Book Proposal

Ground Zero

Jerusalem, holy war, and collective insanity

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D.

Anyone contemplating world war is certifiably insane, no matter how calm they seem.

Vanna Bonta

Table of Contents
Foreword

1. Jerusalem napkins. 7 2. Blind spots. 29 3. The lay of the land. 47 Part One: The four horsemen of the apocalypse 4. Fundamentalism 53 5. Messianism 97 6. Evangelism 137 7. Territoriality.. 185 Part Two: To be or not to be 8. The sanity option 235 9. Holocaust and holy war.. 269
About the author Endnotes Selected bibliography Picture credits

Pre-publication Reviews The manuscript has been fact-checked and edited. In addition the following reviews are cited below: Jerry Kroth's Ground Zero not only convincingly describes the insane unconscious forces that produce Islamic terrorism, it is one of very few books that takes seriously the real desire of leaders like Akhadinejhad to give nuclear weapons to enough terrorists around the world to produce a final globe-cleansing holocaust. . . The need for Islamists to carry out their prophecies so they will fuse with their redeemer is real and reasonably likely which makes Kroth's book crucial for Israeli and American politicians today. Lloyd deMause, Editor The Journal of Psychohistory

An absolutely riveting psychological analysis of the most explosive conflict on earth. I especially liked the discussion of the territorial imperative which Ive never heard developed about the Arab/Israeli conflict previously. Incredibly readable, but scary too! M.S. Forrest, Ph.D., psychotherapist, Santa Barbara . . . I like to think of myself as informed and yet the information that I took from Ground Zero was not only new but overwhelming. I had no idea that such a tinderbox of destructive potential for the world was under the aegis of completely deluded groups. It is like giving gasoline and matches to circus clowns on LSD. We tend to give a pass to religious movements thinking that faith is a good thing. But fundamental faith is so blinded by its own tautological dynamics that even mass death is acceptable on the stage of mythological fulfillment. What I was able to take from this book was a clear, well written

explanation of the contemporary and frightening significance of an ancient area of dispute. Will I sleep easier? No, but if I hear disturbing sounds outside my window in the morning, I will know why. Steve Stelle, author of On Shaky Ground

A provocative work that looks beyond the headlines, Jerry Kroth offers a thoughtful view of the ongoing tragedy that continues in the Middle East. In so doing, he challenges the perspective that has dominated the conversation so very long. Jeff Kisling, Ph.D., clinical psychotherapist, Palo Alto Book Jacket Ground Zero: Jerusalem, holy war, and collective insanity tries to unearth all the extreme elements which make peace in the region unobtainable: fundamentalism, messianism, evangelism, and territoriality. These represent the dark force which prevents a sane and reasonable peace from being achieved between Israel and the Arab world. The first to our four horsemen of the apocalypse that is examined is radical and extreme Islamic fundamentalism which cannot rest until the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque are liberated from the infidels. From bin-Laden to Nasrallah and Akhmadinejhad, the fundamentalist point of viewand specifically Islamic end-times prophecy and the arrival of their redeemer, the Mahdiplays a far larger role than most Americans think in how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is perceived. When we journey to evangelicals, we encounter an opposite perception. Their thirst for the Rapture requires that the Dome of the Rock not be liberated but destroyedcleansed in their wordsso that the third temple can be built, prophecy fulfilled, and all the logo pieces put in place for the Rapture and the glorious return of Jesus.

But these are only two collective, psychic forces predisposing this region to war. Radical and fanatic messianists await their Messiah tooa different one from the evangelists Jesus or the Islamists Mahdiand their attempts to hasten the arrival of their Godhead, Messiah ben David, similarly will resolve their prophetic yearnings. Unfortunately all three of these eschatologies presume horrific violence and destruction. Our three different messiahs only arrive on the scene with a great war and holocaust either accompanying them or preceding them. Finally, the psychology of territoriality is examined in which the Israeli/Palestinian issue raises a deep and penetrating psychological enigma: Most wars show that an intruder violates the territorial space of the proprietor, and, at least in the animal kingdom, the proprietor generally prevails. What makes this issue unique is that both Palestinians and Israelis consider themselves true and legitimate proprietors, and thus each sees the existential other as an alien intruder. It is as if two home teams are competing with each other in the same stadium. The psychological implications for this Gordian knot are deeply foreboding. After reviewing these four populations of extremist, mentally deranged, and ferocious patients in our virtual asylum, Ground Zero in The sanity option looks at the possibility of how reason might prevail. If our inmates could be sequestered, the possibility of peace, co-existence, and dtente is not only hoped for but indeed likely and plausible. But should the dark forces of the unconscious prevail, Ground Zero looks at the alternative hypothesis too. In the final chapter, Holocaust and holy war, all the military options, equipment, submarines, nuclear weapons, anthrax, plague, sarin, mustard gas, thermobaric bombs, cruise missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, air-burst artillery shells, tanks, aircraft, dirty bombs, troops, settlers, reservists, militants, jihadists, holy warriors and martyrs are described, tallied, sifted, and sorted. Conclusion: this is the most densely weaponized acreage on planet earth and consummately the most volatile.

The prospect of collective insanity breaking out in this region, with all the weaponry that is in place and ready for ignition, is nothing short of nightmarish. Overview of the book Ground Zero divides into three major sections. In the introduction, the reader is taken to Jerusalem to visit the holy sites and focuses in on Mount Moriah or what is called the Temple Mount by Israelis or the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) by Muslims. Here we find the most flammable thirty-five acre piece of real-estate on the planet. It houses the Dome of the rock, the place where Mohammed ascended to heaven with the angel Gabriel, and the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third most revered structure in the entire Muslim world. Below Al-Aqsa is the Wailing Wall, a place sacred to Jews everywhere. As the reader descends into this contentious abyss, Ground Zero first discusses perceptions. There were roughly seven thousand people who lost their lives in this region in the 21st century, but in Mexico three times that number died in the drug-trade violence that has plagued that country. In the far off Congo, there were seven hundred times more casualties than in tiny Israel, but media coverage of Mexico and the Congo is absolutely miniscule compared to coverage devoted to Israel. This is not merely a bias found in the western media. Al Jazeera is just as guilty. Why does Israel get such enormous attention over famine, war, and failedstate pillaging that goes on in the rest of the world? The answer is not found in media conspiracy theories, but in the recognition that Israel, and Jerusalem in particular, represents the most controversial and incendiary place on earth. This region packs more weapons into one tiny sliver of earth than any other. It is a tiny island swimming in a sea of collective enmity. This is ground zero, the most likely place where the fuses for World War three will be lit. This singular perspective accompanies the reader on the entire journey taken by this book

Part I: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Fundamentalism, Messianism, Evangelism, and Territoriality Early on, the reader is introduced to the term collective insanity. It is distinguished from individual lunacy by its ability to metastasize violence and spread psychotic herd behavior to ever larger groups of individuals. Collective insanity is an infectious pandemic. No religion is mocked in this text. Rather Ground Zero looks at the extreme and fanatical read insane offshoots that hide under the tents of mainstream religion. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have lunatic fringes, and these are three of the four horsemen of our modern day apocalypse. Each of the chapters in Part I is a thoroughgoing review of these fanatic offshoots. In chapter four, fundamentalism, we examine the patients housed on the binLaden ward, and learn of their militant delusions about liberating the Al-Aqsa mosque from the grip of Jews, crusaders and swine. In the Mahdi ward, we come upon Akmadinejad and Hezbollahs Nasrallah Hezbollahs Hassan Nasrallah both of whom await the return of the twelfth Imam (a five-year old boy gone missing for a thousand years) who will help unleash the end-times of Islam: the war of Gog and Magog, the appearance of the Dajjal, and, of course, the full and complete destruction of the Jews. Following that, we journey to the messianism ward of our asylum which houses Jewish religious extremists. Their ambition is clear: to cleanse the Temple Mount of Muslim desecration, to destroy the Dome of the Rock, to raise a perfectly red heifer whose ashes will be used to further cleanse and purify, and ultimately to build the third Temple placing its foundation stones where Islamic shrines once stood. This is not something to be contemplated without wrenching violence and bloodshed.

