The world is presently at its most wicked. It is beyond human help. It requires only a nudge to implode and prepare for the divine ruler, the Saheb-ul-Zaman (the Mahdi, the Lord of the Age) to come and set it aright. It is the sacred duty and privilege of every Muslim to do all he can to hasten the death of the old world and the birth of the global Islamic Ummah. Thus goes the thinking of Iran’s ruling mullahs and their hand-picked president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It seems like the old millennialism thinking, a belief held, in one version or another by major religions. Indeed it is, with one terribly alarming difference.

This time around, a group of believers with tremendous resources are intent upon forcing the issue, making the conditions so dire that it leaves the reluctant Saheb-ul-Zaman no choice but to appear and assume his universal reign. The belief in supernatural intervention to set the world aright is scriptural to major religions, including Islam. The Jews have been earnestly supplicating the Lord for the Messiah to come; the Christians are impatiently awaiting the second coming of Christ; and, the Zoroastrians are convinced that Saoshayant is the one who shall come, defeat the trouble-making Ahriman—Satan—and make the creatures again pure. Up to this point millennialism was a belief and a hope. No one ever aspired to or had the means of making the anticipated events come about. The matter was in the hands of God. The Muslims’ perennial prayer recited every day, posted in mosques and even on bumpers of vehicles has been, “O, Saheb-ul-Zaman, hasten your coming.”

The prayer for the advent, thus far, has been limited to passive supplications of the faithful. It is a well-established fact that beliefs are potent impetus to action. If you believe your home is about to be burglarized, you secure the house and take other precautions. If you, under the influence of cocaine, believe that a bug is burrowing into your skin, you may take a knife to your own body and try to dig the imaginary bug out. Hence, it is shortsighted to dismiss the mullahs as a bunch of lunatics who are out of touch with reality and that they have no intention of doing catastrophic mischief to compel the Mahdi’s coming-- maybe some arming of the Iraqi Shiites, a little support for Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine—but no, no major idiocy. After all, they are rational people and in touch with reality. Any large scale troublemaking spells their doom as well. Thus goes the rationalization—the greatest risky tranquilizer of the mind. Rationalization, compounded by complacency and denial, can be deadly, particularly when the adversaries have different realities. To the fanatic mullahs ruling Iran Sahaeb-ul-Zaman is an absolute reality and his promised advent is irrevocably ordained. This is their reality and their belief and they have every intention of leading their life according to them. It is foolish for the non-Muslims to dismiss the mullahs and the Bin Ladens as a bunch of fringe lunatics who are going to go away simply by wishing it.

The Islamist reality is that the non-Muslims are the ones who deserve to be done away with; they are the ones who have refused to submit to the summons of Allah for much too long; and, it is time for the faithful to get rid of them. This makes for a lopsided contest. The non-Muslims are passively wishing that the nightmarish surge of Islamism is only a temporary fringe phenomenon doomed to die on its own, while the other side is marshaling its huge destructive power to accomplish its aim by eradicating the non-Muslims. The cabal of fanatical mullahs ruling Iran has lost its patience, not only with the unbelievers, but also with the Mahdi as well. They aim to force his arrival. The mullahs believe they have the means to make it impossible for the Mahdi to tarry any longer by causing unprecedented death and destruction—conditions deemed essential for his coming. The world must hit the very bottom, before the Savior of the world comes to the rescue, so they firmly believe. The question is: What does prudence demand? Clearly wishing the problem to go away is not a very effective solution in the same way that wishing for the Saheb-ul-Zaman to come has not been. Reasoning and negotiating with the mullahs and their ilk hold very little, if any, lasting promise. There are always the easy ways of denial and appeasement. We are very good at both practices. No, the Muslims have been around for ages. They make some trouble from time to time. But they really are not all that bad and dangerous. We’ll get along. If we have too, we’ll even let them live by the Sharia—their stone-age laws— in our midst. We’ll be reasonable and they will come around. We’ll just have to get along. So goes the line. One problem: The other side doesn’t think this way. The Islamofascists don’t believe in the notion of “Live and let live.” They believe that the earth is Allah’s and it has been sullied by the heathens, the unbelievers and the kafir for far too long. Now that they have the means, they aim to make the world to their design and bring about the final solution—a nasty reminder of not too long ago Nazism. Is this alarmist, or even hatemongering? You don’t believe Muslims can be that intolerant and hostile toward non-Muslims and that they’ll never go to the extremes? You know Muslims personally in your neighborhood or your work place and they are nice people? The nice Muslims you personally know are presently small minorities in alien lands. They have to be nice, and they may indeed be nice. Yet, when the main force of Islam surges forward, these nice folks will either have to join it or be swept aside like the rest of the resisters. The concern is not with individual Muslims who live as solid citizens in democratic societies. They may have developed a taste for the freedom democracy bestows or have simply learned to tolerate it.

Our concern is with the gathering Islamic storm from the heart of Islamdom. To truly appreciate Islam, you must experience firsthand Islam in power. Take a quick trip to the lands of the Muslims and find out for yourself how horribly they treat the non-Muslims, even the, “People of the book,” Jews and Christians. Try to have a Bible study group or build a church in Saudi Arabia and discover the benevolence of Islamic rule. The world is a laboratory where the experiment with Islam shows irrefutable results. To the extent that Islam rules any society, that society is stagnant, backward thinking, repressive and violent. The Islamic Republic of Iran represents the cutting edge for the newly petrodollar invigorated Islam. It is determined to complete its task of ending the world of “Dar-ul-Harb”—the non-Muslim world to be warred upon—and establishing the “Dar-ul-Solh,” or “Dar-ul-Salam”—the Muslim world of the Ummah under the rule of the Mahdi. If achieving this aim hinges on the conflagration of the Third World War, the mullahs are happy to make it happen