Will Ahmadinejad Stay?

By Joel C. Rosenberg

Keep your eyes on Iran on June 12th. That’s the date Iranian voters go to the polls to “choose” their next leaders. “Choose” is putting the best face on it. The elections are effectively rigged by the forces of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini. The man the Supreme Leader wants to be president will be “elected” president. Period. End of sentence.

The question is whether Khameini wants Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to remain in office. If so, Ahmadinejad should remain in power and the nuclear showdown with Israel and the U.S. will intensify dramatically. Thus far, all indications are that Khameini agrees completely with Ahmadinejad’s eschatology, or End Times theology. The Supreme Leader has occasionally reined in the President on social or economic issues, but never in Ahmadinejad’s outspoken view that the end of the world is near, the Islamic Messiah known as the Mahdi is coming, and the way to hasten the Mahdi’s coming is to annihilate Israel and the U.S. Last August, Khameini appeared to endorse Ahmadinejad for re-election. This week, 211 members of the 295-seat Iranian parliament endorsed Ahmadinejad for re-election.

Worth noting: Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria writes a bizarre cover story this week in which he asserts that Iran’s apocalyptic, genocidal leaders have no interest in building nukes when even the Obama administration’s top military expert says Iran most certainly is pursuing nuclear weapons. Excerpts:

“Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were ‘un-Islamic.’ The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that ‘developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.’ Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying.”

Exactly, Fareed. They’re lying. Like they were lying about not having secret nuclear research facilities until 2002 when an Iranian dissident group exposed those lies at a press conference in Washington and we discovered two advanced and dangerous facilities Western intelligence agencies hadn’t known existed until then. As I described in Inside The Revolution, Ahmadinejad and other top Iranian leaders have been crystal clear about their intentions. I quote them in detail and at length from their speeches and interviews. Why is it so hard for “experts” like Fareed and others to see the danger that such men pose not just to Israel but to Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it?

Related News