When we come to the evangelism ward, we encounter thousands of deranged inmates who believe the world is coming to an end quite soon, indeed in their lifetimes. They desperately wish to be part of prophecy and similarly hope to destroy the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the Temple. They share these delusions less because they love Israel or Jews and more because these are the fundamental constituents for the Rapture and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately the destruction of the Jews, or at least those who have not received Christ in their hearts by the time Armageddon arrives, is where evangelical eschatology gets little press. That concept is deeply anti-Semitic and strangely underplayed by the media. The inmates in our asylum possess delusions which are punctuated by extremism, violence, and their ability to set off worldwide explosions as their respective end-time dramas are acted out and unfold. In the final chapter in this section we look at the territorial imperative. Starting in the animal kingdom, Ground Zero refers the reader to the ferocity of instinctual behavior with regards to proprietors and intruders (in sports, home teams vs. visiting teams). From the perspective of evolutionary biology, this is a decidedly male instinctual predisposition, and it expresses itself in the Israeli-Palestinian stamping grounds as well. Competing territorial claims on the Temple Mount/ Haram-al-Sharif are staked out by proprietors. The inmates we seek to house in our asylum are those who will claw and fight to see that every speck of sacred territory remains forever under the dominance of their respective alpha-male proprietors and never ceded to any intruder. Part II: To be or not to be In the final two chapters we look at the possibilities of success and failure. In The sanity option the traditional road maps to peace are shelved. They havent worked, and why they havent comes down to how the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa are negotiated. In this section an assumption is made that peace can be achieved if delusions and denial are overcome, if both sides stand at a distance from religious and territorial extremism, and if the Temple Mount can be subdivided i.e., partitioned, returning the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa to the bosom of Islam while permitting the construction of the third temple on an Israeli

tranche. This is an unprecedented initiative. The win-win side of the sanity bargain, however controversial it may be, is clear and apparent. But placing ones bets on human frailties and flaws, we pursue the opposite prognosis in the final chapter, Holocaust and holy war. Here Ground Zero examines what happens if our inmates are not sequestered and their delusions and denial persists. As they stream out of the asylum, we look at their influence in the corridors of Qom, Damascus, Washington, and Jerusalem and how it will likely prevail over more moderate and reasonable voices. If delusion and denial remain intractable, with each side projecting wildly into the poison container of the existential other, then todays uneasy armistice could easily devolve into war. In this unhappy chapter, all the armaments of the region are delineated from mustard gas to radiological weapons. A discussion of what might trigger these fuses proceeds. Two military doomsday scenarios are outlined, neither of which have any particular appeal except to the inmates of our asylum. With over 90 photographs, tables, graphs, 600 footnotes, and a wide scholarly expanse, the 320-page Ground Zero offers the reader a novel way of thinking about an extremely perilous situation that confronts the whole of mankind.
About the author

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the graduate counseling psychology program at Santa Clara University in California. His academic assignments have included courses in psychotherapy and personality theory, dreamwork, and research methods. Dr. Kroth has an abiding therapeutic interest in working with dreams, personal oracles, and the applications of dream theory to psychohistory and collective psychology. Jerry has been a member of the International Psychohistorical Association since 1983. Dr. Kroths twelve prior books were in the areas of counseling psychology, child sexual abuse, learning disorders, metapsychology, transpersonal psychology, and research methodology. In addition he has written and presented over seventy-five papers on anxiety,

child development, mass psychology, synchronicity, experimental studies of the dream process, the psychology of propaganda and collective psychology. He is a contributor to the Huffington Post as well. Professor Kroth maintains a website where his c.v. can be viewed: collectivepsych.com His most recent books are listed below: Conspiracy in Camelot: the complete history of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Psyches Exile: an empirical odyssey in search of the soul. American Crazy: a voyage to the dark side of the American Dream. The Lindbergh kidnapping: mobs, mass psychology, and myth. Aliens and Man: a synopsis of facts and beliefs. Omens and Oracles: collective psychology in the nuclear age.

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. Associate Professor Emeritus Graduate Division, Counseling Psychology Loyola Hall, 140, Santa Clara University Santa Clara, CA 95053 Home address: 15042 Montebello Rd., Cupertino, CA 95014 Tel: (408) 515-4171 Email: jerrykroth@yahoo.com University email: jkroth@scu.edu

Sample Chapter

Part I:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

Fundamentalism Messianism Evangelism Territoriality

4.

Fundamentalism

Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword. . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors! Ayatollah Khomeini (1942)

As we begin the tour of our virtual asylum, there are four main wings which house our fanatic, deluded, and deranged populations: The dormitories are labeled Fundamentalism, Messianism, Evangelism, and Territorialilty. Think of this as a very large campus housing many thousands of inmates. We begin at the fundamentalist wing. Be careful to stay a safe distance as you pass through their units. Here we have

two major areas: the bin-Laden ward and the Mahdist ward. Our task on this visit is to learn more about our patients, their delusions, how dangerous they are to the outside world, and particularly how their illness expresses itself with respect to The Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa. Religious digression While three of the four wards in our asylum house religious madmen and extremists, we need to clarify that this book is not written by an atheist, nor is it an effort to defame or degrade any religion. There are 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet, 1 and the majority believe in compassion, family unity, respect for elders, and in a womans right to become educated or drive a car. A majority of Muslims do not believe in stoning anyone to death. They do not believe a young girls clitoris should be mutilated, that a thiefs hands should be cut off. They find beheading repugnant, and especially abhorrent to them is the killing of children by anyone. Our media has a circus-like penchant for regaling extremist ideas and, as a consequence, rank and file Westerners tend to think these are the common elements of Islam. Untrue. Indeed a majority of Muslims believe it is perfectly acceptable to dance, to sing, enjoy music, and they are not signatories to the Ayatollah Khomeinis violent rhetoric which begins this chapter. In this book, to be candid, we are not talking about these people. We are talking about nut jobs, who interpret religious books in warped, perverse, bizarre, and mentally distorted

ways. As Karen Armstrong, author of the classic work on fundamentalism The battle for God writes: There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.2 Yes, there are lunatics who believe that if a girl of seven is not wearing a veil, Allah wants her to be killed by his Andrea-Yates-Taliban messengers here on earth, but that perversion is not held by mainstream believers. There are over 360,000 Muslim women in France. Only about four hundred wear, or seek to wear, a burka. 3 So we are interested in the extremists in this book, not the vast majority of believers. Those who hear Allah whispering in their ears and instructing them to kill we view as mentally disturbed. It is only our deranged inmates who interest us, those who insist Allah ordered them to grow their beards to exactly a specified length, that a woman should remain illiterate into adulthood, and that God ordained that a man can have twenty wives and fifty children, but a woman should be stoned to death for a single instance of adultery. Yes, many of our patients believe that God sent them magical messagesor perhaps even texted them with military orders. Besotted by their hallucinatory heavenly dictums, they seek out a Shia grandmother and her grandson as they try to buy cabbages in a street market in Iraq and blow them to bits with explosives along with themselves.

