Culture Jihad in Tehran

E. Michael Jones

Fidelity Press

206 Marquette Avenue

South Bend Indiana 46617

© 2013, Fidelity Press

To Nader and Zeinab

Table of Contents

Preface

Death to America

History of the Revolution

Qom

What is Islam?

The Rise of Asharism and the Closing of The Muslim Mind

The Logos of Sex

Biographical Note

Endnotes

Preface

Two Weeks that Shook the World

The story you are about to read begins with an invitation to speak at a conference on Hollywood in Tehran and ends with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. As you probably guessed, I feel that there is a link connecting these two events. The link is Islam's uncanny ability to arrive on the scene when Christianity has failed in its mission. Martin Luther referred to this uncanny ability as the scourge of God. He should know he was the scourge of God in his own way. When Pope Alexander VI aborted the counter-revolution against sodomy and usury which Savonarola launched in Florence, God sent Luther and Islam as the scourge of God to purify a corrupted Christendom. When the counter-revolution against modernity that should have been launched by Vatican II got aborted, God sent the Iranian revolution of 1979 in its stead, and, as the movie Argo indicates, the reverberations are with us still. This is a report about the continuing implications of both fateful events.

E. Michael Jones

South Bend, Indiana

March 2013

Death to America

Tehran is on the same latitude as northern Florida, but it is a mile-high city like Denver which borders on a desert on the south and even higher mountains on the north which stretch all the way to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. The palatial compound of the former Shah is now a government estate — part museum, part caveat, part monument to the wretched excess of his last days in power before Imam Khomeini swept him from office in 1979.

When we visited the Shah's palace it was snowing, but on Sunday, February 10, 2013, the day set aside for the celebration of the 34th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution which drove Shah Reza Pahlevi from power and turned Ruollah Khomeini into a national hero, the morning is sunny and warm, and I am travelling down a river made up of three million people. Getting three million people to one place would be a logistical nightmare in a city with perfect public transportation, and Tehran is far from perfect. It is a city of 14 million people, all of whom it seems spend their days stuck in massive traffic jams. It is only our status as foreign dignitaries that gets us through the police barricades and close to the promenade that leads to Azadi Square where the speeches are being held. There are Frenchmen, Pakistanis, Africans and Afro-Americans in our group, but as we step off into the river-like crowd, it's pretty clear that we're not Iranians. In fact it's pretty clear that some of us are Americans. It is most clearly apparent from my appearance because in addition to wearing a Harris tweed jacket, which is too warm, I am the only one of the 3 million people in attendance wearing a tie. Imam Khomeini had disparaging things to say about the tie during the early days of the revolution, and no one has worn one since.

Trucks with loudspeakers move along with the flow of the crowd, and mullahs lead the chanting. As the first truck passes by, the crowd is chanting "Allah Akbar." Then they start chanting something I don't understand.

"What are they chanting?" I ask one of the conference organizers who has volunteered to accompany us on the march.

"Death to America," he says. "Sorry."

"I don't take it personally," I reply.

Nor for that matter did anyone else. A young man in his twenties comes up beside me and asks me where I'm from. Visions from Argo flashed through my mind at this point, and for a moment I thought of saying that I was a Canadian.

"South Bend, Indiana," I say.

"I want to go to America," he tells me and for the rest of the march he is never far from my elbow asking me for an e-mail address and telling me what he is studying. For some strange reason, the Iranian people that I met all liked Americans. Given what we have done to them in recent history beginning with the CIA-orchestrated coup that deposed Mossadegh in 1953, there is no reason why they should, but they do nonetheless. The hotel is staffed by people who are unfailingly polite. When I thanked the lifeguard at the pool for replenishing the water in the sauna, he pumped his fist and said, "Chicago" as if he were cheering me on to something or other. He had never heard of South Bend, but when I told him it was near Chicago, the impression registered and I was from that moment on greeted with the pumped-fist Chicago sign. Perhaps it is traceable to their experience with the Shah, but the Iranians seem more capable of separating the government from the people than any group I have met in my travels.

At one point on our march toward Azadi Square, we passed a stage which was set up in front of TV cameras, and we were invited to come up on the stage to say a few words on national TV. The crowd behind the barrier was mostly young and they cheered when I walked onto the stage and flashed the V peace sign. When I told the man holding the mike that the American people wanted peace, they cheered again, after my words got relayed to them in Farsi.

There was little music provided along the way but after a while I got used to the fact that music meant trouble. The crowd walking toward Azadi Square was a river of people which did not stop when individuals stopped walking, which is what happened whenever the crowd came to a stage where music was being played. The moving crowd simply plowed into the stationary crowd, and everyone became packed together in a way that was clearly dangerous. Visions of pilgrims being trampled to death in Mecca flashed before my mind's eye as I began to be pressed closer and tighter into the mass of people around me. At this moment a fistfight broke out between a pickpocket and his victim, the only incidence of crime that I saw during my entire stay. It looked as if someone were going to get knocked down and to get knocked down in a situation like this meant a good chance of getting trampled to death. But just as mysteriously as the crowd had increased in density, it thinned out and we continued our procession.

By now President Ahmadinijad was speaking and the lady next to me translated his text from Farsi as we proceeded. He talked about national unity. Looking around at the crowd and listening to Ahmadinijad's words, I realized how much the much-vaunted "consent of the governed" has been missing from American life. The only time I have seen anything close to this number of people come together in America was to protest something the regime had imposed on us, whether it was abortion or the invasion of Cambodia during the Spring of 1970. I have been part of huge crowds in places like New York and Chicago (where I felt a similar fear when the same thing I described above happened) on the fourth of July, but the point of the gathering was pretty clearly spectacle, namely, fireworks and not politics. It was not national unity, because in the United States national unity does not exist. And so we are treated to the simulacrum of national unity at staged events like the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, both of which exist to give the deracinated and isolated individuals who make up the crowds at those events a sense of belonging and purpose.

