You Light Up My Life(or at least you threaten to)

Will August 22nd
be a Night to Remember?

Is Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as nutty as he sounds, willing to bring destruction down not only on Israel and the West, but on his own people? How serious should his threats be taken? Here are three articles that take a look at that question:

Iran Hints at Aug. 22 Doomsday for Israel

Noted Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis warns that Iran is preparing for an apocalyptic "end of time", and that it could come as soon as August 22.

The July 28 edition of NewsMax's Insider Report pointed to the connection between that date, when Iran leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country would respond to Western demands regarding Iran's nuclear program, and a possible attack on Israel...

August 22
Does Iran have something in store?

...There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers. This worldview and expectation, vividly expressed in speeches, articles and even schoolbooks, clearly shape the perception and therefore the policies of Ahmadinejad and his disciples.

Even in the past it was clear that terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam had no compunction in slaughtering large numbers of fellow Muslims. A notable example was the blowing up of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998, killing a few American diplomats and a much larger number of uninvolved local passersby, many of them Muslims. There were numerous other Muslim victims in the various terrorist attacks of the last 15 years.

The phrase "Allah will know his own" is usually used to explain such apparently callous unconcern; it means that while infidel, i.e., non-Muslim, victims will go to a well-deserved punishment in hell, Muslims will be sent straight to heaven. According to this view, the bombers are in fact doing their Muslim victims a favor by giving them a quick pass to heaven and its delights--the rewards without the struggles of martyrdom. School textbooks tell young Iranians to be ready for a final global struggle against an evil enemy, named as the U.S., and to prepare themselves for the privileges of martyrdom...

...In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

How then can one confront such an enemy, with such a view of life and death? Some immediate precautions are obviously possible...

We’re Losing World War IV
How to get back to the road to victory.
Barbara Lerner does an excellent job of explaining the hows and whys of how we've reached this point:

...n the 1980s, Iran’s mullahs created Hezbollah, a Shiite Arab terrorist group in Lebanon, and used it to drive us from that country the way they drove us from Iran, but this time, they didn’t just humiliate us and mock our impotence; they tortured and murdered our embassy people in Beirut, and blew up 241 of our marines. In the 1990s, Iran’s mullahs took control of Syria, turning it into a puppet terror state and transit hub, and transformed Hezbollah from a purely local terrorist army into a sophisticated global terrorist network. In this decade, these Shiite mullahs reached across the great Sunni-Shia religious divide, establishing close ties with Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood; took control of the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas; and reached across the world to forge close military ties with nuclear-armed Asian states like North Korea and oil-rich enemies to our south like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Along the way, they pioneered the terrorist arts of airplane hijacking and suicide bombing.

And all this time, the Iranians — and their ever-growing legion of followers and fans — have been waging an increasingly successful propaganda war against America, Israel, and the West, among Muslims in the Middle East and far beyond it.

Average Americans — if they remember them at all — consider the series of American defeats chronicled above and a host of others as an unconnected jumble of unfortunate events.

It’s easy to do: Our media treats them that way. Muslim media do not. On the global Muslim media stage, Iran’s mullahs and their frontmen look like Islamic conquerors of old, winning victory after victory against both the great and the little Satan, mocking us as impotent cowards, and intimidating and co-opting our already half-dhimmified old-Europe allies. Watching all this, every year more and more Muslims rally to their cause, eager to be on what they see as the winning side...

Barbara has a solution for all this. As much as I would like to disagree with her about it, I'm not sure I see any alternative. Her solution may be inevitable, but I'm not sure we should let the ravings of Iran's lunatic president dictate to us when we should act. To merely react is too much like being a puppet on a string; there is much to consider. I don't envy those who have to make the decisions to act, and when.