These are our patients, a bizarre and delirious cadre of psychotic holy warriors of God.

The bin-Laden ward

Osama bin-Ladens father had eleven wives who bore him fifty-seven children. Osama was the child of his fathers 10th wife. Not quite living up to the fecundity of his father, Osama had a harem of five wives and nineteen offspring at last count. His most recent wife was fifteen at the time of her marriage to him. One of the characteristics of a mentally disturbed person is that their delusory musings do not connect well to reality. For example, Bin-Laden seems to have had an erotic attachment to intelligent women. Two of his wives were university professors. At the same time, he supported virtually all efforts to deny women an education. His admiration for the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, cannot be described as anything less than gushing. Omar makes it a point to stress how ignorant women are prized by God above all else. He and his Taliban minions were credited with blowing up one hundred and thirty four schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan in just the last year. Omar believes it is un-Islamic for girls to become educated. In the Swat Valley area of 1.8 million, 120,000 girls used to pursue an education. Omar winnowed that figure down to a mere 40,000. 4 And Osama, was ebullient over Mullah Omars pedagogical miracle-working.

Bin Laden enjoyed the company of intelligent women for himself, but for other Muslims, keeping women uneducated chattel appeared as his supreme fundamentalist objective. Osama, now deceased, was a mass murderer who liked to play dress-up. He enjoyed pretending he was a monk and messenger of God. He cultivated the aura, accoutered himself in robes of a prophet, practiced his monologues in front of a TV, and either just before killing people, or shortly thereafter, issued missives which exuded extreme religious sanctimony. Praise be to Almighty God; Peace and prayers be upon our Prophet Muhammad, his family, and Companions. Praise be to God; praise be to God; praise be to God who created heaven and earth with justice and who allowed the oppressed to punish the oppressor in the same way.5 Obamas death toll, exacted with the help of his a sundry henchmen, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, Abu Ayoub al-Iraqi, Anwar al-Awlaki, Abu Yahya al-Libi, et.al. comes in at considerably less than fifteen thousand. One does not need to read Osamas many proclamations to detect his ultimate enemies are the Jews and Crusaders, but despite that, one scholar calculated that about eighty-five percent of Obamas victims were actually Muslims. 6 Bin Laden, however, did manage a few attacks on Israel. AlQaeda operatives in Jordan sent money to fund a double suicide attack in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem in 2001 killing fifteen. 7 A punk attempt on the Israeli national football team in Malta was thwarted in 2002.

Attacks in Taba in 2004 and Sharm El Sheikh 2005 and Daha 2006, killing nineteen, likely had an Al Qaeda connection. And there is scuttlebutt that an Al-Qaeda group, Jundallah, became active in Gaza recently. For the record, our virtual asylum does not hold just any deranged set of individuals, but only those who have spoken about the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa. This is the subject of our interest, so let us look a bit more closely at the verbal meanderings of our patient, the courtiers that follow him, and hear more clearly the precise character of bin-Ladens worldview. These are excerpts of some of bin Ladens screeds and interviews which, unfortunately, rarely touched American ears: From an interview: . . . It is that this Western civilization, which is backed by America, has lost its values and appeal. The immense materialistic towers were destroyed, which preach Freedom, Human Rights, and Equality. It became a total mockery and that clearly appeared when the U.S. government interfered and banned the media outlets from airing our words which dont exceed a few minutes, because they felt that the truth had started to appear to the American people, and that we truly arent terrorists by the definition they want, because we are being violated in Palestine, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Kashmir, in the Philippines and in every place. 8 [After the World Trade Towers collapsed]:

Bush and Blair quickly moved and said that now is the time to create an independent nation for Palestine. God be glorified!! [Amazing]. During the last ten years the time was not ready, only until the attacks happened? So they wont wise up without the language of beatings and killings. 9 . . . And when the new President Bush came with Minister Colin Powell, within the first months of their rule, they said that they would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of Israel, and the Congress and the Senate clapped for them. This is hypocrisy beyond any hypocrisy. . . They will not wise up unless the attacks fall on their heads, and with the grace of God, the battle has moved inside America. We will strive to keep it going, with Gods permission, until victory is attained. 10 Q. . . But Sheikh, from what I see from your answers, you always speak about Palestine and about the Palestinian issue. So let me ask you the question, a few years ago you preached killing Jews and Crusaders, and we remember that the title quotes a famous saying of the Prophet, expel the polytheists from the Arabian Peninsula . . . you concentrated on the expulsion of the Americans from the Arabian Peninsula. So in your latest speeches we see a decrease in that. You have put forth the Palestinian issue or like you call it the Al-Aqsa Mosque issue. . . . So what is your opinion or argument on this matter? Bin Laden: I say that jihad is mandatory on all Muslims to free the Al-Aqsa Mosque, or to save the weak in Palestine and in Lebanon and in Iraq and in all Islamic lands, and there is no doubt that freeing the Arabian peninsula from the polytheists is also mandatory on all Muslims. . . I used to say that the Americans take our

money and give it to the Jews so they can kill our children with it in Palestine. 11 Q. So you say that this is treatment with the same action? They kill our innocents so we kill theirs? Bin Laden: Yes, so we kill their innocents and that is valid both religiously and logically. . . They say that this is wrong and impermissible and for proof they say that the Prophet forbade the killing of children and women, and that is true. It is valid and has been said by the Prophet. . . But this forbidding the killing of children and innocents is not absolute and there are other writings that uphold it. As for the World Trade Center, the ones who were attacked and who died in it were a financial power. It wasnt a childrens school. And it wasnt a residence. And the general consensus is that most of the people who were in there were men that backed the biggest financial force in the world that spreads worldwide corruption. . . . . . and the slaughter still goes on. . .So if we try to defend ourselves, they call us terrorists, and the slaughter still goes on. So it is said that the Prophet said in truth: The Hour will not come until the Muslim fights the Jews and kills them. . . . And whoever claims that there is a permanent peace between us and the Jews, then he has disbelieved from what has been sent down to Muhammad, and the battle is between us and the enemies of Islam, and that will go on until the Hour of Judgment. 12

