Story here. h/t: NationalTerrorAlert.com
IF some Iran-watchers in the US are to be believed, we could be 24 hours away from the day of judgment. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's President, has promised to deliver tomorrow his response to international demands that Iran stop enriching uranium for nuclear use.
By the Islamic calendar, Tuesday is also a holy date: the night when Mohammed rose to heaven from the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on a "buraq", a fabulous winged beast with the body of a horse and the face of a woman, and reappeared in Mecca. Will Ahmadinejad seize the moment to unveil the possession of some new fissile material or weapons system - perhaps a nuclear-tipped one?
Bernard Lewis, the West's foremost scholar of Islam, has even warned that on such a symbolic date it would be wise to bear in mind the possibility of a "cataclysmic" event such as a strike on Israel.
(...)
An expert on the Middle East, Ilan Berman, is based at the American Foreign Policy Council. He said last week: "I'm not in the camp that believes the end of the world will come about on Tuesday, but there is a strong apocalyptic strain in Ahmadinejad and his group. He is positioning Iran to be in the vanguard of the clash of civilisations with the West."
While we might prefer to believe Ahmadinejad's just some uppity little sheet head jumping up and down and hollering aggressively at folks much bigger and more powerful than he, kind of like Yosemite Sam, Donald Duck, Daffy Duck or Scooby Doo's aggressive little puppy counterpart Scrappy Doo, the fact of the matter is that he's far too dangerous and serious about his intentions to be dismissed. Just as it was a grave error for most folks to dismiss Hitler as harmless enough to not be cause for too much worry, so is it a grave error to summarily, cavalierly wave away Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic promises based on his ancient, evil ideology, to which he clearly adheres like Crazy Glue.
That being said, we must now prepare and brace ourselves for the worst. Today, not tomorrow.
I hope Ahmadinejad's just a little shit with a big, foul mouth, but I fear he's much, much more. We have, after all, witnessed some of the worst monstrosities before, and it's to be expected that history is about to repeat itself sooner or later.
The question is: will that time come tomorrow, August 22, 2006?
See also: Speculation Rages About Iran's Plans for August 22 for more specific expert information and speculation.