By the time we got back to the van, the crowd was every bit as dense as it had been in front of the music stages. The conference attendees had to be literally dragged by their arms out of the crowd and into the van until it was finally full. After the doors and windows closed, we sat there, unable to move either forward or backward, submerged in a sea of humanity. We had no police escort. The van was totally surrounded and could not move. The windows in the van weren't tinted and so the crowd, which had just finished chanting "Death to America," could clearly see our American faces. It was clear that if they had taken the Death to America chant seriously, the crowd could have smashed the van's windows or overturned the van and set it on fire with us inside. The thought occurred to me when the people outside the van began pounding on the windows. They could have killed us if they wanted to I thought as the pounding reached a crescendo, but they didn't want to. They wanted peace, which is what they say whenever they greet you. The fact that they could have killed us but didn't reveals the most basic accomplishment of the Iranian revolution of 1979.

In spite of what you see in movies like Argo, the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent the last 34 years teaching the Iranian people that the fundamental bedrock of social life is submission to the will of God. Like the Mossad, the Masonic republic of America achieves its ends by way of deception. There are two truths in any Masonic society — the esoteric truth for the masters of the universe who staff the secret societies which run the country — and the exoteric truth for the run-of-the-mill idiots who watch the Super Bowl on TV and attend NASCAR races. So according to the latter explanation, the NATO looting of Libya was a "humanitarian intervention" which was accomplished by "freedom fighters" with NATO assistance. No revolution, certainly not the American Revolution, succeeds without passion-fueled excess, but the unforgivable sin which the Iranians committed in bringing off theirs is that they were able to establish social order after the revolutionary excesses of 1979 and, more than that, guide the country, however imperfectly, according to religious principles to a more or less stable future, in spite of the American instigated war with Iraq and a host of other black ops whose intention was to destabilize the government. Hilary Clinton articulated the intention behind all of these measures when she said that sanctions were supposed to lead to regime change. After looking around at the three million people marching in support of the Islamic republic, it was clear, to me at least, that that wasn't going to be happening any time soon.

History of the Revolution

On January 16, 1979, His Imperial Majesty Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the King of Kings, Light of the Aryans and Head of the Warriors, descended from the Peacock Throne, boarded a plane, and flew into exile. Two weeks later Ruoallah Khomeini, a 77-year-old religious scholar, flew from exile in Paris to Teheran, where he was greeted by millions of followers, and became the leader of the first modern Islamic revolution. The Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, not riding on a donkey, but almost as modestly, riding in the passenger seat of a Chevy pickup surrounded by a few million of his supporters, some of whom were sitting on roof of the truck's cab. What followed was the chaos and violence which accompanies any revolution, revenge killings aimed at the SAVAK, the secret police that had been trained to torture Iranians, the burning of that country's cinemas in protest against the sexualization of the culture which the Rockefellers and the CIA had orchestrated to turn the Iranians into sexual robots and docile consumers (i.e., "Americans"), the hostage crisis, which got prolonged by George Bush and Ronald Reagan to defeat Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980, and enough footage to make a number of movies, the most recent being Argo, a gripping CIA propaganda film which obscures everything about the revolution that needs to be explained.

The miracle of the Iranian revolution of 1979 is that it did not end up like all of the revolutions which accompanied the Arab Spring in 2011. By the time I arrived in Iran, both Libya and Egypt had descended into chaos. The reason the Iranian revolution didn't is Imam Khomeini and Shi'a Islam, which honors Logos (or to give Arash Darya-Bandari's translation of that Greek term, nezzam I tauhidi, the order of unicity) in a way that the Sunni Muslims and most certainly the Wahhabis and the Salefists do not. There is no separation of Church and State in the Shi'a version of Islam, but there is paradoxically among the fundamentalist Salefists, who, like the Wahhabis and the more radical Sunni sects, accepted the political hegemony of the caliphate.

Imam Khomeini was able to keep the Iranian revolution under control because he was able to exercise both political and spiritual authority at a crucial moment in Iran's history. If he had not been able to wield both swords, that of the emperor and the pope simultaneously, Iran would probably look a lot like what Egypt looks like today. Iran is the only country in the world which has conducted a successful counter-revolution against the American-Zionist Imperium and has lived to tell the tale. At a time when most Islamic revolutions seemed destined to go from oppression to anarchy in the wake of the Arab Spring, the Iranian revolution still stands as an example of a people who successfully broke the yoke of Jewish-American cultural hegemony and then, in spite of the turbulence of the early years and the devastation wrought by the eight-year long war with Iraq, successfully rolled back the sexualized culture of the '60s without succumbing to anarchy or a new form of dictatorship.

America's Zionist-controlled government is hostile to Iran, not because it possesses or wants to possess nuclear weapons, but because it has taken control of its own culture in a way that the West still finds both puzzling, dramatic, and, ultimately, an affront to everything the regime preaches, from sodomy to usury. This is probably the reasoning behind the recent release of Argo, the recent CIA propaganda film demonizing Iranians and lionizing Hollywood Jews. Argo is a perverse tribute to how unsettling the American elites continue to find this successful provincial uprising against their universal cultural hegemony. The message of Argo is what you would expect from the Masonic republic of America. Americans are deceivers. Ben Affleck moves blithely from one deception to another; he forges visas; he is involved in the production of a phony film, which is produced by Hollywood, America's propaganda ministry. He teaches the hostages how to deceive their captors. He coaches everyone in deception, and because of this we are to recognize him as an American hero.

If I were under any illusions that the West had somehow mellowed in the rebellion against God's order that was the essence of the Enlightenment, they were dispelled by viewing A Royal Affair on the flight from Amsterdam to Tehran in the original Danish with Dutch subtitles. The film was serious European but not artsy fartsy. It was a biopic about the life of Johan Struensee, the physician to King Christian IV, king of Denmark at a time when the Enlightenment was raging in France, the continent's most powerful country. By the time Struensee had become his physician, the king had gone mad from (in the film's own words) excessive masturbation. Struensee exploited the situation to become in short order 1) the queen's lover (Struensee seduced the queen by giving her his contraband copies of Rousseau to read. The fish rots first at the head) and 2) de facto dictator of the Kingdom of Denmark. He then used his position as dictator to introduce the Enlightenment, in the form of freedom of the press and mandatory smallpox inoculation, to Denmark. What followed was heaven on earth — for a while at least — until the forces of evil, otherwise known as church and state, got their pay cut as part of government austerity measures. At that point the déclassé ruling class organized a counter-revolution and Struenesee became the Enlightenment's version of Jesus Christ by shedding his blood for the people who rejected him in the name of hatred of all religion and — you're probably expecting this by now — freedom.