. . . So we have not hesitated in the killing of the Jews who conquered the sanctuary of our Prophet (Al-Aqsa). . .The Jews, it appears to us and appears from the writing of the Prophet that we will have to fight them under that name and on this land in this blessed land which has the sanctuary of our prophet. . . . . . our duty is to fight whoever is in the trench of the Jews. America and the American people are free: they have entered the trench, and they will get what is coming to them. . . . The Jewish lobby has taken America and the West hostage. 13 Q: If America got out of Saudi Arabia and the Al-Aqsa Mosque was liberated, would you then present yourself for trial in some Muslim country? Bin Laden: If the Americans have charges against me, we too have a charge sheet against them. 14 Random quotations from bin-Laden O women kinfolk do not wear or use cosmetics or imitate the whores and mannish women of the West. Be a school that graduates men and mujahideen in the cause of God. 15 Bush the father, the ill-famed man, was the reason behind the killing of over one million children in Iraq, in addition to men and women. . . The Islamic nation has risen in the form of the Al-Aqsa uprising. . .the Jews have tried to escape to no avail. They have found no refuge

and have been totally exposed, even as they hide behind walls, facing exploding human bodies that make them taste death, that chase them with terror, and inflict a tremor on them so much that they have become like frightened asses fleeing from a lion. 16 Jihad will continue until the day of Resurrection.
17

Another form of the repeated forms of treason perpetrated by the rulers of the region against our causes in general and against the cause of Al-Aqsa in particular. 18 Boycott American and Jewish Products. Kill the Americans and Jews with a bullet or a knife or stone. . .Support the mujahideen and stand behind them, strengthen them, and pray for them. 19

For the man who flew a plane into the Pentagon. . . Hani Hanjor, from Al-Taif, the destroyer of the center of U.S. defense, the Pentagon. Clear purity and a splendid sacrifice. We beseech God to accept him as a martyr. 20 The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price and pay heavily for it 21 Messages to the American people . . . With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Under the protection of your weapons, Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque to pollute

it as a preparation to capture and destroy it. 22. . . We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and trading with interest. . .We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in, that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread among you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached . . . The Jews have taken control of your economy through which they have then control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense. 23 . . . Such are the Jews who believe in the core of their religion that all people are their slaves, and whoever refuses is punishable by death 24 To his own Mujahideen . . . On that blessed Tuesday (Sept 11), the Zionist American alliance was still using American tanks and planes and Jewish hands to rape the lives of our sons and our people in the land of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque 25 . . . We fight those who fight us and chop off their heads with our sword. . . . . . My message to you concerns inciting and continuing to urge jihad to repulse the grand plots that have been hatched against our Islamic nation. . . with the help of the apostates, under the trick of weapons of mass

destruction. There is also the fierce attempt to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque in beloved Palestine. Speaking about history: When our adherence to our religion weakened and our rulers became corrupt, we became weak and the Romans returned by waging their infamous Crusaders wars. They occupied the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but after ninety years we regained our strength when we returned to our religion. Thus, with the help of God we regained the Al-Aqsa Mosque at the hands of a wise leader. . .The leader was Saladin, may God bestow his mercy on him. 26 It should be clear that bin Laden is an incredible anti-Semite whose interest in the Al-Aqsa Mosque was a consummate fixation. There is a rather direct connection between September 11th and the capture of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by the infidel Israelis in 1967. This fact stings as one of bin Ladens most painful psychic wounds. Also on his mind, however, was the U.S. embargo on Iraq which he alleges killed a million Iraqi children. This provided him a sweet eye-for-an-eye theology to justify the revenge killing of children. Fact-checking on this issue, an economic embargo against Iraq did indeed commence in 1990 after it invaded Kuwait and continued until 2003. During that time of hardship, per capita income fell precipitously and some 220,000 excess deaths of young children occurred; certainly appalling, but far less than bin-Ladens tirades.27 With respect to his denunciation of Western praetorian government, corruption, gambling, and promiscuity, his lofty

idealism was felled by a rather considerable stash of pornography found in his quarters, 28 plus the fact that in the compound where he was killed he was sleeping with three women and taking aphrodisiac syrup to enhance his performance. As he pontificated that women should not use cosmetics, his own vanity was regularly manicured by dying his beard. No one knows the exact number of jihadists who belong to bin Ladens Al-Qaeda. The best estimate is that our bin-Laden wing houses several thousand individuals with the same delusory system of bin-Laden and his affection toward violence. 29 Al-Qaedas reach extends from Central Asia into Africa and as far as Indonesia with affiliates in Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Kenya, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Spain, Egypt, Yemen, and Uganda. 30 It is a Sunni organization and has connections with other extremist groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the harakat ulMujahidin.31 We are admitting all members of Al-Qaeda into our ward, and that includes its interim leader, Saif al-Adeter. We now move on to the next section of the fundamentalist wing of our asylum reserved for Mahdists.

The Mahdist ward

Christianity has its End-of-Days adherents who talk about the Tribulation, the Rapture, and the second coming of Jesus. Islam has a similar end-of-days scenario. The names are different, but there are remarkable similarities too.

Not all Christians are card-carrying believers in the End-ofdays story. It is unknown what percentage of Muslims believe in the eschatological drama either. There is little mention of this topic in the Koran, but there are other books which Muslims consult. One is the Sunna which includes hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) and Sirat (biographical) literature. The end-of-times plot in Islam is thought to be mythological, but some fundamentalists take these matters very much to heart. There are two types of signs signaling the end of days, Minor and Major. They differ between Shia vs. Sunni Islam, but here are the generic highlights: An Anti-Christ figure emerges called the Dajjal. Imam Mahdi (The awaited one) arrives on the scene after terrible catastrophes, chaos, destruction, and war. Prophet Jesus (Esa) comes. The Sun rises from West instead of East Gog and Magog appear (supernatural beings or beasts) Smoke appears widespread. The Minor signs are summarized below:
32

Books will be widespread; adultery and fornication will be common; intoxicants will be consumed. There will be much killing; Muslims will go hungry; children will be filled with rage and disrespect. Children will fornicate. Wealth will be shared only among the rich; miserliness will be common. There will be acid rain. People will be disrespectful in mosques. Women will walk in the market place with their thighs exposed. Great

distances will be traversed in short spans of time. Women singers will be common. People will dance late into the night. People will believe in the stars. Charity will decrease. Smog and earthquakes will increase. There will be many false prophets. Lying will become widespread. Family ties will be cut; women of childbearing age will no longer give birth. Men will begin to look like women and vice versa. Starting to sound familiar! The most anticipated and central sign is the coming of a man known as The Mahdi, also called The Guided One, the Lord of the Age, or The Awaited Savior. The Mahdi is one of the early major signs. Mahdi is the messiah or savior, and equivalent to the Jewish Messiah and the Christian return of Jesus. The Mahdi will be a descendant of Muhammads daughter, Fatimah. He will ride upon a white horse, fight against the enemies of the Muslims, set up a new world order based on justice and righteousness and will invade all the places between East and West. The Mahdis ascendancy to power is preceded by an army from the East carrying black flags. These are said to come from the area of Khorasan generally thought to be either Central Asia or Iran. He will be the ruler of the world, the caliph of Islam, and of course, will preside over and reign from you guessed itJerusalem, and the Temple Mount. As one Muslim said to Joel Richardson, author of The Islamic Antichrist You Americans and

The Mahdi should be 40 years old and descended from Muhammeds wife (Fatima). Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese Sufi sheikh, (above) created a state, the Mahdiyah, on the basis of his own claim to be the Mahdi in 1881

