Vital Perspective

The cult of the Twelfth Imam

MEMRI has an excellent synopsis of Mahdism, a must read for those seeking to understand events in Iran.

"According to Shi’ite tradition, the Twelve Imams, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali Ibn Abi Talib, were endowed with divine qualities that enabled them to lead the Shi’ite believers and to function as Allah’s emissaries on earth. However, when the Twelfth Imam Muhammad Al-Mahdi disappeared in 941 CE, his connection with the Shi’ite believers was severed, and since then, the Shi’ites are commanded to await his return at any time..."  Read the whole thing.

"Immediately upon assuming the presidency, Ahmadinejad began to assert his belief in the imminent return of the Mahdi as the basis for his political activities. Despite the traditional belief that no one can foresee the hour of the Mahdi’s return, Ahmadinejad frequently stated that his coming was nigh, and even gave a more specific prediction.

Also: A big roundup on Iran's energy sector and its efforts to make sanctions irrelevant here.

Companies doing business with sponsors of terror

Thanks to Judith for pointing this out.  The SEC publishes a list of companies that do business with state sponsors of terror .Of course, our so-called friends the Saudis, oil tick sponsors of Wahhabi Islam and Islamist terror, aren't considered a state sponsor of terror by our government, so companies that do business with them aren't listed.  But this list is useful anyway. You can make a difference with your investment decisions and purchase choices - for maximum impact let the companies know why you are taking your business elsewhere.

Companies that do business with Iran

Companies that do business with Sudan

Companies that do business with Syria

Companies that do business with North Korea

UPDATE: Well, look at our spineless political class: Congressional pressure forced SEC to remove the above lists. SEC withdraws list linking companies to terrorism

Within the last week, both the chairman and the ranking Republican member of the House Financial Services Committee had written to the SEC criticizing the list. The chairman, Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, called the list "unfair and perhaps counterproductive." He said some companies "apparently have investments that are so negligible they could not be considered material either to investors or the economy of the terrorist financing state." The ranking Republican of the committee, Spencer Bachus of Alabama, said "this initiative appears to have been ill-conceived and poorly implemented."

Su-Shi Watch: Allah's brigade vs Al Quds

Car bomb blew up near a bus killing 18 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards (Shia, of course). The Sunni group Jund'Allah (soldiers of Allah), led by Abdul-Malik Rigi, a Balochi separatist group which has carried out previous attacks against the Mullahs regime, has claimed responsibility. Gateway Pundit has the details on this attack. Click here for more info on Jund'Allah and on the Iranian Balochistan, a majority Sunni region in Shia Iran.

UPDATE: Amir Taheri has more on the attack and Su-Shi tension in Iran. Excerpt:

The incident confirms [the mullahs] fears that they now have enemies that can use precisely their own tactics against them. Car bombs, fake uniforms and suicide attacks were introduced to the Middle East by Khomeinists first in Iran under the Shah and later in Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and as far away as Argentina by branches of Hezbollah. In the past three years, groups allied to Tehran have used the tactics against the new regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Khomeinist regime is having a taste of its own medicine, and is clearly panic-stricken by the experience. [...]

Iran's Baluch community, more than 2 million souls, is part of a 20 million-strong nation spread across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Oman and the Persian Gulf states. As Sunni Muslims, the Baluchi feel shut out of Iranian life that, since 1979, has been dominated by Shiite clerics. Under the Khomeinist constitution, no Sunni can run for president, let alone the office of "Supreme Guide." There are no Sunni Cabinet ministers, provincial governors, ambassadors, high court judges or directors of public corporations. Sunnis are not allowed to have their own schools and mosques outside areas where they form a majority.

Sunnis account for almost 12 percent of Iran's population of 70 million. The largest number is ethnic Kurds, about 4 million, followed by the Baluch, some 2 million, and the Turkoman, who number 1.8 million in the northeast. Sunnis also are in a majority in Talesh, on the Caspian Sea, and in parts of the coastline on the Persian Gulf. The capital, Tehran, is home to some 2 million Sunnis, who are, nevertheless, denied the right to have a mosque of their own.

The mullahs have rewritten all textbooks to reflect only the Khomeinist brand of Shiite Islamic theology, history and rituals. The registrar of birth does not allow newborn babies to be given typically Sunni names.

Under President Muhammad Khatami, a mid-ranking mullah, repression against Sunnis intensified. The only Sunni mosque in Mashad, the Iranian main " holy" city, was burned to the ground. Efforts to rebuild it have been blocked by the government since 2000. The Khatami presidency also witnessed the assassination of dozens of Sunni clerics in mysterious circumstances.