The Iranian revolution, we are told:

was unusual for the surprise it created throughout the world: it lacked many of the customary causes of revolution (defeat at war, a financial crisis, peasant rebellion, or disgruntled military), produced profound change at great speed, was massively popular, and replaced a westernising monarchy with a theocracy based on Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists (or velayat-e faqih). Its outcome — an Islamic Republic "under the guidance of an extraordinary religious scholar from Qom" — was, as one scholar put it, "clearly an occurrence that had to be explained."[1]

The recent release of Argo is some indication that Americans are still trying to explain what happened. They found the Iranian Revolution of 1979 puzzling for a number of reasons. In fact, they are still puzzled by it. Islamic revolutions are still with us, and they still need to be explained to an American public that has distinctly impoverished categories when it comes to understanding anything that transcends the sophistication of their nightly news broadcasts.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the revolution of 1979 was that Americans were being held responsible for the actions of a man whose name most Americans could hardly pronounce. The Shah was hated because he was the representative of America, which we were being told was the Great Satan. After decades of incomprehension, America's propaganda ministry finally came up with an explanation of the revolution of 1979 and its sequelae when it floated the phrase "they hate us for our freedoms."

Americans found events like the Islamic revolution puzzling because the terms "freedom" and "revolution" had already gotten co-opted a decade earlier when the New York Times put Wilhelm Reich on the cover of its Sunday magazine and resurrected his phrase, "sexual revolution," as the explanation of what had happened in the '60s. If what happened in the '60s was the "sexual revolution" leading to "freedom," then what happened in Iran in 1979 was clearly something else. It was a counter-revolution. In fact, it was a sexual counter-revolution.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 was in reality part of the sexual counter-revolution that was sweeping the world at that moment in time. Ronald Reagan was part of that counter-revolution in America. Jimmy Carter's support for the Shah, as well as his inept handling of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent hostage crisis, helped put Ronald Reagan in office, but the main reason Reagan won the election was the votes of the so-called "Reagan Democrats," i.e., the Catholics who had finally found a candidate who was willing to oppose the infamous 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. If Catholics needed further proof of the counter-revolutionary nature of the Reagan presidency, they could point to Reagan's alliance with Pope John Paul II to bring down atheistic Communism.

The Republican party betrayed this counter-revolution when they aligned themselves with the Jewish neoconservatives who led America into the military campaign against Islam in the Middle East that began with the 9/11 attacks and which currently has Iran in its sights, but that doesn't change the fact that Reagan won the election of 1980 as a conservative sexual counter-revolutionary who was the tacit ally of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose hostage crisis helped put him in office.

The idea that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was the Iranian version of the global sexual counter-revolution explains an event that the Americans found particularly puzzling, namely, the spectacle of Iranians burning down their own movie theaters and birth control clinics. During the 1970s, Iranians were subjected to a film- and TV-based barrage of sexual imagery, whose main purpose was the pacification and demoralization of the country. The commercials of the '70s can be viewed on the Internet. They are crude and tame in comparison with the pornography and sophisticated ads which are now common, but their intention is clear.[2] Playing Led Zeppelin's "Whole lotta love" as background music for a clip advertising an ice-skating rink makes no sense (Wouldn't the "Skaters' Waltz" have been more appropriate?), unless we see the entire package (including crotch shots of female ice skaters) as part of the Shah/CIA attempt to turn the Iranians into sexual robots and docile consumers.[3]

Hollywood, as I said, is the propaganda ministry for the Zionist-American Imperium. Hollywood achieves its hegemonic goals by way of moral corruption. That was the gist of my talk at the Hollywoodism conference, and why I had come to Tehran. It was the gist of more than 30 years of research into the use of sexual liberation as political control, and the development of that argument could be found in extenso in my book Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control. I didn't need to cook up anything new for an Iranian audience because they were guinea pigs in the same experiment in social engineering that had destroyed Catholic political power in the United States in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

When Iranians recognized that sexual liberation was a form of political control, they burned down their own movie theaters. Fifty years earlier, Catholic reaction to Hollywood's sexualization of American culture had been boycotts. Instead of burning their movie theaters down, American Catholics boycotted them under the leadership of Philadelphia's Cardinal Dougherty and the Legion of Decency.

After meeting with Hollywood moguls during the height of the boycott in 1934, Joseph Breen claimed that Harry Warner, head of Warner Brothers studios, was "crying tears as big as horse turds" because his theaters were losing $100,000 a week in Philadelphia alone. Eventually Breen became head of the first Hollywood Production Code, which allowed Catholics to keep nudity, obscenity and blasphemy off of America's movie screens.

Even if the realization occurred 40 years apart, both American Catholics and Iranian Muslims came to the same conclusion: film was an integral part of the sexual revolution. The purpose of sexual liberation was the destruction of the nation's moral fiber as a prelude to sophisticated totalitarian control. The Jewish psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich was the architect of sexual liberation as political control because he explained the importance of "mass situations" in undermining morality and therefore the social order. Film became a tool of sexual liberation because Hollywood was and still is controlled by Jews.

The Jewish revolutionaries have never lost their penchant for producing pornography and using it as a form of political control. When the Israeli military rolled into Ramallah in the West Bank on March 30, 2002, one of the first things they did was take over Palestinian TV stations. This is what conquering armies do. But when the conquering army is Jewish, something more telling and unusual follows. Shortly after occupying the Al-Watan TV station, the Israeli forces began broadcasting pornography over its transmitter. One 52-year-old Palestinian mother of three children, according to one report, complained about "the deliberate psychological damage caused by these broadcasts." The only Palestinian station not taken over by the Israelis ran a written message at the bottom of its screen claiming that "Anything currently shown on Al-Watan and other local TV channels has nothing to do with Palestinian programs but is being broadcast by the Israeli occupation forces. We urge parents to take precautions."

The Marquis de Sade, another architect of sexual liberation as political control, made it perfectly clear that sexual liberation leads to violence and eventually murder. The French Revolution, which the Marquis de Sade started from his cell in the Bastille, was proof of that. The Ayatollah Khomeini was able to focus this violence on the Great Satan that was inciting it and create a successful counter-revolution against it.