Zionists better get ready, because the black flags are coming! Muhammed said Armies carrying black flags will come from Khorasan. No power will be able to stop them and they will finally reach Eela [Baitul Maqdas in Jerusalem] where they will erect their flags. [Baitul Maqdas means the Dome of the Rock.] Egyptian author Muhammad ibn Izzat says it more venomously: The Mahdi will be victorious and eradicate those pigs and dogs and the idols of this time so that there will once more be a caliphate based on prophet hood as the hadith states. . . Jerusalem will be the location of the rightly guided caliphate and the center of Islamic rule which will be headed by Imam al-Mahdi. . . That will abolish the leadership of the Jews and put an end to the domination of the Satans who spit evil in to people and cause corruption in the earth, making them slaves of false idols and ruling the world by laws other than the Sharia of the Lord of the worlds. 33 The Mahdi will perform miracles and rediscover the Ark of the Covenant. He walks on stage after a great period of turmoil and suffering closely akin to the Tribulation for Christians. He will make a seven-year peace treaty with a Jew of priestly lineage, but then will conquer Israel for Islam and lead the faithful in a final

slaughter of the Jews. The Mahdi will rule for seven years and redistribute enormous amounts of wealth. Many Christians believe the Mahdi is a close rendering of the Antichrist. The Islamic Antichrist figure, however is different. He is called the Dajjal who comes to power over the world. He will be able to heal the sick and have amazing powers. The Dajjal is blind in his right eye and is said to have the word infidel (kaafir) written between his eyes or on his forehead, but only believers will be able to see it. If a Muslim memorizes the first ten verses of Surat al Kahf, the Dajjal will not be able to harm him. The Dajjal, as you can probably surmise, will be Jewish, and the bulk of the Dajjals army will be recruited from the Jews. According to one Palestinian scholar: The Jews await the false Jewish messiah, while we await with Allahs help. . .the Mahdi and Jesus, peace be upon him. Jesus pure hands will murder the false Jewish messiah. Where? In the city of Lod, in Palestine. Palestine will be, as it was in the past, a graveyard for the invaders. 34 Jesus, named Esea by Muslims, returns as an ally of the Mahdi, and as his subordinate. Jesus will visit Muhammads grave and salute Muhammad. Jesus will actually destroy Christianity and establish Sharia law throughout the entire earth. He will remain on earth for roughly forty years. His primary responsibility will be to kill the Dajjal. Jesus will kill

not only kill him, but also all of the Dajjals followers most of whom will be Jews. The Dijjals followers, the Yahudis, will number seventy thousand. Then Hadra Isa honorable Jesuskills the Dajjal at the Gate of Hudd, near an Israeli airport in the valley of Ifiq. The final war between the Yahudis will ensue and the Muslims will be victorious. 35 As one young sheik opined: It is all written in the Koran. The Koran says that Allah will allow the Jews to return to Palestine. I know this to be Allahs plan from Allah himself: He will bring all the Jews to one place and kill them.36 !The twelfth imam As we review this violent eschatology, one remaining item needs mentioning, the Shia belief in the hidden Imam, or the twelfth iman. As the story goes, many years after Mohammeds death there was a line of succession from his wife, Fatimas family. !! The !e!l!e!v!e!n!t!h! !S!h!i!'!a! !I!m!a!m! !H!a!s!a!n! !a!l!-!A!s!k!a!r!i! !d!i!e!d! !o!n! !1! !J!a!n!u!a!r!y! !8!7!4! !A!D! . . .!a!n!d! !s!i!n!c!e! !t!h!a!t! !d!a!y!,! !hi!s! !s!o!n! ! !M!a!h!d!i! !i!s! !b!e!l!i!e!v!e!d! !b!y! !S!h!i!'!a!s! !t!o! !b!e! !t!h!e! !I!m!a!m!,! !a!p!p!o!i!n!t!e!d! !b!y! !A!l!l!a!h!,! !t!o! !l!e!a!d! !t!h!e! !b!e!l!i!e!v!e!r!s! !o!f! !t!h!e! !e!r!a!.! !T!h!e! !m!o!s!t! !p!o!p!u!l!a!r! !a!c!c!o!u!n!t! !o!f! !a!l!-!M!a!h!di! !i!n! !S!h!i!'!a! ! !l!i!t!e!r!a!t!u!r!e! i!s! !t!a!k!e!n! !f!r!o!m! !h!i!s! !f!a!t!h!e!r!'!s! !f!u!n!e!r!a!l!.! ! !

I!t! !i!s! !r!e!p!o!r!t!e!d! !t!h!a!t! !a!s! !t!h!e! !f!u!n!e!r!a!l! !p!r!a!y!e!r! !w!a!s! !a!b!o!u!t! !t!o! !b!e!g!i!n!,! !a!l!-!M!a!h!d!i!'!s! !u!n!c!l!e!,! !J!a!f!a!r! !i!b!n! !A!l!i! !a!p!p!r!o!a!c!h!e!d! !t!o! !l!e!a!d! !t!h!e! !p!r!a!y!e!r!s!.! !H!o!w!e!v!e!r!,! !a!l!-!M!a!h!d!i! !a!p!p!r!o!a!c!h!e!d! !a!n!d! !c!o!m!m!a!n!d!e!d!,! !"!M!o!v!e! !a!s!i!d!e!,! !u!n!c!l!e!;! !o!n!l!y! !a!n! !I!m!a!m! !c!a!n! !l!e!a!d! !t!h!e! !f!u!n!e!r!a!l! !p!r!a!y!e!r! !o!f! !a!n! !I!m!a!m!.!"! !J!a!f!a!r! !m!o!v!e!d! !a!s!i!d!e!,! !a!n!d! !t!h!e! !f!i!v!e!-!y!e!a!r!-!o!l!d! !c!h!i!l!d! !l!e!d! !t!h!e! !f!u!n!e!r!a!l! !p!r!a!y!e!r! !f!o!r! !h!i!s! !f!a!t!h!e!r!.!. . .I!t! !i!s! !r!e!p!o!r!t!e!d! !t!h!a!t! !i!t! !w!a!s! !a!t! !t!h!i!s! !v!e!r!y! !m!o!m!e!n!t! !t!h!a!t! !a!l!-!M!a!h!di! !d!i!s!a!p!p!e!a!r!e!d! ! !a!n!d! !w!e!n!t! !i!n!t!o! !g!h!a!y!b!a!t!,! !o!r! !o!c!c!u!l!t!a!t!i!o!n. 37 The twelfth Imam has been in virtual hiding ever since, and the twelvers as they are called, represent a Shia cult who believe the twelfth imam will be coming out of hiding very soon, indeed in our lifetime. Hes been hiding for a smidgeon over a millennium, but the sect of twelvers believe their Mahdis reappearance is just around the corner. There are a few wannabe Mahdis throughout history:38

Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese, declared himself to be the Mahdi in June 1881. Mizra Ghulam Ahmad said he was the Mahdi in British India in 1889. Muhammad bin Abdallah Al-Qahtani was proclaimed to be the Mahdi by his brother-in-law who led over 200 militants to seize the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Three hundred people were killed.

