Israel Matzav

Ignoring the Twelfth Imam

Cut to President Ahmadinejad's address to the United Nations. His speech was mostly a lot of run-of-the-mill kook boilerplate — the UN is a stooge of the Great Satan (if only), America started the Israel-Hezbollah war (whatever) — but he wound up the usual shtick with a prayer for the return of the Twelfth Imam, the so-called "Hidden Imam" — or, as the Iranian president put it, "the perfect, righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet."

This isn't just some cockamamie pie-in-the-sky deal. Last year, President Ahmadinejad told the Indian Foreign Minister that everything would be hunky-dory in two years' time, which the minister took to mean when Iran's nukes would be ready to fly. But, as the president went out to explain, that's apparently the Twelfth Imam's ETA.

The New York Times and most other media outlets didn't mention President Ahmadinejad's big Twelfth Imam finale. America would appear to be largely uninterested in the arrival in 2007 of "the perfect, righteous human being." If he shows up on schedule, the attitude of most Americans seems to be that they're washing their hair that night. But go back to Ted Turner's observation on nukes: "They aren't usable by any sane person." The annals of human history are filled with millennial cultists of one form or another but ours is the first era in which they have the capability to live up to their sandwich boards. President Ahmageddonouttahere is an apocalyptic with a delivery system: "The end is nigh" is an old slogan. Now the means are nigh.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:57 PM