The Republican Party betrayed its own counter-revolution, and as a result the violence which sexual liberation naturally creates continues unabated in the form of seemingly random mass killings of the sort which we just witnessed in Colorado and Connecticut and other places too numerous to mention. The Aurora, Colorado killer, James Holmes, like most males of his generation, frequented adult web sites. After providing his sexual profile to one of them, he was "shot down" by three women he tried to solicit for sex. The random acts of violence that occur in America with depressing regularity are manifestations of the sexual counterrevolution which the Republican Party exploited for political purposes and then strangled in its cradle in favor of neoconservative-inspired wars for Israel in the Middle East. These attacks will continue until Americans wrest control of their culture from the forces which have been using pornography to enslave them because, as the Marquis de Sade could have explained very well, the same forces that render the majority docile, turn an equally predictable minority into violent killers.

I had come to the third annual Hollywoodism conference in Tehran to explain Hollywood's use of sexual liberation as a form of political control to the Iranian people. The conference began with speeches by the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mr. Mohammed Hosseini, by the co-Chairs of the Conference Mr. Shamaghadi and Mr. Ghodamrez Montazami. Iran's President, Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, was a no show. The gist of what the organizers had to say could have been taken from the pages of Culture Wars magazine, which I edit. The majority of the world's people are subject to a global culture which is dominated by Jews and American elites who devote much of their energies to mocking the religions of that majority and undermining their morals. Iran has taken a leadership role in rolling back this cultural offensive and is happy to bring together people from all over the world to collaborate with them in liberating themselves from predatory global culture. Iran is the land of literature and civilization. It brings these gifts, which it has developed over 2,500 years of continuous culture, to the struggle. These are not poor Sunnis blowing themselves up with explosives strapped around their waists, and the former Senator from Alaska Mike Gravel gave a speech praising the Iranians for taking the cultural initiative in what is a world-wide struggle. Each speech was followed by film clips. Some were better than others. The French comedian Dieudonne's film collage, which preceded his speech, showed him, among other things, wiping his ass with an Israeli flag.

Even though I am not scheduled to speak until the next day I am called up onto the stage to give a little two-minute speech. The room is awash in photojournalists. I have never been photographed so much in my life. Having about 30 seconds to prepare my speech, I mention the fear I see on the faces of the people from the most powerful country on earth and say, "Fear is useless; what is needed is love." As I walk from the stage I am pursued by ladies in flowing black robes holding microphones and cameras who want to talk about fear and love. Equally intrigued by my speech is a reporter from the New York Times, who sits me down with his colleague from the Los Angeles Times, and a lady photographer wearing a hijab. He wants to know if this is my first time in Iran and, if so, what strikes me the most about that country.

"Desexualization" is my answer. "The Iranians have desexualized the culture after Khomeini's revolution. They have removed sex from the public sphere and put it back into the private sphere where it belongs."[4]

I go on to mention the fact that they burned down their movie theaters as spontaneous rejection of the sexualization of their culture under the Shah.

"Are you in favor of burning down movie theaters?" the Times reporter wants to know.

I am tempted to say that it depends on which movie is playing, but I refer him instead to Cardinal Dougherty's boycott of Warner Brothers' theaters in Philadelphia in 1933 as the Catholic alternative to firebombing.

While negotiating my way through more interviews and lunch, the Muslim woman who was supposed to take me to Mass at 9:00 AM shows up and tells me we'll be leaving for Mass at 3:30 PM instead. She accompanies me through an hour of impossible traffic and films me making the sign of the cross and saying my prayers and attending Mass and listening to a very long homily in Farsi. When it's over she says that she felt a presence during the service. As a matter of fact, so did I.

The New York Times reporter did not stay for my talk, which went off like an IED under a convoy of cultural propaganda. In an article which appeared in France, Marie Poumier wrote that:

E. Michael Jones provided the shock phrase ("le formule choc") summarizing the stakes surrounding sexual excesses: it is Jesus against Dracula. His presentation has shown how the Irish have for a while (between 1933 and 1965) countered the Jews in Hollywood, the Jews who have since infested cinema with obscenities. The on-going campaign against the prophet currently being aired with the Guignols on Canal+ [a popular French evening show] is a new chapter to turn the Muslims into mental slavery, as this has been going on for a long time for Christians (cf. the Pussy Riot affair as an offensive against the Orthodox world). The Marquis de Sade, after his experience in prison, had indeed perfectly established the link between debauchery and tyranny.[5]

What followed my talk was unlike anything I have experienced in my entire life. For the next ten hours I was chased from one end of the hall to the other by ladies in chadors wielding microphones who wanted to talk about sex. My diary entry at the time conveys some sense of what I felt:

I have never experienced a day like today in my entire life. I was the first speaker at the conference today and after giving my Israelis broadcast pornography to the Palestinians speech, there was this stunned silence, and then everybody started to applaud and after that everyone was saying that it was, in Talib Warsi's words, a landmark speech and that it was going to inaugurate a new era. After it was over, at around 10:00 I started to walk to the door and women in chadors holding microphones and cameras ran up to me and I have been literally doing one interview after another for the past 12 hours. I cannot walk across the room without being stopped for three interviews. I just did an interview with Nader Talebzade, who is a filmmaker and the organizer of the entire conference. He mentioned my talk at the Islamic university he had just visited, and now all the mullahs want copies in Farsi. There is really something uncanny about this. It's as if they've been waiting for me to give them the explanation, and now that they have the explanation, everything makes sense to them. At the end of my TV interview with Nader, I said that Iran was the leader of the free world. I had never even thought that thought before it came out of my mouth, but after I said it we both knew it was the absolute truth. It was an amazing experience.

Twenty-four hours later, the feeling that something extraordinary had happened still hadn't worn off and found expression in my diary entry of February 5, 2013:

Yesterday was not a dream. I descend to the lobby and find that is still full of ladies in chadors, who pursue me, microphone in hand, from one end of the conference hall to the other. Jim Fetzer congratulates me on my speech. Merlin Miller, who ran for President and is trying to produce a film on the USS Liberty incident and is one of the most handsome men I have ever met, comes over to congratulate me on my speech. He says something to the effect that it is one of the most powerful talks he has ever heard and says he wants an audio copy, something I tell him which is beyond my power to do. I am humbled and honored by these and other comments from my colleagues at the conference. I cannot cross a room without doing at least three interviews, which at this point have all run into one blurred generic statement in my mind. Staring into lights and a camera I say:

My name is E. Michael Jones. I am the editor of Culture Wars magazine. I am in Tehran to take part in the Hollywoodism conference where we are exploring the role Hollywood plays as America's propaganda ministry in destroying everyone else's culture. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in Iran and say things that no other government in the world would allow me to say. Iran is the leader of the free world.

