The Iranian/Muslim Threat

The threat posed to the world by Iran continues to grow more serious, with two new developments.

First, Iran's most hard-line Islamic spiritual leaders have issued a holy order approving the use of atomic weapons against the country's enemies, calling into question the theocracy's traditional viewpoint that Shariah law forbids the use of nuclear weapons. One senior mullah has now said it is "only natural" to have nuclear bombs as a "countermeasure" against other nuclear powers, a reference considered to be the United States and Europe.

Second, the recent revelation of a seminar on suicide-bombing tactics at Tehran's Khajeh Nasir University by a group that claims its members are dedicated to becoming suicide bombers. A spokesman for "Esteshadion" (Martyrdom Seekers) warned the United States and Britain yesterday that they will strike coalition military bases in Iraq if Tehran's nuclear facilities are attacked. "With more than 1,000 trained martyrdom seekers, we are ready to attack the American and British sensitive points if they attack Iran's nuclear facilities," the spokesman said.

I’m a peace-loving guy, but I recognize that peace is, in the most optimistic of terms, a two-million-to-one long shot. Iran does not want peace if getting peace means it will not be able to develop nuclear weapons. That position may be construed to mean that Iran, which is run by militant Islamic clerics, intends to use nuclear weapons to impose Muslim doctrine of the rest of the world, which rejects Islam, and with greater and greater justification in view of recent fanatical behavior by Muslim fundamentalists in several countries.

I don’t consider myself a prophet, but I have been saying for several months that we are seeing the beginnings of a religious world war between Islam and everybody else. The mindless violence in response to anti-Muslim cartoons, which now has a Muslim/Christian element in Nigeria, is evidence of the growth and intensification of the lunatic Muslim fringe. In the eyes of Muslim fanatics, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, believers in other religions and believers in no religion at all are all the same, and are deserving of death.

Militant Islam is the greatest threat human beings have faced in all of history, greater than the threat of Hitler, or of imperial Japan, or of the Communists of the USSR, Korea or China. This is a greater threat than the relatively minor threat posed by a few individual ego-maniacs like Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Hirohito, it is a threat posed by more than 1.3 billion believers living all over the world, some of whom are convinced that their god has commanded them to rid the world of all who do not believe as they do, and have begun to act on those commands.