We will now take a closer look at the Mahdists who populate our asylum.

Mahdi mania Children grow up believing in the tooth fairy, or Peter Pan, and as we mature, fungible mythologies often morph into religious myths of one variety or another. The professions of psychology and psychiatry by most standards are quite young and certainly not in such an arrogant position to deem people who believe in these a sundry mythologies as insane. What tops the scales in favor of mental disorder, however, is when these ideas spill into reality and become so deeply entrenched that they are not only delusory but are ideas that represent imminent danger either to the people who hold them or to others. One candidate is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad is a Mahdist, a fervent follower and devotee of the violent rhetoric of Ayatollah Khomeini, and a person who believes that he has spoken to the Mahdi, our missing five year-old. On top of that, like Andrea Yates, he has received instructions from the Mahdi. Even conservative Iranian clerics have been critical of Ahmadinejad bellowing about the Mahdi. They say he ought to be concentrating on Irans high unemployment and inflation rates and not on end-time fixations. 39 Ahmadinejad does not merely believe these things, however. He acts on his beliefs in very concrete ways. Here are a few examples:

 He set up an institute in Iran for the study and dissemination of information about the Mahdi. It employs a staff of 160.40 When Ahmadinejad was Mayor of Tehran he turned cultural centers into prayer halls, required male city employees to have beards, instituted separate elevators for men and women, and ordered the preparation of a detailed plan for the Mahdis arrival including his route through Tehran. He donated $17 million of government money to the Jamkaran Mosque, home of the Well of Request. This is the exact spot where the Mahdi had been seen previously in history. All of Ahmadinejads cabinet signed a written pledge of loyalty to the Mahdi and the pledge was then dropped into the well at the Jamkaran Mosquethere to be received by the Mahdi 41

Son of a blacksmith, Ahmadinejad scored well in his Iranian entrance exams and earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering. Quickly, he became a devotee of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He is a Shia, married, and has two sons.

He created a hotline and a radio show about the latest develops portending the Mahdis coming. Plans have been drawn up for a direct train connection from Tehran to the Jamkaran Mosque to facilitate the Mahdis travels after he arrives.

 The Hojjatieh Society is a clandestine, mystical group built around the cult of the Mahdi. To some the Hojjatieh are Islam's version of a lunatic fringe end time group like David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. . . They believe that chaos, even purposefully caused by the faithful, is a necessary condition for the Mahdis return. 42 Ahmadinejad has appointed Hojjatieh faithful to his cabinet and throughout the Iranian bureaucracy. His mentor is the ultra-orthodox radical called The Red Cardinal, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi. Yazdi heads the Ayatollah Khomeini Institute in Qom. Posted in the lobby of the institute is a board displaying the number of days since the Mahdi went into hiding. Yazdi, whom Akjadinejad calls Brother Samare, has a vicious hatred for Jews. When speaking in front of the United Nations in 2005, Ahmadinejad spoke in apocalyptic terms and ended his speech with a messianic appeal to God to hasten the emergence of your last repository, The Promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace. 43 Ahmadinejad saw himself as the messenger of God and believed that Gods hand transfixed the audience. . . he said that one of his colleagues had seen a glow of light around him. . .I felt it myself too. . . I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. . .and for the twenty seven to twenty eight minutes all the leaders did not blink. . . It is not an exaggeration because I was looking. . it seemed as if an unseen hand was holding them there and opened their eyes to receive the message from the republic. 44 In August 2004, upon his inauguration, Ahmadinejad said the real ruler of Iran was the Twelfth Imam and that government policy and decisions would be directed by the goal of hastening his coming. 45 Translation: the real

governing authority of Iran is a five year-old boy who has been missing for eleven centuries, and only his decisions will Ahmadinejad implement. Under Ahmadinejad Iranian state controlled television produced programs that depict Jews as using the blood of non-Jewish children to make Passover matzos. Other state-sponsored programs feature Jews who the kidnap non-Jewish children to steal their body parts; still others depict Jews as pigs and apes, or using images of the prophet Muhammad in voodoo ritualistic scenes. 46 Author Yossi Melman says But of all his convictions, he believes in the arrival of the Mahdi most fervently. . .Ahmadinejad will do what he can to make sure that happens, even if it means creating a crisis. 47 Our revolutions main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam he says. 48 Mark Hitchock reports that Ahmadinejad sent out a Christmas Card in 2006 saying he awaited the emergence of Jesus and the holy prophet Imam Mahdi to wipe away every tinge of oppression and agony from the face of the world. . . 49 Of course what he didnt say is that the Christians and Jews will have to die in order for this utopia to come into existence. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war, and bloodshed. . . After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace. 50 The elimination of Western imperialists and Israel will hasten the end.

To Joel Rosenberg Bottom line: the leaders of Iran are preparing for an apocalyptic war with the US and Israel. It not a question of if, but when. 51 Ahmadinejads rhetoric 52 Whether you like it or not, The Zionist regime is on the road to being eliminated 53 Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan. The United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will some come to an end of their lives. Israel is a contradiction to nature; we foresee its rapid disappearance and destruction. The Zionists are a group of bloodthirsty savages putting all other criminals to shame. Open the doors of Europe and let the Jews go back to their own countries. This regime that is occupying Jerusalem must be eliminated from the pages of history. Any nation that recognizes Israels existence will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation. Waller Newell says,

Unfortunately, whether mad or not, Ahmadinejad has a coherent ideological vision in which the call to wipe out Israel is no ordinary manifestation of antiSemitism. Instead it is the beckoning of an apocalyptic event that will usher in a millennium of bliss for all believers, indeed all mankind. Nuclear weapons are the indispensable means to this end since they are the most reliable way of exterminating the Jewish state. They are there not to be negotiated away in exchange for economic and security benefits. The revolution needs nuclear weapons to carry out its utopian mission. 54 Alireza Jafarzadeh writes With a nuclear arsenal, the Iranian regime can carry out its stated objective of wiping Israel off the map. 55 The bomb is their final storm to obliterate Israel. Their ticket to utopia. Their pathway to the Mahdis coming. 56 Ahmadinejad seems intent on furthering and hastening that ambition as much as possible. Other Shiite thinkers, by contrast, take a more fatalist stance, and prefer to believe that the Mahdis coming cannot be hastened by human activity a view that corresponds loosely to Iraqs Ayatollah Ali al-Sistanis position. 57 Ahmadinejad, of course, seeks to liberate Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa mosque, and the destruction of all Jews and the state of Israel will certainly spare the holy of holies, the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa. A curious footnote is that when Hezbollah in Lebanon was preparing for Ahmadinejads upcoming visit, they built a replica of the Al- Aqsa mosque directly on the Israeli-Lebanon border. 58