After one interview, a lady in a chador gave me an assortment of nuts; at another point one of the ladies who interviewed me gave me a beautiful blue Islamic rosary. I take my rosary out of my pocket and tell her the prayers Catholics say on their beads, and she tells me the prayers that Muslims say on theirs.

More than once I embarrass myself by indiscriminately extending my hand to women. Shaking hands with men is perfectly acceptable. In fact, they not only shake hands, they embrace and kiss each other on both cheeks. More than once I am subjected to signs of affection which I, coming from a homosexualized culture, find shocking.

On the other hand, having lived in Germany for years, I am completely accustomed to bi-sexual handshaking, something which in Iran leads to one painful incident after another, all the way from the frosty "I don't shake hands" to the embarrassed last minute evasive lunge on the part of the woman as she attempts to avoid my hand, to the flushed embarrassed expression that comes over the woman's face when I grab her hand and start pumping it up and down while looking her in the eyes, the sort of thing I learned to do in Germany during the '70s. "He's holding my hand," the horrified look on the young lady's face says, "What's he going to do next?" After a number of painful incidents, I learn to put my right hand over my heart, as if preparing to say the pledge of allegiance in lieu of shaking a woman's hand. It is a gesture that has universal acceptance in Iran. Now that I think of it, it seems as if only men make this gesture. One young man comes up to me and quotes back the line I recited yesterday, "Fear is useless . . ." at this point he attempts to finish what I said at the end of my speech on the first day of the conference but can't, and so I finish his sentence by saying, "what is needed is love."

Fear is useless. . . .

The phrase will return to rebuke me later when a man whose English is less than perfect comes up and tells me he wants to interview me.

"Fine," I say, "Let's go to the lobby."

"No, sir," he says. "I want to interview you on national television. We must go by car. It is only five minutes away."

In the days leading up to my departure, my daughter Rebecca had acquired the disconcerting habit of asking, "Aren't you afraid to go to Iran?" To which I would respond, "I wasn't until you asked the question." After hearing the question a number of times from other people as well, I wrote to my English friend John Beaumont:

So, as things stand now, I will be met at the airport in Tehran, where the reception committee will put a black hood over my head, throw me into the trunk of a Toyota Corrolla (I hear their trunks are very comfortable), and take me to an undisclosed location.

At this point, with the words "fear is useless" still echoing mockingly in my head, I find myself staring at a young man I have never met before who wants me to get into a car with him and drive off to an undisclosed location to do an interview. So naturally I agree to go with him. When we get outside, he gestures me toward what looks like a Toyota Corrolla. He does not open the trunk, nor are there any black hoods in sight, but the driver is a young man with a three-day beard wearing aviator sunglasses who looks like central casting's version of the Iranian terrorist. He could easily have been an extra in Argo. "Salaam Aleikum" I say as I sit down next to him in the front passenger seat. He shakes my hand, I put my right hand over my heart, and we roar off into the dusty streets of Tehran.

After about ten minutes of zig-zagging through traffic, we arrive at what looks like a military compound. There is a gate with a soldier in attendance who is checking papers. If I had been able to read Farsi, I would have known that we had just arrived at the Iranian equivalent of the headquarters of National Public Radio, but I cannot read Farsi, and so for all I knew we had just arrived at the Iranian equivalent of Abu Ghraib instead. After giving up my ID at another checkpoint, we arrived at a huge brutalist building which was built right around the time that the Shah was expelled and Imam Khomeini arrived from Paris, and I end up doing seven minutes live on national radio.

Before I go on, I am introduced to the man who is going to do the simultaneous translation for the show. He is blind.

"What do you think of National Public Radio?" he asks me.

"It's run by Jews." I say. I mention Ellen Weiss, who ran the newsroom at NPR, as well as her husband, Rabbi David Saperstein, and the gay marriage campaign, which changed the law in New York State largely because of the lobbying of Saperstein and his fellow reform rabbis and the favorable publicity this cause got on NPR.

"Thank you for being so honest with me," he replies.

That night the minister of culture tells the conference he wants to support film projects. Two young men come up to me and tell me about the damage the sanctions are causing. Coke is on every table at dinner, but people are dying because the sanctions have made it virtually impossible to buy medicine.

I hate panel discussions, but they are a necessary antidote to the good feelings that speeches like the one given by the culture minister engender. They reveal the intellectual reality of the situation, which is that there is little or no intellectual coherence much less unanimity to be found among the conference participants. In a panel discussion on economics, I say that economics must be reintegrated into the moral law, prompting global strategist William Engdahl and Senator Mike Gravel to ask who will guarantee the authenticity of the moral principles. It's in many ways the simplest question posed at the conference.

"The Catholic Church," I say.

Engdahl and Gravel at this point raise their eyes to heaven and look as if they are about to rend their garments. Out of his very mouth, they all but say, and then go on to rail against popery, etc. etc. etc.

Arash Darya-Bandari, who studied at Berkeley, thinks that America should follow Kevin Barrett's example and convert to Islam. He finds American individualism intellectually bankrupt and thinks the Islamic republic provides a better alternative, and to a certain degree I agree with him, because the Islamic republic of Iran recognizes the need for a guardian or archon, who represents the necessary presence of transcendent principles as the basis of any society.

We go over some of the same ground in the Tradition and Modernity panel discussion. Everyone agrees that the American system is so riddled with self-contradiction and hypocrisy that it is tantamount to the world's most powerful failed state, but no one can seem to come up with an alternative that is convincing to everyone. Arash again suggests that Americans convert to Islam; I suggest that they convert to Catholicism; but no one sees either happening any time soon.

