It's the Batty/Scary Shia Eschatology, Stupid!

If you left out all the Allah and Mahdi crap, A-jad's speech, replete as it was with mentions of the "imperialist," "colonialist" and "hegemonistic," might have been mistaken for something uttered by, say, Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. But put all the Allah and Mahdi stuff back in, and what have you got? Something the media at large hasn't a clue about, and has thus failed to report, says Joel C. Rosenberg in The Corner:

...Ahmadinejad isn’t hiding what he believes. He denied the Holocaust. He blasted the U.S. for bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. He blamed the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on the U.S. government. He insisted that his so-called messiah known as “Imam al-Mahdi” or the Twelfth Imam is coming soon. He insisted that Jesus Christ will come with the Mahdi to take over the world. He called for “the shared and collective management of the world.”

Consider this excerpt:

This movement is certainly on its rightful path of creation, ensuring a promising future for humanity. A future that will be built when humanity initiates to [tread] the path of the divine prophets and the righteous under the leadership of Imam al-Mahdi, the Ultimate Savior of mankind and the inheritor to all divine messengers and leaders and to the pure generation of our great Prophet. The creation of a supreme and ideal society with the arrival of a perfect human being who is a true and sincere lover of all human beings, is the guaranteed promise of Allah. He will come alongside with Jesus Christ to lead the freedom and justice lovers to eradicate tyranny and discrimination, and promote knowledge, peace, justice, freedom and love across the world. He will present to every single individual all the beauties of the world and all good things which bring happiness for humankind.

Though most world leaders do not appear to understand what Ahmadinejad is really saying, students of Shia Islamic eschatology, or end-times theology, do. The Iranian leader believes the end of the world as we have known it is increasingly close at hand. He believes the time for establishing an Islamic caliphate, or global government ruled by the Mahdi, is rapidly approaching. What’s more, he believes that the way to hasten the coming of the Twelfth Imam is to acquire nuclear weapons and use them to annihilate the United States, which he calls the “Great Satan,” and Israel, which he calls the “Little Satan.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands what Ahmadinejad means. So do some of his top military advisers. That’s why they believe Iran is in the eye of a gathering storm in the Middle East, and the chance of a major war is growing...