, Ali Khamenei is seriously ill and will have to be replaced in the coming months, as he is no longer capable of holding office, according to Assembly of Experts member mullah Nasseri. The powerful mullah body appoints and oversees the country’s supreme leader. “Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei is gravely ill - he can no longer see very well, has difficulty hearing, and is no longer able to properly perform his duties,” Nasseri told a women‘s group.”
“The country’s supreme leader since 1989, Khamenei succeeded the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, infamous mullah Khomeini, as president in 1981 and served two terms. His death or removal from office by the Assembly of Experts will trigger a power struggle within the mullahs’ regime, according to observers.”
“The names of three possible successors to Khamenei are currently on the lips of Iranians: Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba; Iran’s former reformist president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani-Expediency Council Chairman; and Gholam Ali Mesbah Yazdi, the ultra-conservative ayatollah who is considered the spiritual father of Iran’s current hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
As commented by Haaretz, January 5, 2007, Bringing Ahmadinejad to justice: “The win of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the recent elections was characterized as the “moderate” victor in the recent Iranian elections. However, the Argentinean judiciary recently determined that it was this same Rafsanjani who planned, organized and ordered the mass terrorist bombing of the Argentinean Jewish community center (AMIA) in 1994, resulting in the death of 85 people and 300 wounded. In a fortuitous yet chilling reminder, the Argentinean prosecutors’ decision calling for arrest warrants to be issued against the Iranian leadership was released on the same day that President Ahmadinejad called yet again for the disappearance of Israel, and on the anniversary of his first public and direct call for the destruction of Israel (on October 25, 2005) when, as he put it, “Israel must be wiped off the map, as the imam says.”
“The imam, in this instance, is former Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the supreme leader of Iran, who had declared in 2000 that “there is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state,” while otherwise using epidemiological metaphors in calling for Israel, “the cancerous tumor of a state,” to be ‘removed from the region.’”
Iran’s revolutionary leaders deeply believe they can carry out their ambitious agenda. To us, that sounds bizarre because we see Iran as a middle-sized country that causes an amazing amount of trouble. Things look very different to Iran’s hardliners. They see themselves as the leaders of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims who are destined to dominate the world.
Persia is an Ancient Country with a Great Tradition
To their conviction that Allah is on their side, Iran’s hardliners add a strong dose of nationalism. Iran’s history is 2,500 years old; by contrast, Islam has been around for a mere 1,300 years. For most of that time, Iran (the ancient Persia) has been a much larger country than it is today. After all, the Bible tells us that it was the Persian Emperor who ended the Jews’ Babylonian captivity, freeing them to return to build the Temple in Jerusalem and giving them the money with which to do so. Coming to a more recent time, only 200 years ago, Iran was more than twice its present size. No wonder Iran expects to be the regional superpower, especially when its population is three times that of Saudi Arabia and all the other Gulf Arab monarchies combined.
While its self-conceit may be impressive, Iran’s only real chance to be able to dominate its neighborhood, much less to accomplish its often-stated goal of eliminating Israel, is through its nuclear program. That is why U.S. policy toward Iran has appropriately focused on the nuclear issue. President Bush and his top officials have made many strong statements about the dangers from Iran, calling a nuclear-armed Iran unacceptable. But the sad reality is that over the last year, Iran has made slow but steady progress with its nuclear program, creating facts that will be hard to reverse. Perhaps diplomacy can rescue the situation, but only stronger pressure can produce results.
Russia and China, who have so far blocked Security Council action on Iran, are hard to read. The pessimistic view is that they do not care much about a nuclear Iran: yes, a militant Islamist Iran could threaten them (both have large Muslim populations), but a nuclear Tehran’s greater threat to the West would be welcomed by some in Moscow and Beijing.
The Role of Propaganda—Saying What the Listener Want to Hear
We must realize that within the Middle Eastern culture, saying what your listener wants to hear is more important than telling the truth. For a Middle Easterner, words are more important than ideas, and ideas are more important than facts. It is this trait that has caused many Americans to wonder how such outlandish statements can be made that are patently false. For example, when Saddam Hussein said that the battle of the first Gulf War (Desert Storm) would be the “mother of all battles” and claimed victory before anything started, it was the words and ideas that were embraced by his followers. The facts were not important. Predominantly Muslim nations with state-controlled media—virtually all of them—exhibit this mentality most powerfully.