On February 5, 2013, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement denouncing the conference as a hotbed of anti-Semitism and conspiracy nuts. My name is conspicuous by its absence on their list, conspicuous because I have uttered the word "Jew" more than anyone else at the conference. This means that, as far as the ADL goes, I am still deep within the realm of "dynamic silence," something which Nader sees as a compliment of the highest order. This proves that if the ADL were to mention my name, Nader opines, someone might find my writings on the web and be persuaded by what I have to say.

The female graduate student who gave me the Muslim prayer beads sat down next to me during the afternoon coffee break and told me that she wants to write for Culture Wars. She is in a master of fine arts program and feels that Catholicism and Shi'a Islam are intertwined. As if to give her graphic proof of what she said, I pull the beads she gave me out of my pocket and they are literally intertwined with the rosary I brought with me. I show them to her as an omen of future collaboration. I then tell her about the fine arts tradition in Philadelphia and we look at N.C. Wyeth paintings on her smart phone.

When she got up to leave, a man takes her place and began talking about how the Muslims will not be swept away in the way that the rest of the world has been by the engines of the Great Satan. He then told me that the 12th imam will come and remove all injustice from the world. I replied that Jesus will come again, and he agreed with me. The 12th imam is on the earth now in Saudi Arabia somewhere, but only the pious can see him. I had the feeling that the sanctions are weighing on everyone's mind perhaps because I did an interview on them shortly before the man who wanted to talk about the imminent arrival of the 12th imam sat down beside me.

I got into the elevator to go up to my room. There was an attractive young woman in a chador in the elevator when I got on. We stood there in silence after the door closed. Then out of the blue she told me that I look like a very kind person. I responded by saying that looks can be deceiving. Then I laughed and thanked her for the compliment. The door opened and we went our separate ways. I still have problems with my habit of bi-sexual handshaking. There was another instance today. We both laughed it off.

Qom

Qom is an oasis in the desert roughly 100 miles south of Tehran. It is the holy city of Shi'ism. After the Sunday march, I changed into summer clothes when I got back to the hotel, something which proved to be a mistake because the desert is always cold at night, but especially cold in February no matter how hot the day. After lunch we set off toward Qom but turned off the main highway halfway there and rode off into the desert to see a film set for a $50 million movie on the life of the prophet. The director is Majid Majidi, one of Iran's most acclaimed filmmakers. Majidi was born in Tehran in 1959 and became an actor at the age of 14. After starring in Mohsen Makhmalbar's film Boycott in 1985, he became a director whose films accumulated one award after another. In 1998, his film Children of Heaven was nominated for the Academy Award for best Foreign Language Film, the first Iranian film ever to be nominated. He lost out that year to Roberto Beningni's Life is Beautiful, which is, if you'll remember, a holocaust film, but went on to direct The Color of Paradise in 2000, Baran in 2001, The Willow Tree in 2005, and The Song of Sparrows in 2008.

Majidi, who is now involved in the post-production phase of the Prophet Mohammed film, the most expensive Iranian film ever produced, meets us at the entrance of the set, which has been carved out of the mountainous red rock and sand of the desert. The Iranians have been making critically acclaimed films for decades now, ever since Imam Khomeini gave his approval to The Cow, but Majidi's Prophet Mohammed film, which is comparable in scope to Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, is their first foray into world cinema. To do this Majidi has created what he calls "Islamic Hollywood," complete with the most historically accurate set I have ever seen.

I have seen movie sets before, but they generally fall into two categories: actual buildings for films about contemporary themes or facades propped up by two by fours. When we visited the Shah's palace, a film was being made about the life of the Shah. At the bottom of the steps leading up to the palace there was a 1940s vintage Mercedes and at the top of the stairs the Shah himself, which is to say an actor who looked more like the Shah than the Shah himself. The Iranian film industry has moved from grinding out Iranian pornography in the Shah's last days to ethnic films during the years following the revolution of 1979 to Majidi's epic on the prophet, which signals Iran's entry into world cinema and their attempt to compete with Hollywood for the world market.

Majidi, who walked out of the Danish film festival when that country published and went on to defend the publication of the cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammed, is committed to making a film that will "show the real face of Islam." In reaction to the Danish cartoon scandal, he gave his rationale for withdrawing from the festival by claiming that "I believe in God and live with my beliefs in every single moment of my life. I would like to protest against insulting any religious belief and icon."

The sun was setting as Mejidi led us into the set, which included an adobe replica of Mecca at the time of the prophet's life, complete with Qaabah made of black stones with idols inside, as well as a replica of Medina, and a Christian monastery made out of stone. Walking through the set at what Mejidi called "golden time," which is to say, when the red rock of the mountains had become luminous with the light of the setting sun, amounted to something like a religious experience all by itself, and Majidi has successfully captured a number of luminous moments like this on his film.

When we got back to Tehran a few days later, Majidi showed us a short documentary on the making of the film which included scenes from the movie, which is now in post production. It was a stunning experience. The stills of the prophet's birth look as if Rembrandt could have painted them, the lighting is that effective. Majidi, who lived on the set for two years supervising its creation, is deeply committed to film as a vehicle for expressing religious belief, and if Majidi pulls it off, Mohammed the Prophet is going to be not only the vehicle for Iran's entry into the world film market, it will launch theistic Islamic Hollywood as the alternative to Jewish Hollywood's use of film as the vehicle for the world's moral corruption and the "creative destruction" of its ethnic cultures. If ten percent of the world's Muslim population goes to see it, the producers of Majidi's prophet epic will sell 130,000,000 tickets. If in addition to that, ten percent of the world's Christians see the film, that figure will roughly double. Either way, the film is destined to have a profound effect on the world's religious sensibilities. It will most certainly have a galvanizing effect on Islam.

What is Islam?

But what exactly is Islam? The two weeks in Iran have been in many ways a rolling symposium not unlike the anti-Enlightenment version of Nathan der Weise, Lessing's play about the debate between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Our symposium was fated to be different. Instead of being presided over by Nathan the Wise (Lessing's take on Moses Mendelssohn) with Saladin and King Richard the Lion-hearted in attendance, representing Judaism, Islam and Christianity respectively, our presider was Arash Darya-Bandari, the Berkeley educated Shi'ite. The panel included Kevin Barrett, a former academic and former Unitarian from the People's Republic of Madison, Wisconsin, who was now a Muslim, and yours truly, who was being introduced as a traditional Catholic. Kevin defended the Sunni position against Arash's attacks, something which highlighted the current state of affairs in the Middle East, which is now experiencing a civil war in Syria between the Shi'a who are supporting the Assad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood or Salefists, who are being paid as mercenaries by the Americans.

