The Ayatollahs are Whipping up a Frenzy of Religious Superstition and Hate. Why?

A sort of collective delusional hysteria is sweeping the Iranian populace. It is induced by the Islamic republic’s extremist clerical rulers for reasons of their own. Wonder and hate are invoked by fake miracles and myths, demons and monsters.

The newly-elected, definitely eccentric president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems bent on portraying himself as a charmed figure. On a visit to one of the elite ten grand ayatollahs of the regime, Javadi-Amoli, in Qom this week, he came out with this rigmarole:

“When I addressed the UN General Assembly, a dazzling aura formed around my head. This I learned from one of the heads of state listening to my speech. He told me that they were all sitting at the edge of their seats to drink in the message from our Islamic regime.”

In mid-October, Ahmadinejad suddenly ordered a well in northern Iraq to be declared the sacred gate to the tunnel leading to the Shiite Messiah – Mahdi in Arabic, Emam-e Zaman in Farsi. The faithful were encouraged to toss notes into the pit bearing their secret wishes, and a set of lavish mosques, hotels and restaurants ordered built around the magic shrine to accommodate hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The Islamic regime in Tehran was declared the guardian of this holy place.

To further charge the atmosphere, a miraculous dog was fabricated to star in a pious film circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies in Tehran. This dog was shown bowing at the tomb of the eighth Shiite Imam Reza in the northeastern town of Mashad, before climbing atop the marble edifice and bursting into canine tears. The episode caused great excitement and was widely covered in Iran’s media – until a coolheaded cleric reminded the dog-worshippers that Islam regards dogs as unclean creatures. The episode was then exposed as a fraud concocted by a film director who had trained his dog for the part.

Non-Shiites likened to evil monsters, cancerous growths

Amid these absurd episodes, ayatollahs at the head of government have begun spouting the grossest form of hate rhetoric heard even in Tehran to demonize all of Iran’s opponents and Western infidels in particular.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chairman of the Council for Preserving the Constitution, declared that only Shiites were human beings and the rest of the world’s inhabitants were corrupt animals fit only to be destroyed. Non-Muslims, he said, were evil monsters which defiled the planet earth.

These words aroused anger even in Iran, especially among minorities. The Zoroastrian leader demanded an immediate retraction and apology. However there was more to come. The director of Friday sermons in Qom, Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, last Friday described the United States and Britain as cancerous growths that destroy any country they penetrate and must be rooted out.

Ayatollah Mohamad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the president’s religious mentor, told his congregation: “Shiites must avoid contact with their enemies, even if they are on the point of death. Never ask a non-Shiite for bread.”

No doubt impressed by Michael Jackson’s song in praise of Islam, Yazdi produced a grand plan to dispatching 5,000 missionaries to the United States to spread the truth faith. It goes without saying that each of these “missionaries” would form a center for recruiting and training “martyrs” for killing infidels.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iran experts recall that in the 1980s, the founder of the Islamic republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini resorted extensively to pious and religious symbolism to invoke a sense of menace and electric anticipation in the country. His purpose was to galvanize young men to sacrifice themselves as martyrs in Iran’s holy wars. Plastic keys to heaven, mass-produced cheaply in the Far East, were handed out to each soldier fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. The troops were entertained by misty visions of the glorious Messiah prancing on his white horse to the front.

This current atmosphere of hysteria and dread drummed up in Iran may also be the ayatollahs’ way of preparing the country for some new sacrifice.