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Are we all heading for Judgment Day? Do we need to prepare for Armageddon? Whether you believe it or not, some very powerful people are doing everything they can to bring about the end of the world. It might come sooner than we think if recent events in North Africa are any indication. Last week, the region erupted in violent protests over the YouTube posting of an amateurish movie portraying the Prophet Muhammad as a homosexual, a child molester and a religious fraud.
There is a clash of civilizations ensuing right now, a war between cultures being waged before the world’s media. It has been raging for 2,000 years with no let up, and there are some very well-funded agents provocateurs working behind the scenes to set up the final conflict between good and evil.
Religious zealots of all stripes — be they Christians, Jews or Muslims — want to destroy our secular society and impose their beliefs on the rest of us, whether we like it or not. Some of them want to provoke a global holocaust. Case in point: the producers of the deeply offensive anti-Islam movie, “The Innocence of Muslims.”
After 9/11, an irrational fear of Muslims became a unifying force behind the political philosophy of right-wing extremists like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rick Santorum, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) and others. Their shrill diatribes against Islam reek of hypocrisy. When these demagogues talk about freedom of religion, what they really mean is the freedom to cram their own simple-minded religious beliefs down your throat.
The people who want to make America a “Christian nation” are just as dangerous as those who wish to impose sharia law or any other state-sponsored religion. Separation of church and state is one of the key tenets of our democracy. It must be strictly enforced.
Religious leaders like John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Terry Jones — the crazy Quran-burning pastor in Florida — use their First Amendment rights to incite violence and spread ignorance and hate over the airwaves. This in turn has led to an environment where angry white men like Sikh-temple shooter Wade Michael Page decide to take matters into their own hands. Angry white men who are too dumb and crazy to tell the difference between a Muslim and a Sikh.
The list of recent hate crimes against Muslims proves we still have a long way to go before we can live up to the ideals of religious tolerance outlined in the U.S. Constitution. America has never been a particularly tolerant country, although we like to pay tolerance a lot of lip service. Christians were killing each other on American soil a half century before the Mayflower even arrived on these shores. In 1565 the Spanish wiped out an entire colony of French settlers simply because, as the Spanish commander put it, “they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these provinces.” The arrival of the pilgrims in the early 1600s was indeed a response to the religious persecution they had experienced in England, but the Puritans certainly did not practice tolerance or allow opposing religious views to be expressed in the colonies. No dissent of any kind was permitted in their “city upon a hill.” This utterly theocratic society further spread the word of God by committing systematic genocide against the native population. At least the founding fathers recognized the need to rein in religiosity with the Constitution.
To some Americans, the election of Barack Obama signaled the beginning of the end of times. Having a mixed-race man elected president of the United States was enough to send a lot of already confused people completely over the edge. Obama has been called the Antichrist on more than one occasion, and he is openly reviled among evangelicals. Some still believe he’s a “secret” Muslim, whatever that is.
Messianic Jews and Coptic Christians are now aligning themselves with these right-wing evangelicals, Christian Zionists and virulent Islamophobes — such as Pam Geller and Robert Spencer — against 1.8 billion Muslims to bring about Armageddon, the ultimate battle between the forces of good and evil.
The problem with religious morality is that it’s not grounded in rational thought. The singular passion of a religious fanatic is to obey the will of God. Everything is an act of faith. When someone believes they’re doing God’s will, they are impossible to reason with. Any effort to dissuade them from their task will be futile. After all, if God has commanded you to do something, anyone who tries to stop you must by definition be an agent of evil. Beliefs that aren’t based on evidence to begin with certainly can’t be changed by more evidence.
Religious zealots believe that someone who acts upon faith alone should be admired and revered. Unfortunately, religious faith can be very dangerous when a believer decides on a course of action that doesn’t consider the welfare of others. If a few innocents happen to die in the process, so be it; any compromise would be a violation of God’s will.
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The story behind “The Innocence of Muslims” and how it ended up on YouTube in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 anniversary is still shrouded in mystery. The original media reports claimed that an Israeli-American real estate developer from California was responsible for the film, a man going by the name of “Sam Bacile.”
Bacile, the supposed producer of the movie, raised some $5 million from 100 donors, whom he refused to identify. In a telephone interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bacile said he made the film in Hollywood last year. In the same interview, he referred to Islam as “a cancer.”
It turns out that “Sam Bacile” is actually an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a shady character who is now in hiding with his family somewhere in California.
Nakoula is a convicted felon. He spent a year in prison in 1997 for intent to manufacture methamphetamine, and in 2010 he was charged with bank fraud and spent more time in the slammer.
A shadowy group of Coptic Christians, right-wing evangelicals, Christian Zionists and anti-Muslim activists are ramping up the hate in an effort to bring more chaos and instability to the Middle East. This is the clear intent of the producers of “The Innocence of Muslims.” The film was made to insult, degrade and mock Islam in a way that they knew was likely to provoke violence.
They did it for political gain and to advance their twisted religious ideology.
Right on cue, the radical right-wing Islamists stepped into the fray to stoke the flames of anti-American rage across the region in response to the film. So now both sides get what they wanted: the vaunted “clash of civilizations” that could ultimately lead to our destruction.
The people behind “The Innocence of Muslims” are satisfied they’ve helped cause a major rift in U.S. relations with the Arab world at a time when United States influence is fading. They hope that by destabilizing former United States allies such as Egypt and inciting acts of violence against Western interests in the region, Muslims will come off as the crazy, violent people the Islamophobes portray them to be.