So, to answer the question at least in preliminary fashion, there are in effect two Islams, one at war with the other. There is the Shi'a triad which begins with the Hezbollah-Palestinian faction in the west, moves to the Alawite Assad regime in Syria, which is aligned with the Ayatollah Sistani Shi'a in Iraq, who are aligned with the Shi'a Islamic Republic of Iran. They are now at war with the Sunni/Wahhabi/Salefist triad, which is supported by Israel-Turkey-and the Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia. Caught with its pants down when the Arab Spring arrived and deposed American puppets like the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the American state department, under the leadership of geniuses like Hilary Clinton and John McCain, threw their support to Salefist insurgents like Morsi in Egypt and God-knows-who in Libya and gave their imprimatur to the new boss, who, compared to the old boss, harbored an even more virulent hatred of Israel and was intellectually even less equipped to run a government than the secularist totalitarians they were so avid to depose. The result has been chaos, epitomized by the murder of the US ambassador and his staff in Benghazi, brought about by the very people that Hilary Clinton and John McCain put into power.

True to their Enlightenment prejudices and the failed policies of the '70s that drove the Shah from power in Iran, the State Department invited a number of "women leaders" from the Islamic world to take part in a summer-long program of feminist brainwashing at St. Mary's College in South Bend, Indiana. For some reason known to Allah alone, the Joneses were selected to be the host family for one of these young ladies. Fatemah, which is not her real name, had come here fresh from the coup in Libya, newly anointed as a feminist leader of the future who could be counted on to spread feminism and the moral corruption of women that invariably accompanied it among her sisters in Libya — all in the name of freedom, of course.

Feminism, you may remember, was one of the first things that Paul Wolfowitz promoted after the conquest of Bagdhad, indicating that it was the appropriate punishment for conquered backward peoples, like the Catholic parents who send their children to St. Mary's College and the children of the Salefists in Libya. Unfortunately, things never work out as planned by the Masters of the Universe. After lavishing money on fifth-column feminists in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz nearly got himself killed when an RPG hit the room below his in the hotel where he was staying in Baghdad. The spectacle of Wolfowitz running out of the hotel in his underwear was a sign of hope insofar as it showed that Iraqis understood feminism and how to deal with Jewish revolutionaries intent on corrupting the morals of their daughters. As the result of a gesture similar to firing an RPG at Paul Wolfowitz's hotel room, the US ambassador to Libya got killed by the people he liberated. After an intense late night conversation, Fatemah, the woman leader of the future who got billeted to our home, began to express a hatred for Israel that was even more intense than her hatred for the late Muammar Khaddafi. So Israel and the State Department are sowing dragons' teeth and are in for a rude awakening, of which the murder of Ambassador Simpson is only the prelude.

But back to our symposium. It will not make great literature because its dramatis personae do not represent the clear alternatives that Lessing proposed in his. No one represented the Jews at our rolling symposium, but that may be fitting because it was always a fiction of the Enlightenment that the Talmudic Jewish religion was compatible with rational discourse. Solomon Maimun had disabused the Berlin Enlightenment of that notion, but Lessing, who had his own agenda, wasn't listening. The American triad of Protestant, Catholic, Jew was missing from our symposium as well. The new American phenomenon was Kevin Barrett; raised as a Unitarian, he became a traditional Unitarian, which is to say a Unitarian with camels, when he embraced Islam. When the "Gospel" of Barnabas was brought up, he said that he wouldn't trust the manuscript to the keeping of the pope, who wanted to see a copy, showing some consistency with the anti-Catholic legacy of Boston Unitarianism. Barrett had a way of consistently muddying the waters by bringing up the Sunni position and contradicting what seemed like the reasonable Shi'a position consistently proposed by Arash. Shi'a Islam has a Magisterium which is not separate from the state. The Islamic republic of Iran is based on the Velayat-e faqih, or governance of the guardians. The guardians, analogous to the Archons of Plato, ensure that democracy remains within the bounds of Sharia, which is to say, the laws of God. If any group in Islam has the potential of breaking out of the intellectual impasse which has resulted from the Islamic sola scriptura reading of the Koran, it is Shi'ites scholars like Javadi e Emoli, whose thoughts on the relationship between freedom and the moral law I cited a number of times in my talk at the Hollywoodism conference. Shi'a Islam denies that every Muslim has the right to his own interpretation of the Koran. Shi'a Islam believes that something like a Church, i.e., an organization providing moral guidance is necessary for salvation and for the proper functioning of the state.

Science was the regnant lingua franca under the Shah and all of the other secular regimes which the United States and Britain put in power in the aftermath of World War II. It was based on the bifurcation of Logos which Descartes bequeathed to the West when, disgusted with the legacy of Christendom and the wars of the 17th century (he was a soldier in the Battle of White Mountain when the Magic King of Bohemia was deposed), he divided the world into the res cogitans, which was subjective, and the res extensa, which was its objective opposite. Morals got banned from that universe because no one, least of all Descartes, could figure out how they applied to balls moving in space, and the result was economics as pseudo-physics and the world as we know it now.

By the time Imam Khomeini founded an Islamic republic based on the rule of the guardians and total abolition of the separation of church and state which had characterized all of the secular Islamic regimes in the Middle East, the Enlightenment state was showing signs of strain. In the intervening three decades since that time, it has all but completely collapsed. The American experiment in ordered liberty failed completely during the 30-some crucial years that spanned the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Shorn of the religious input that the Catholic Church had provided, however incompletely, America was unable to prevent the complete eclipse of its own democratic principles and their replacement by the crudest form of Jewish plutocracy, symbolized best by the role which casino mogul Sheldon Adelson played in the 2012 presidential elections, or in the 20 some standing ovations that the entire American Congress gave to Binyamin Netanyahu in the Spring of 2011 in order to keep Jewish money flowing into their coffers. When asked what kind of government America's founding fathers had created, Benjamin Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, by the time George W. Bush left the White House in 2008, it was clear that we couldn't keep it and that America had entered a state of totalitarian decadence that was the antithesis of everything that America's founding fathers had sought to maintain.