Germany’s Four-Year Plan a Precursor for World War II
Just as the West may now not recognize the planning and sincerity of Iran’s preparations for war, it is important to review the history of Germany during the period before World War ll.
In reading the excellent book The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Fergurson, I noticed the striking similarity to the events occurring prior to World War II and the events occurring in Iran and Europe. I refer specifically to pages 441-6.
“Later, after it was all over, the historian Friedrich Meinecke tried to explain ‘the German catastrophe’ by arguing that technical specialization had caused some educated Germans (not him, needless to say) to lose sight of the humanistic values of Goethe and Schiller; thus they were unable to resist Hitler’s ‘mass Machiavellianism’. Thomas Mann was unusual in being able to recognize even at the time that, in ‘Brother Hitler,’ the entire German Bildungsbilrgertum possessed a monstrous younger sibling who embodied some of their deepest-rooted aspirations. An academic education, far from inoculating people against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. So much for the greatness of the German universities. Their fall from grace was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel.”
“Were German intellectuals worse in these respects than their counterparts elsewhere? Possibly. Yet other intellectuals were never exposed to Hitler’s supernatural magnetism—and that, surely, was the crucial factor. For, on closer inspection, what Hitler offered Germans was something much more than Roosevelt was offering Americans. Roosevelt spoke of frankness, action and leadership in a national emergency. But he emphasized in his inaugural address that the nature of that emergency was purely material; spiritually and morally there was nothing wrong with American society. Hitler, by contrast, saw Germany’s economic problems as mere symptoms of a more profound national malaise. Roosevelt made eight references in his speech to the ‘people’; Hitler used the word Volk no fewer than eighteen times. His role was not just to restart the economy but to be the nation’s savior, the redeemer who would end years of national division by forging a Volksgemeinschaft—a folk-community.” [The folk-community has striking similarity to the Islamic concept of Ummah.] Tellingly, His first speech as Chancellor ended as follows:
I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.
The Rise of Messianic Populism
The response that this messianic proposition elicited was quasi-religious in its fervor. As an SA sergeant explained: ‘Our opponents ... committed a fundamental error when equating us as a party with the Economic Party, the Democrats or the Marxist parties. All these parties were only interest groups; they lacked soul, spiritual ties. Adolf Hitler emerged as bearer of a new political religion. [Just as we see today the rise of political Islam. See Islamic Economics and Shariah Law: A Plan for World Domination by David J. Jonsson.] ‘The Nazis developed a self-conscious liturgy, with November 9 (the date of the 1918 Revolution and the failed 1923 Beer Hall putsch) as a Day of Mourning, complete with fires, wreaths, altars, blood-stained relics and even a Nazi book of martyrs. Initiates into the elite Schutzstaffel (SS) had to incant a catechism with lines like:
‘We believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created ... and in the Führer ... whom He has sent us.’
Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, (alternatively spelt al-Husseini), the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a Muslim religious leader. Known for his anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, al-Husayni fought against the establishment of a Jewish state in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. Husayni collaborated with Nazi Germany, becoming a resident in Berlin during World War II, where upon being granted a rank of SS Gruppenführer by Heinrich Himmler, he helped recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS.
It was not just that Hitler more or less overtly supplanted Christ in the iconography and liturgy of ‘the brown cult’. As the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps argued, the very ethical foundation of Christianity had to go too: ‘The abstruse doctrine of Original Sin ... indeed the whole notion of sin as set forth by the Church ... is something intolerable to Nordic man, since it is incompatible with the ‘heroic’ ideology of our blood.” [This parallels in many respects the teaching of the Qur’an.]
Social Transformation
‘The Nazis’ opponents also recognized the pseudo-religious character of the movement. As the Catholic exile Eric Voegelin put it, Nazism was ‘an ideology akin to Christian heresies of redemption in the here and now ... fused with post-Enlightenment doctrines of social transformation’.