Since 1979, Iran has witnessed countless Sunni revolts, often crushed by force. But the Khomeinist regime has fomented sectarianism in Islam for more than a quarter of a century by inciting Shiite minorities against Sunni regimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait, among others. It is using Hezbollah to provoke a sectarian war in Lebanon. In Iraq, the Khomeinist regime is arming Shiite militias to attack the U.S.-led multinational force and undermine the new democratic regime.

The dramatic attack in Zahedan has shown that sectarianism is a game that others, too, can play.

Punish Shell

Royal Dutch Shell is not on our side in the War for the Free World. Last week, Shell announced that it has entered, with a Spanish oil company, Repsol, into a preliminary understanding to help the Iranian regime develop part of its vast South Pars natural gas reserve. This means a $10 billion investment in Iran. It also means a slap in the face to all of us who are working to undermine the genocidal regime in Tehran. If Shell decides to go forward with the deal the Mullas will get a shot in the arm that will only embolden them. Sadly, this comes at a time that the Iranian energy sector seems to be on the verge of collapse. Iran's oil minister Kazem Vaziri-Mamaneh has confirmed recently that the state's oil industry is suffering from an acute lack of investment. Shell's decision can overturn all that.

Shell is a test case of our resolve and it should realize that investing in Iran will carry severe consequences.

Frank Gaffney offers solutions: "The real power to punish Royal Dutch Shell for being against us in this War for the Free World should lie with American investors and consumers. The Roosevelt Anti-Terror Multi-Cap Fund (RATF) is the first mutual fund in the nation to be certified by the Conflict Securities Advisory Group as "terror-free." It holds in portfolio neither Shell nor any other publicly traded companies doing business in Iran, Sudan, Syria or North Korea. Nationwide Financial, E-Trade, Ameritrade and Schwab have begun offering RATF as an option on their investment platforms. [...] If you don't want to enrich those who are trying to kill us, insist that your money -- be it in public pension funds, 401(k) plans, mutual funds, life insurance portfolios, etc. -- is invested terror-free."

Gaffney, who runs the Divest Terror initiative offers another way to punish shell: "Whether you are an investor or not, you have another option: Show Shell how you feel about its dealings with our Iranian enemies by filling up your car at the pumps of one of its American competitors."

No matter what you feel about Exxon and Cheveron, at least they are not doing business with terrorist-sponsoring states. There are 3,000 Shell gas stations in the U.S. Make sure you fill up your tank elsewhere until Shell withdraws from the deal.

That explains it

Via Imshin, we have the following fascinating perspective regarding the Palestinian propensity to blow themselves up along with other people in the Asia Times:

It is repulsive to think that a people of several millions, honeycombed with representatives of international organizations, the virtual stepchild of the United Nations, appears doomed to reduce its national fever by letting blood. The 700,000 refugees of 1948, hothoused by the UN relief agencies, prevented from emigrating by other Arab regimes, have turned into a people, but a test-tube nation incapable of independent national life: four destitute millions of third-generation refugees in the small and barren territories of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, which cannot support a fraction of that number.

The project of a Palestinian economy based on tourism and light manufacturing is a delusion in the globalized economy of Chinese-dominated trade in manufactures. The subsistence-farming fellahin should have left their land for economic reasons, like the Okies during the 1920s and 1930s, and dispersed into cities, like a hundred other rural populations of the so-called developing world. Kept hostage for political reasons, they cannot stay, and they cannot leave. They have chosen instead to fight, and if need be to die.

The Palestinians cannot hope to earn their keep in peacetime; their only hope is to keep the region in perpetual tension, the better to blackmail the West and the Arab Persian Gulf states for subsidies. Voting for Hamas, in other words, was a rational choice on strictly economic grounds. Economics was an afterthought, though. Without a viable alternative, the Palestinians might as well choose the leadership that best flatters their national feeling. Now this balancing act has broken down, largely because Iran has disrupted the fragile equilibrium among Palestinian factions. By turning to Tehran for funding, Hamas has made itself an outlaw, and the West as well as Saudi Arabia has no alternative but to support violent means to reduce a democratically chosen majority party.

Article also has an interesting perspective on Carter.

Iran increases voting age from 15 to 18

Iran's latest decision to increase voting age from 15 to 18 tells us that Ahmadinejad's biggest fear is not the U.S. but his own restive youth.

Nearly three quarters of Iran's population is under the age of 30 but these youngsters make an unhappy lot. The rising generation of Iranian youth is more democratic, more liberal, more secular and more positively disposed toward the West than ever before. The future offered by the regime is bleak. The education system is largely inadequate or inappropriate to the modern age; unemployment is high, even before the next large cohort enters the job market; the economy is floundering.