Hezbollahs Hassan Nasrallah Hassan Nasrallah served as the leader of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon since 1992. Nasrallah is a swashbuckler Shia Muslim who orchestrated attacks against the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and targets in Argentina, Africa, Sweden, and Thailand. He was the driving force behind the attacks in Israel in 2006. Since the end the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, Nasrallah has increased his anti-Israel rhetoric and issued numerous statements threatening the Jewish state. In the aftermath of the February 2008 car bombing in Syria that killed Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah comes from a Operations Chief Imad Lebanese family of 10 children. He is the graduate of a Shia Mughniyah, Nasrallah seminary in Baalbek. He has five stated that the children, one of whom he named assassination will result in Muhammad Mahdi Note the the "disappearance of the picture of the Dome of the Rock Jewish state" and declared on his scarf "open war" on Israel. The following month, Nasrallah told thousands of supporters that the "Zionist entity can be wiped out of existence." Nasrallah has also threatened that Hezbollah has rebuilt and improved its rocket and missiles arsenal and now has the capabilities to strike deep into Israel. Nasrallah is a believer in the Mahdi too and has organized children in Lebanon into The Imam al-Mahdi Scouts. The objective is to influence their hearts and minds and to take

part in the ultimate overthrow of Israel and the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. 59 Nasrallah completely rejects any compromise with Israel or any attempt to recognize its legitimacy. Resistance forces will ultimately triumph, he says. We will come out victorious and change the face of the region. The Israeli entity will disappear and American sovereignty over the world will vanish. 60 Nasrallah warns his followers that Israel is preparing to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah told the al-Manar television network on Wednesday night that "Israel is planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque." . . .There is no real dispute between Israel and the United States.' It's only a matter of time before the Jewish state turns Jerusalem into a Jewish city both in terms of its residents and in terms of the holy sites." 61 More of Nasrallahs rhetoric. 62 Here are a few Nasrallahisms along with some of the worst anti-Semitic rhetoric you may have encountered: The Zionist entity is not legitimate and will not be legitimate in any situation. The Gaza war proved that Israel is the enemy of the world of Islam. In front of the Zionist entity that is based on spilling the blood of the innocent and committing massacres. . . Israel is our enemy and the enemy of our nation. It will remain as such even if some make peace with it Northern Israel will burn as Gaza is burning.
The Imam al-Mahdi Scouts

Could Israel be wiped out of existence? Yes, and a thousand times yes! What do the Jews want? They want security and money. Throughout history the Jews have been Allah's most cowardly and avaricious creatures. If you look all over the world, you will find no one more miserly or greedy than they are."63 Nasrallah referred to Israel as "the state of the grandsons of apes and pigs the Zionist Jews" and condemned them as "the murderers of the prophets."64 Our weapons, our blood, and our rockets are all yours [the Palestinians], too, and we will we stay with you until we can pray with you at the Al-Aqsa mosque in united Jerusalem, capital of all of Palestine!" Hezbollah is far more than just rhetoric. In 2011 a Jewish settler family of five was stabbed to death. The likely culprits were led by the chief security officer of Hezbollah, Imad Mughniyeh. 65 Palestinian Islamic Jihad The Palestinian Islamic Jihad was created in the 1970s and continued in Gaza until it was exiled to Lebanon in 1987. It is religious in orientation and dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel and the foundation of an Islamic Palestinian state. In 1989 it moved to Damascus where it has its headquarters and is financed by Syria and Iran. It is estimated to have close to a thousand members, suicide bombers, and volunteers at the ready. Polls reveal that some three percent of the Palestinian people are sympathetic with its objectives and tactics.66 Some names associated with it are Fathi Shaqaqi (deceased), Mahmoud Tawallbe, Ali Sefoori, and Tabeth Mardawi.

Its military wing is called the Al Quds Brigade ( Jerusalem Brigade). It is probably the most active and successful terrorist group operating. Its attacks are legion: fourteen people on a bus in Israel, nine Israelis tourists killed in Egypt, a car bomb aboard a public bus in Israel killing nine, a suicide bombing near Netanya killing eighteen soldiers, another on a bus near Netzarim killing eight Palestinian Islamic Jihads people, a suicide bombing in a talisman showing two fists, Tel Aviv shopping mall which the Dome of the Rock, and the killed twenty, a suicide attack in map of Islamic Palestine Tel Aviv night club killing twenty (which includes all of present day Israel). one people, a car bomb in Jerusalem which killed two people, a suicide bomber near Nazareth who killed seven people on a bus, and another eighteen killed in Meggido.

Its intent, like that of Hezbollah and Ahmadinejad, is to liberate all of Palestine, establish an Islamic state which will conform to Sharia law, liberate the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque and, of course, await the Mahdis return. Estimates of the population of the Fundamentalist ward If we include all of Al-Qaeda, and a significant fraction of the followers of Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Mahdi-mania fundamentalists in Iran, the potential inmates to house is large indeed. One attempt has been made by an Indian scholar, Dr. Sharma who reviewed polling data in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and

attempted an estimate of the number of jihadists available to give their lives to the cause of Islamic fundamentalism. His interesting analysis winnows down the number in an intelligent manner, and he concludes that there are 1.8 million actual Islamic jihadists today. He cautions, however, that if some event occurred like the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, that number could jump one hundred fold almost instantaneously.67 According to Jeffrey Goldberg the Temple Mount and the Dome of the rock is the most explosive piece of real estate on the planet68 so any destruction in those thirty-five acres or its holy sights could easily unleash a torrent of psychotic holy warriors. In an attempt to be conservative in our estimates, we will take half of Dr. Sharmas analysis and conclude that 900,000 fundamentalist Islamic jihadistsmostly Mahdimaniacs, but some Al-Qaedistasqualify for admission to our asylum. Virtually all are male and frenzied enough to commit wholesale carnage. There are others we could house in our asylum, notable among them are the Al Aqsa brigades of the PLO, but we will address these more secular movements later. For now the fundamentalist wing of our asylum only includes these dangerous patients here. A note about collective insanity. The patients who belong here number in the thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands. They are extreme and delirious fundamentalists who suffer from a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism and Mahdi-mania and are seething with vicious and murderous hatred. Consider how these movements metastasize. One Dr. Khaled from Egypt writes what appears to be religious book, on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a book written in English for Muslims. It

even appears to be a tourist book on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but no sooner does one begin this treatise before being taken by surprise at the vitriolic anti-Semitism that spews out of this fundamentalist Mahdist: It also brings to mind the sad era during which the mosque fell into the hands of the filthy, impure crusaders . . .until it was taken captive in our time at the hands of a handful of Jews, the brothers of monkeys and swine, who have incurred the Wrath of Allah, and are cursed in the Quran and Sunnah of His Messenger (peace be upon him). 69 On the end times he writes of the one-eyed Dajjal: The coming of the anti-Christ, the one-eyed fake, and his demise at the hands of Jesus (peace be upon him) who will descend from the heavens and kill him, and then the great massacre and final finishing off the accursed Jews when even the trees and stones will cry out for Muslims to kill the Jews hiding behind them. 70 Note the dysgenic themes of contamination and purification so characteristic of the mentally ill: There will come a day when Al-Aqsa Mosque will be freed. . . and purified from the stain of the accursed Jews.71 He will besiege the believers in (Jerusalem) till they are horribly frightened, then Allah Most High will destroy him and his soldiers to the extent that walls and roots of trees will call saying O Muslim! or O Believer! This is a Jew or a disbeliever, come and kill him.72 So, the late bin-Laden, Akhadinejhad, and Nasrallah are really merely the flotsam and jetsam of a vortex of