As Clifford F. Porter in his article “Eric Voegelin on Nazi Political Extremism” Journal of the History of Ideas - Volume 63, Number 1, January 2002, pp. 151-171 commented: Voegelin’s analysis of Nazism is worth revisiting by historians because it delineated the Nazi rationale for the Holocaust in the early 1930s, even if the Nazis themselves had yet to move towards mass murder early in the regime. Voegelin was not prescient enough to predict the extent of the Holocaust, but he understood that the ideological rationale of Nazi violence was unlimited. Furthermore, his description of political extremism as Gnosticism in 1952 is valid for explaining why an individual might support the Nazis and then voluntarily commit extraordinarily vicious acts to try to realize the dream-world [social transformation] of the Third Reich. … By 1938 he had theorized that ideologies were political secular religions that substituted the state for divine reality.
The journalist Konrad Heiden called Hitler ‘a pure fragment of the modern mass soul’ whose speeches always ended ‘in overjoyed redemption’.
“Hitler had provided them with a suitable formula: ‘we know two Gods: one in heaven and another on earth; the second is Germany.’ But ‘we’ are Germany, Hitler had said on another occasion, and ‘we’ meant ‘I.’ And so there were people who prayed to Hitler, perhaps without realizing that this was prayer”. [Der Fuehrer by Konrad Heiden, pp 631]
An anonymous Social Democrat called the Nazi regime a ‘counter-church’. Two individuals as different as Eva Klemperer, wife of the Jewish-born philologist Victor, and the East Prussian conservative Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen could agree in likening Hitler to the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Jan of Leyden. (Niall Fergurson)
As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated, while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension. As with us ... hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main supports of the regime ... A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power ... and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned over to the executioner.
Still, all this leaves one question unanswered: What had gone wrong with the existing religions in Germany? For if National Socialism was a political religion, the fragmentation of the old political parties cannot satisfactorily be presented as the essential precondition for its success. Evidence of declining religious belief among German Christians is in fact not hard to find: a substantial proportion of Germans exercised the option to be registered as konfessionslos (without a religion) in the 1920s. There were marked declines in church attendance, particularly in North German cities. Significantly, unlike the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church had suffered very heavy financial losses in the hyperinflation. Morale among the Protestant clergy was low; many were attracted to the Nazi notion of a new ‘Positive Christianity’. All this may offer a clue as to why the farmer were more likely than the latter to vote Nazi in the crucial elections of 1930-33 - as we have seen, the single most striking sociological characteristic of NSDAP support, though here too there was considerable regional variation and it would be quite wrong to infer from this anything stronger than inertia in Catholic voting patterns. After all, Austrians were scarcely less enthusiastic about National Socialism and they were virtually all Catholic. And nearly all the fascist dictators were themselves raised as Catholics: Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, to say nothing of wartime puppets like Ante Pavelic in Croatia and Jozef Tiso in Slovakia, who was himself a priest. (Niall Fergurson)
In the article on Wesley Center Online by Leon O. Hynson, THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: An Ethics of the Spirit “We may call the Church to a Christian discipleship in all spheres of life. If the Church, with its vision of righteousness and wholeness, is excluded from social involvement, then whom will the Church suggest for the task? The sectors of power and influence, professions and business, labor and politics, have no adequate ethical ground from which to re-create, sanctify, and energize. These sectors of power all have particularized ethical norms for self-regulation, but lack an ethic equal to the depth of human demand and need.”
George Forell - Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa , in answering the question: “Why did the church not speak up against Nazism?” said, “Now, this church should have probably said more. But when all is said and done, the only people that said anything were the churches. Certainly the legal profession said nothing. Certainly the medical profession said nothing. Certainly the schools and the university professors said nothing.” There was no university Kampf, or a medical association Kampf. The only Kampf in Germany was the Kirchenkampf. This illustrates my claim that the community of the Spirit is able to speak because it possesses the moral force. The ethic of the Spirit offers both the structure and substance of a “categorical imperative” to humankind. The ethics of the Spirit offers the dynamic for its actualization. This ethics of the Spirit is the ethics of the Church. Even now in our apocalyptic time, the Spirit is moving over the face of the world; and through the community of the Spirit, God is commanding: “Let there be light”; and behold, light breaks forth, and God says. “It is good.”
George Forell writing in the article Admonition in 2002 “The center of the Christian Faith is the Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified for our sins and raised for our salvation. Without Christ there is no Christianity. This might seem obvious to most of us but we live in a time in which there are some, claiming to be Christians, who believe that the overwhelming centrality of Christ for Christians is an embarrassment in a pluralistic world. They say, “We should consider all founders of religion and important religious leaders of equal significance.” Our answer must be our Lord Jesus Christ for he is not just the founder of a religion or a great religious leader. He is the second person of God, the Holy Trinity. To downgrade Jesus to a religious leader or prophet is for Christian’s blasphemy. Christ is our only savior. We are saved by faith alone through Christ alone.”