By barring from voting almost 5 million Iranians between the ages of 15 and 18, many of them cast their ballot against him in local elections last month, causing him a humiliating defeat, Ahmadinejad hopes to fare better in the next legislative elections in February 2008, and the presidential ones in 2009. But be sure that when this youth reaches the new voting age they will not like Mr. Ahamadinejad and his ilk more than they do now. 

The coming Sunni-Shi'ite nuclear arms race

Gal Luft portrays an unsettling scenario of the face of things to come:

"As tension between Sunnis and Shi'ites mounts from Iraq to Lebanon another front is opening in the deepening strife between the two parts of the Muslim world: The race to acquire nuclear capabilities. Iran's uranium enrichment program en route to a Shi'ite bomb has already whetted the appetite of its Sunni neighbors to follow suit. The December meeting of the of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is a new milestone on the road to a Sunni Arab nuclear capability. In the meeting, GCC leaders decided on a joint program in the field of nuclear technology for "peaceful purposes". "Possessing nuclear technology […] has economic and scientific significance," the spokesman for the Council of Ministers explained. Two weeks later another Gulf country, Yemen, announced its aspirations to acquire nuclear technology. On the African side of the Middle East, Egypt and Algeria, two Sunni nations blessed with energy resources, have also declared their intension to pursue nuclear power. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak drew roaring applause when he announced in a November speech before a combined session of the People's Assembly and Shura Council that Egypt was not "in need of anyone's authorization to develop peaceful nuclear energy".

"What is at stake today is not just a nuclear Iran but a full blown nuclearization of the world's most dangerous region. With this in mind the U.S.' and Europe's strategy should go beyond just preventing Iran from acquiring nukes. As this battle may already be lost, the focus now should be on the next wave of nuclear hopefuls. This will require the development of a fresh set of carrots and sticks as well as a candid dialogue which includes not only Sunni Arabs who desire nukes but also Russia, China and Pakistan, the countries most likely to provide them with the technology they need to meet their ambitions.

As the world transitioned from the Cold War to the war on radical Islam former CIA director James Woolsey said: "We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." If subsequent to a failure to prevent a Shi'ite bomb comes another failure to prevent a Sunni bomb this unsavory jungle will be populated in no time with some of the worst of dragons."

The mother of all conspiracy theories

Every time a new Muslim conspiracy theory erupts we think they can't possibly get any nuttier. Each time we are proven wrong. This one would be hard to surpass though.

"Mohsen Rezai, Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin said that Hitler was Jewish, and that Hitler's policies were aimed at bringing about the establishment of a Jewish state. Ramin added that Hitler acted under the influence of his powerful Jewish associates and in cooperation with Britain, since the latter shared his desire to force the Jews out of Europe."

It is even more mindboggling that the harbinger of this theory, Mr. Ramin, was recently appointed secretary-general of the new "world foundation for Holocaust Studies" established at the Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference in December.

Ramin bases his theory on a book titled Adolf Hitler, Founder of Israel published by Hennecke Kardel, a German born in 1922 which "proves" that Hitler was Jewish, and that his grandmother was a Jewish prostitute. Hitler's father went by his mother's Jewish name until he was 40, and later changed his surname to Hitler.

Let's see that we got it right: Adolf Hitler decided to start a world war, invade Russia, kill 6 million brethern as well as tens of millions of non-Jews just so that he could lose the war, destroy his country, shoot himslef in the head, bring about the establishment of the UN that would, in turn, establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Simple right?

On the subject of Holocaust denial, one of the best books available is Denying History. Its analysis is equally valid when examining the 9/11 conspiracists psychosis.

Divest from Iran

No doubt the sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council in late December are too weak to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But, as the NY Times reports today, what could make a real difference is the oustanding job done by financial institutions and other private sector "street fighters" to cut ties with Iranian businesses and individuals beyond those involved in its nuclear and missile programs. The most notable of these efforts is Divest Terror organized by the Center for Security Policy in Washington. The results of the collective work are beginning to show. Last month, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation announced that it would not issue any new loans for Iranian projects until Iran resolved the nuclear impasse with the West. The Iranian economy is suffering a great deal as a result of the economic punishment. In a rare acknowledgment of difficulty, the Iranian oil minister, Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh, told the ministry’s news agency, Shana, recently that Iran was encountering obstacles in financing oil projects. “Currently, overseas banks and financiers have decreased their cooperation”. For the Iranian nuclear program death will only be caused by a thousand cuts.

Video: Brigitte Gabriel Discusses Radical Islam in Heritage Foundation Forum

Happy New Year to you all. Before we get too far into other activities, we thought we'd leave you with an excellent series of videos of Brigitte Gabriel discussing radical Islam at the Heritage Foundation. Gabriel is a Christian Lebanese-American journalist, author and activist. She is the founder of the American Congress For Truth, a conservative think tank. The videos will take just under an hour to go through.