Sound The Trumpet : Islamic Messiah At Center of Iranian Policy

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“Islamic Messiah At Center of Iranian Policy”
by www.wnd.com
October 17th, 2009

Ahmadinejad's chief spiritual adviser is Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, known as "the Crocodile" for his rugged facial features and his hard-line orthodox religious views.

Yazdi is the chief living authority on the Mahdi, the "Guided One," better known as the Twelfth Imam or the Hidden Imam. The belief in Shiite Islam is that Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam in line of succession from the Prophet Muhammad, disappeared down a well in the 10th century A.D., going into "occultation," or hiding, until the appointed time to return.

Shiite Muslims believing in the Mahdi maintain the Mahdi is a messianic figure who will return after an apocalypse to elevate Shiite Islam to the status of the only true religion, with the consequence that all false religions, including Sunni Islam, will be vanquished.

A key distinction between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims is that Shiite Muslims believe the legitimate authority over Islam must be established from within Prophet Muhammad's direct family line, whereas Sunni Muslims accept secular leadership, such as the caliphates that ruled Islam during the Ottoman Empire.

Ayatollah Yazdi heads the Imam Khomeini Research and Learning Center in Qom, site of the Jamkaran well from which Shiite believers expect the Twelfth Imam will reappear. Yazdi has proclaimed that Ahmadinejad is the "chosen" of Imam Mahdi, the person designated to prepare the way for the Mahdi's second coming.

Yazdi is also a member of the Assembly of Experts, the select group of clerics responsible for electing the supreme leader from within their ranks. When Ayatollah Khomeni died in 1989, the Assembly of Experts, then chaired by Rafsanjani, elected Ayatollah Khamenei to be the second supreme leader.

The informal agreement at the time was that Khamenei would succeed Khomeni, with Rafsanjani becoming president. Key to putting this deal together was Ayatollah Yazdi's support for Khamenei. With his acknowledged years of learning, Ayatollah Yazdi qualifies to be ranked an imam, a distinction Ayatollah Khamanei does not share. Without Yazdi's support, Khamanei would never have been selected supreme leader. Today, Yazdi would have to be considered a possible future supreme leader himself, likely to succeed Khamenei.

That Yazdi backed Ahmadinejad was a key factor determining Ahmadinejad's electoral victory over Rafsanjani in 2005. In the 2009 presidential election campaign, Rafsanjani was put on notice: during a televised debate with Mousavi, Ahmadinejad directly accused Rafsanjani of corruption, charging that Rafsanjani had enriched himself at the expense of the Iranian people.

When Ayatollah Khamenei declared Ahmadinejad the winner of the 2009 election, despite protests of voter fraud from Mousavi, the warning was abundantly clear. The first mission would be for the Basij to root out and imprison or kill all known organizers of the street protests. The next mission, once Ahmadinejad was firmly in power and the election protests had been suppressed, would be for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to turn on Rafsanjani and Mousavi to eliminate them as potential rivals in the future.

Earlier in 2009, Yazdi lost a vote to Rafsanjani in a bid to become the head of the Assembly of Experts, the group that chooses Iran's supreme leader. Once the post-election protest is completely subdued and Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad have the opportunity to settle all scores against Mousavi and his supporters, another such contest with Rafsanjani may turn out very differently.

Israel takes Ahmadinejad seriously

Israeli military intelligence experts are convinced that Ahmadinejad's expressed religious devotion to the Mahdi is genuine.

Equally, Israeli military intelligence takes seriously Ahmadinejad's repeated threats to destroy Israel. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs published in 2008 a detailed examination of Ahmadinejad's menacing public statements. The author, political scientist Joshua Teitelbaum, concluded that the intent of Ahmadinejad's numerous statements calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people was clear.

"What emerges from a comprehensive study of what Ahmadinejad actually said – and how it has been interpreted in Iran – is that the Iranian president was not just calling for 'regime change' in Jerusalem, but rather the actual physical destruction of the State of Israel," Teitelbaum wrote. "When Ahmadinejad punctuates his speech with 'Death to Israel' (marg bar Esraiil), this is no longer open to various interpretations."

As evidence for his conclusions, Teitelbaum published a photograph taken in a military parade in Tehran on Sept. 22, 2003, in which the Iranian regime displayed a Shahab 3 missile inscribed in Farsi with Ahmadinejad's famous statement that "Israel must be uprooted and wiped off [the pages] of history."

Evaluating the impact of the image, Teitelbaum wrote, "By juxtaposing its call for Israel's elimination with a Shahab 3 missile during a military parade, the Iranian regime itself has clarified that these expressions about Israel's future do not describe a long-term historical process, in which the Israeli state collapses by itself like the former Soviet Union, but rather the actual physical destruction of Israel as a result of a military strike."

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13