Implications of the Imminent Return of the Twelfth Imam
An official Iranian State media website, The World toward Illumination predicts the coming of both the Imam Mahdi, the Shiite messiah, and Jesus by the spring equinox. ‘Imam Mahdi (may God hasten his reappearance) will appear all of a sudden on the world scene with a voice from the skies announcing his reappearance at the holy Ka’ba in Mecca,’ the message says.
The website said the Mahdi will form an army to defeat Islam’s enemies in a series of apocalyptic battles, overcoming his archenemy in Jerusalem, WorldNetDaily.com reported on December 31 in the article, Iran website heralding ‘Mahdi’ by springtime.
In a greeting to the world’s Christians for the coming New Year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he expects both Jesus and the Mahdi to return and ‘wipe away oppression,’ WND reported last month.
‘I wish all the Christians a very happy new year and I wish to ask them a question as well,’ said Ahmadinejad, according to an Iranian Student News Agency report cited by YnetNews.com.
Ahmadinejad’s mystical obsession with the coming of the Mahdi raises concerns that a nuclear-armed Iran could trigger the very conflagration he envisions for the end of the world.
In a videotaped meeting with Ayatollah Javadi-Amoli in Tehran, Ahmadinejad discussed a paranormal experience he had while addressing the United Nations in New York last September. He says he found himself bathed in light from heaven throughout the speech.
‘People are anxious to know when and how will He rise; what they must do to receive this worldwide salvation,’ says Ali Lari, a cleric at the Bright Future Institute in Iran’s religious center of Qom. ‘The timing is not clear, but the conditions are more specific,’ he adds. There is a saying: ‘When the students are ready, the teacher will come.’
“The Bright Future Institute was established in early 2004 by a number of scholars and masters of Islamic seminaries in the holy city of Qom with a view to develop the culture of Intizar or Awaiting Imam Mahdi as and to increase the knowledge about him both in Iran and abroad by supporting research and cultural works of other scholars. this institute is a non-profit making, independent research centre which promotes efforts to reject wrong ideas about imam Mahdi by holding discussion sessions and also by preparing scientific answers to respond to superstitions surrounding him.
The Bright Future Institute is to hold an international seminar every year about the fifteenth of Sha’ban, the auspicious birthday of Imam Mahdi (May God hasten His reappearance) to bring together researchers in messianic science.”“The institute is the eighth of its kind in Iran to study and even speed the Mahdi’s return. But it is the largest and most influential, with 160 staff, a growing reach in local schools, children’s and teen magazines, and unlimited ambition to spread the word.”
“Mahdaviat is a code for the revolution, and is the spirit of the revolution,” says cleric Masoud Poursayed-Aghaie, head of the institute. “It’s the code of our identity, [and] I think this belief has been increasing.”
Critics in Iran and outside dismiss end-of-timers as unscientific, traditional followers of myths. To counter those critics, the institute’s news agency, online at www.bfnews.ir, began churning out reports three months ago.
“There is a gap between us and the popular media,” says editor-in-chief Sayed Ali Pourtabatabaie. “We started the idea of a messiah news agency of the Mahdi [because] we thought we needed a news agency to publish His news.”
According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor of January 4, 2006, True believers dial messiah hotline in Iran “Have a quick question about when the Mahdi is coming to save mankind, according to Shiite Muslim adherents? Need to know the signs?”
The 12th Imam is Expected to Return to Impose Justice and Spread Peace
“Just call the new messiah “hotline.” Or log on to Bright Future News Agency to get the latest religious readout—all part of the effort by freshly rejuvenated true believers in Iran to spread their message of the imminent return of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam who is expected to return to impose justice and spread peace.”
The Prophetic Messages of Christianity and Islam
In Matthew 24:3-8 (Holy Bible, NIV), we find Jesus sitting on the Mount of Olives, where the disciples came to him privately.
“Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus answered, “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”
By contrast, Muhammad said:
I have been ordered to fight against people until they say that there is no god but Allah. “That Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” they pray, and pay religious taxes. If they do that, their lives and property are safe. Sahih Muslim, #0033, and Sahih Bukhari, volume 1, #387
You shall fight back against those (i.e., Christians and Jews) who do not believe in GOD, nor in the Last Day, nor do they prohibit what GOD and His messenger have prohibited, nor do they abide by the religion of truth—among those who received the scripture—until they pay the due tax, willingly or unwillingly (until they pay tribute out of hand, and they be humbled). The Jews said, “Ezra is the son of GOD,” while the Christians said, “Jesus is the son of GOD!” These are blasphemies uttered by their mouths. They thus match the blasphemies of those who have disbelieved in the past. GOD condemns them. They have surely deviated. Qur’an 9:29-30
Shiite and Sunni Apocalyptic Teaching
It is important to recognize that both the Shiites and Sunni sects have teaching related to the End Times. While the teaching of Shiite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad considers that the return of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam as ushering in the End Times, the Sunni scholar, Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi, in a fatwa posted on the website www.islamonline.net, (December 2, 2002) in response to a reader’s question, wrote of the “signs of the victory of Islam,” citing a well-known Hadith: “… The Prophet Muhammad was asked: ‘What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?’ He answered: ‘The city of Hirqil [i.e. the Byzantine emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first’ - that is, Constantinople… Romiyya is the city called today ‘Rome,’ the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered].” (See: Al-Qaradhawi: “Islam will Return to Europe as a Conqueror” MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 447, December 6, 2002.)
“This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.”
Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi qualified his statement: “I maintain that the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology…”
http://www.islamonline.net/fatwa/arabic/FatwaDisplay.asp?hFatwaID=2042
Al-Qaradhawi made similar statements on other occasions, on his weekly religious program on Al-Jazeera. He declared: “This means that the friends of the Prophet heard that two cities would be conquered by Islam, Romiyya and Constantinople, and the Prophet said that ‘Hirqil [i.e. Constantinople] would be conquered first.’ Romiyya is Rome, the capital of Italy, and Constantinople was the capital of the state of Byzantine Rome, which today is Istanbul. He said that Hirqil which is Constantinople would be conquered first and this is what happened…”
Scott Peterson-Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor in the article True believers dial messiah hotline in Iran writes: “Shiite writings describe events surrounding the return in apocalyptic terms, similar to those used in Revelations, which some Christian evangelicals believe predicts a final world war during which Jesus returns to win and reign for 1,000 years.
In one script, forces of evil would come from Syria and Iraq and clash with forces of good from Iran. The battle would commence at Kufa - the Iraqi town near the holy city of Najaf (and home to the anti-US Iraqi cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr).
“The evil commander named Sofiani and the anti-Mahdi known as Dajjal (comparable to the Christian antichrist), would both be killed. The forces of good would be led by a “man from Khorasan” - a province in northeast Iran.” (Scott Peterson)
The Mahdi would return at Mecca, and fight. His victory would bring a government of God for a period of “seven,” according to one reading. Seven months, years, or millennia are not clear.
Another text details a conversation, in which the Muslim prophet Mohammad describes the Mahdi as “God’s ultimate thing,” and that God “will conquer the Easts and the Wests of the earth through Him, and He will be absent from his followers [as he is now, known as the “hidden” 12th imam] to such an extent, no one can confirm his existence except the believer whose heart has been tested for faith by the Almighty.”
Even while absent, the prophet is to have said, the Mahdi would benefit his followers, “just as people still benefit from the sun on a cloudy day.”
“The Imam of the Age will have victory, and the entire world will support him, except some regimes and governments that are racist, like Zionists,” says Poursayed-Aghaie. The result will be global dominance of Shiite Muslims.
The Nuclear Crisis with Iran Continues
Remember he has a plan just like the Nazi’s “Four Year Plan“, he is a scholar of history, and he also is follower of the Qur’an. The Persians are also Aryans. The Aryan race is a notion mentioned in the Old Persian inscriptions and other Persian sources from c. 500 BC onwards. The word Iran is a cognate of Aryan, and is derived from the word Aryanam (see Airyanem Vaejah), meaning “Land of the Aryans,” a term adopted in antiquity by the Iranic-peoples meaning free, noble, spiritual. Seventy percent of those living in modern Iran are native speakers of Iranian/Aryan dialects.