fundamentalist insanity that includes thousands of inmates caught in the grip of this gathering psychosis. Consider yet another one of our less-than-famous inmates: Yunis al Astal, a member of the Palestinian Authority parliament, spelled out his organization's vision for the genocidal annihilation of the Jewish people in a television interview last week. The interview was broadcast on Hamas. . .Al Astal described the ingathering of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in terms of a divine plan that would give the Arabs "the honor" of annihilating "the evil of this gang. . . In a few years' time, he predicted, the Zionists will understand that they were brought here for the purpose of being slaughtered in "a great massacre." . . Using Hitleresque language, he said that the Jews are more dangerous than all of the world's lethal birds of prey, dangerous reptiles, and lethal bacteria combined.73 Four concluding insights. We will continue our investigation into this powder keg in our next few chapters, but there are four concepts that need to be brought out of this exercise because they really represent American misperceptions on this issue. (1) 9/11 had much more to do with Israel and its occupation of the holy places of Islam and Al-Aqsa than most Americans recognize. (2) The idea that negotiated truce between five million Israelis and five million Palestinians is all that needs to be accomplished is absurd. Ahmadinejhad, bin-Laden, and Nasrallah are not Palestinians. Muslims all over the world have a deep interest in the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa, or what they call the farthest Mosque, and 1.5 billion people have deep emotional claims herenot merely five million Palestinians.

Any two-state solution that does not give sovereignty over Al-Aqsa to the Muslims would appear chimerical. The idea that placing the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa only under Islamic administrationthrough the Waqfwhile still under Israeli sovereignty is flawed to its core. To hundreds of thousands of radicalized, fundamentalist Muslims both inside and outside of Palestine, the governance of their holy and beloved Noble Sanctuary is left in the hands of polytheists, accursed Jews, atheists, and infidels. As long as that situation continues, there will always be a pressing need to liberate Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa from all of these imagined, unconscious, irrational monsters. This emotional complex infects hundreds of thousands of individuals and will fester as long as this external situation continues as it is. (3) There is a nascent collective hysteria waiting to be unleashed for which most westerners have little appreciation. Rumors and canards can escalate tensions and precipitate outbreaks of violence at any minute. The idea that Israelis are digging tunnels under the Dome of the Rock and trying to destroy it or destabilize it has given one Palestinian mayor reason to call his annual AlAqsa is in danger rally. 74 We are deeply unaware of the volatility of this hysteria, irrationality and herd behavior. (4) The fundamentalist belief in the End Times and Mahdimania is deeply misperceived in the West if it is known at all. The Iranian Broadcasting company reminds its audience that the Mahdi is coming, that he could be here during the Spring equinox, and that . . . the world is now in its "last days." It claims that the Mahdi will first appear in Mecca, and then Medina. He will conquer all of Arabia, Syria, Iraq, destroy Israel, and then set up a "global government" 75 There is an anticipatory mania which smolders under this

issue. It is nursed and reinforced daily by the inmates in our asylum, and like volcanic magma, it does not recede but seems to rise ever closer to the surface with each passing hour. To writer Gershom Gorenberg: Among Muslims, expectation of the final Hour helps feed exaggerated fears about Israels actions in Jerusalem. Belief in the approaching End has influenced crucial events in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Time and again, it has been the rationale behind apparently irrational bloodshed, and undermined efforts at peacemaking. In the worst case, desire for historys finale has the potential to spark all-out war in the Middle East. 76

Endnotes

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-07/world/muslim.world.population_1_god-but-god-middle-eastdistant?_s=PM:WORLD 2 http://thinkexist.com/quotes/karen_armstrong/ 3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/mar/10/religion-islam 4 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/05/taliban-bans-education-for-girls-in-pakistans-swat/ 5 Brad Berner, Jihad: Bin Laden in his own Words, 2006 location 6603 6 http://trueslant.com/arsalaniftikhar/2009/12/14/holy-jihad-batman-al-qaeda-offers-condolences/ 7 Chehab, Ibid, location 2304 8 Berner, Ibid. location 2815 9 Berner, Ibid., location 2853 10 Berner, Ibid, locaion 2867 11 Berner, Ibid., location 2881 12 Berner, Ibid., location 3155 13 Berner, Ibid., location 3597 14 Berner, Ibid., location 3618 15 Berner, Ibid., location 3827 16 Berner, Ibid. location 4196 17 Berner, Ibid., location 4221 18 Berner, Ibid., location 4220 19 Berner, Ibid., location 4291 20 Berner, Ibid., location 4355 21 Berner, Ibid., location 4423 22 Bernert, Ibid., location 4470 23 Bernert, Ibid., location 4562 24 Bernert, Ibid., location 5046 25 Bernert, Ibid., location 5150 26 Bernert, Ibid., location 6224 27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions 28 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-porn-.html 29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda 30 Scott Shane, Signs of leadership void as Al-Qaeda pushes on. New York Times, May 13, 2011, p. A6. 31 http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/terrorist-groups.cfm 32 http://etori.tripod.com/dajjalsystem/satanicreverses.html 33 Joel Richardson, Ibid., location 373. 34 Cited in Richardson, Ibid, location 848 35 Richardson, Ibid., location 697 36 David New, Ibid, p. 166 37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_imam 38 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi 39 http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9466854). 40 Bernert, Ibid, location 61 41 Bernet, Ibid., location 608 42 Bernet, Ibid., location 673. 43 http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/afp/ahmadinejad.htm 44 Ibid., location 593 45 Ibid., location 694 46 Ibid., location 957 47 http://es1982.blogspot.com/2009/12/ahmadinejad-us-trying-to-prevent-mahdis.html 48 ttp://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/ 49 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Showdown-Nuclear-Iran-Radical-Messianic/dp/1595550755 50 Ibid., location 628 51 http://www.econrates.com/threats/lastdays.html 52 Quotes from this secftion come from Bernet, Ibid location 800-1000.

53 54

Bernet, Ibid., location 806 Bernet Ibid., location 1080 55 Ibid., location 1135 56 Mark Hitchcock, Ibid., location 945 57 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/magazine/29islam.html?pagewanted=6 58 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3964235,00.html 59 http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hezbollah_scouts_e.htm 60 http://www.adl.org/main_terrorism/hezbollah_overview.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_7 61 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3870479,00.html 62 Quotations in this section are from: http://www.adl.org/main_terrorism/hezbollah_overview.htm?MGersom ulti_page_sections=seading_7 63 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Nasrallahhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Nasrallah 64 Ibid. 65 http://www.jpost.com/Headlines/Article.aspx?id=211909 66 http://www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East-Encyclopedia/palestinian_islamic_jihad.htm 67 http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/65537 68 David New, Ibid, p. 8. 69 Khalid Al Amry, Ibid., location 42. 70 Khalid, Ibid., location 50 71 Khalid AlAmry, The Al Aqsa Mosque, Cairo: Dar-El Farouk publishers, 2010. location 68 72 Ibid, location 304 73 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144283 74 See also http://www.dflp-palestine.org/english/statements/plo-al-aqsa_mosque_in_severe_danger.htm 75 http://www.econrates.com/threats/lastdays.html 76 Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the struggle for the Temple Mount, New York: Simon & Schuster,2000 (location 71)