The Tehran Times reports that on February 25, Iran successfully launched its first rocket into space for research purposes, but state television has yet to broadcast pictures of the launch. According to the article by Joel Leyden of the Israel New Agency on February 28, Iran Plans To Nuke Europe, US - Sanctions Urged “An Israel security official told the Israel News Agency that the recent launch of a missile from Iran into space illustrated a direct threat to both Europe's and US national security.”
In my article last month Using the Oil Weapon and Sanctions to Avert War With Iran, I commented about the necessity of sanctions and the use of the oil weapon.
It is up to Europe to prevent the two worst developments in Iran—war and nuclear armament—by acting jointly and with determination. Vital European and transatlantic interests are at stake. It is thus Europe's responsibility—and especially Germany's, as the current EU president—to act now.
A source within Israel commented similarly according to Joel Leyden “If we don't see severe economic sanctions coming from Europe in the next few weeks, we will witness a catastrophe,” said a source at the Israel Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The source would not give his name because he would lose his position, but the matter of urgency had him staring at this writer praying to get the message out.
“Iran has no plans to land a man on the moon,” Col. Adam an Israeli security source told the INA. “The same technology is used to build intercontinental ballistic missiles. This Iran space launch is not a threat to Israel. The Iranians need not reach a space orbit to attack Israel, but such a high orbit would be needed to deliver a nuclear payload into Europe or the US.” – Israeli security source.
“Iran is no different than Nazi Germany,” the MFA source said. “They too built up an army, resources and created the V-2.” The V-2 was the first man-made object launched into space, during test flights that reached an altitude of 189 km (117 miles) in 1944. “While Germany was putting the finishing touches to the V-2 which was eventually used against Britain, the world stood by wanting to talk. Now we have Iran repeating history, declaring to “wipe Israel off the map” while planting bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, one which nearly killed US Vice President Cheney during his visit there a few days ago.”
“Iran which denies that a European Holocaust ever took place, is now planning to create a second Holocaust in Europe and in the US,” said the Israel MFA source. “Europe will be first to feel this nuclear suicide bomb, as London, Moscow, Madrid, Rome and Paris are now in range of Iranian missiles. We no longer have the luxury of time to implement sanctions. This is not a movie. This is not the “24” TV series about nuclear terrorism. This is real. Sanctions worked against North Korea, they can and will work against Iran.”
The Need for Addressing the Global Risk
Diplomacy and military strength may deter the expansion of the threat of a global confrontation but the West must address its lack of energy security and dependence on ‘energy interdependence’ instead of ‘energy independence’. The foreign policy of the United States and Europe must address the energy, the environment, foreign trade, financial, immigration, homeland security and defense tracks in a unified manner. Similarly, addressing the crisis in the Middle East, including the Israel-Palestine solution also involves solving relations with Russia, China and Eurasia. This will require commitment and pain now to our way of life. It will require sacrifice. The alternative will be even worse.
Until the U.S. and its allies understand who the enemy is and their goals, and put forward a plan for survival, the world will be heading toward a major war of untold destruction. As mentioned above, we are revisiting 1938 and commercial interests and not security are driving our actions, as then.
Europe followed by America stand at the precipice, will they succumb to a hedonist Leftist future scenario and then becoming Islamicized either through the actions of Leftist/Marxist – Alliance or nuclear Holocaust or will they reestablish their Judeo-Christian heritage. The loss of Europe and America may occur by virtue of a collapsed population, faith and identity. The center of the Christian Faith is the Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified for our sins and raised for our salvation. Without Christ there is no Christianity. Which will it be? It is not possible to determine the outcome, but YOU, the people living in Europe and America can influence the outcome. Decision time is fast approaching.
David J. Jonsson is the author of Clash of Ideologies —The Making of the Christian and Islamic Worlds, Xulon Press 2005. His new book: Islamic Economics and the Final Jihad: The Muslim Brotherhood to the Leftist/Marxist - Islamist Alliance (Salem Communications (May 30, 2006). He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics. He worked for major corporations in the United States and Japan and with multilateral agencies that brought him to more that fifteen countries with significant or majority populations who are Muslim. These exposures provided insight into the basic tenants of Islam as a political, economic and religious system. He became proficient in Islamic law (Shariah) through contract negotiation and personal encounter. David can be reached at: djonsson2000@yahoo.co.uk
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