In our quest for the answer to the question "What is Islam?" we left the now pitch black set of the Prophet movie and arrived late that night in the holy city of Qom and proceeded, after a number of wrong turns, to the house of Hojjatoleslam Nasiri, an Islamic scholar who is editor of the 110 volume edition of the Haddith, which is to say, the commentaries which have accrued around the Koran. The title Hajjatoleslam indicates a rank just below that of ayatollah, and on the following day we would be joined with another cleric, Hojjatoleslam Hosayni, who would help Arash with the translation from English to Farsi and back again, as well as make his own contributions to our discussion.

After some hesitation because of the lateness of the hour, we launch into a discussion of the relationship between revelation and philosophy, which I initiate by citing Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech and the claim he made therein that that Arabic philosophy stopped when Averroes was rejected as a heretic after failing to reconcile Aristotle's claim that the world is eternal with Scripture's claim that it began in time. In coming up with the doctrine of two truths, Averroes was only trying to reconcile a dispute in Sunni Islam between the Mu'tazila, who had been influenced by Aristotle and believed in free will, and the 'Asharites, who believed in predestination, the position of the overwhelming majority of Sunni Muslims. According to a gloss on our conversation which Arash forwarded to me later,

the Mu'tazila maintained that in the event that there is a conflict between reason and revelation, that reason trumps revelation. The 'Asharites believe the opposite. The Shi'a position is that there can be no contradiction between the two, as revelation is not irrational or anti-rational, but trans- or supra-rational, and conflicts arise only because revelation is not properly understood, because reason is not pure (it is mixed up with emotions and illusion), or that reason has overstepped its bounds and transgressed into the compass that is rightly scripture's. Waliyic Islam goes into this at some length also.

The Shi'a position on revelation is similar to the Catholic position. Both religions claim to be based on a canonical set of writings, which are both perfect — which is to say, efficacious for salvation — and complete — which is to say, compiled definitively at a certain period of time, after which no new revelation will be added. This is where the problems start. If all knowledge comes from revelation, and revelation is complete at some point in the past, how do you adjudicate the moral liceity of new technologies like credit default swaps or birth control pills?

The Catholic answer is Sacred Tradition, which is "like a mirror, in which the Church during its pilgrim journey here on earth, contemplates God, from whom she receives everything, until such time as she is brought to see him face to face as he really is."[6] Sacred Tradition "comes from the apostles" and "makes progress in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on. . . . Thus, as the centuries go by, the Church is always advancing toward the plenitude of divine truth, until eventually the words of God are fulfilled in her."[7]

Any attempt to deal with the relationship between revelation and reason in Islamic thought invariably runs into the Islamic version of sola scriptura, at which point all discussions run the danger of hitting a brick wall, ours being no exception to that rule. In retrospect, I think it was a tactical error to talk about logos when I could have used the more accurate word tradition to convey the same thing, something which I probably committed because of the cold, the lateness of the hour, and my chronic lack of sleep because of jet lag. This might have circumvented triggering the Islamic aversion to pagan philosophy, which it sees as a form of idolatry. Nasiri considered Averroes a heretic because Averroes took Aristotle seriously in the first place. Given the sola scriptura approach to revelation, there is no explanation of how a body of scripture which is complete at a certain period of time can find application to future contingencies which the writers of Scripture could not have imagined. Sola scriptura forces the believer to misstate the question by asking what the Koran has to say about credit default swaps and birth control pills.

The way out of this dilemma is some form of sacred tradition based on Logos. This allows the believer to claim that "Sacred Scripture is the speech of God"[8] but it also allows the application of scriptural principles to future contingencies. The Church rejects sola scriptura, because, among other reasons, it invariably leads the interpreter of scripture into an intellectual dead end. The Church "does not draw her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone"[9] because that would preclude dealing with any future contingency not included in Sacred Scripture. The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone, which is based on both Scripture and Tradition. In fact, "Tradition, sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others."[10]

Sacred Tradition is bound up with Logos, which is to say, unaided reason's ability to discern the order of the universe, because it claims that: "God, who creates and conserves all things by his Word, provides men with constant evidence of himself in created realities. . . ." Dei Verbum, the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation then cites Romans I, 19-20: "For what can be known about God is perfectly plain to them [i.e., the pagan Romans] since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity — however invisible — have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made. That is why such people are without excuse: they knew God and yet refused to honor him as God or thank him; instead, they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened." Dei Verbum claims that "God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason."

According to a gloss Arash sent after the interview, Islam would reject Paul's claim because "The Shi'a position is that [unaided human reason] is necessary but not sufficient. As Hj. Nasiri pointed out: each of the philosophers believes his position to be the most reasonable, and without revelation, there is and can be no criterion with which to assay the correctness of a given position."

In continuing the discussion, Arash makes it clear that the Ayatollah Javadi, however, has a slightly different position, claiming

that reason itself sees its own limitations. For example, reason sees that its ambit is conceptual, and that concepts are discrete and finite, that reality is continuous and infinite, and that therefore, its epistemic ambit is limited.

But then, after undercutting what Paul and Sacred Tradition have to say about unaided human reason, the Ayatollah Javadi goes on:

to affirm the importance and indeed the indispensability of reason, stating that a person who fails to abide by its dictates "will be taken to Hell, plea as he might (on the Day of Judgment) that he never saw anything in scripture (pertaining to these imperatives)": (rather,) he will be told, "you were endowed with intelligence, and (it was) your intelligence (which) decreed these (imperatives) to you." (Human) intelligence is "the proof (sufficient unto) Islam" {hojjat ol-islam}, and its dictates are the dictates of (our) religion.

Whether the Ayatollah Javadi would accept the idea that "God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason" is a question I cannot answer at this point. He lives in Qom, but he didn't take part in our symposium. Catholics believe that there can be no conflict between faith and reason, but Muslims believe that there is no possibility of conflict between the Koran and all ideas because the Koran is the source of all knowledge. The more the mullahs revert to sola scriptura the more imperiled any dialogue becomes; in fact, every discussion that starts out with sola scriptura as its premise veers perilously close to the story of the Muslims and the Library of Alexandria. Either what is in the library contradicts the Koran, in which case it is heretical and should be burnt, or it repeats what is in the Koran, in which case it is superfluous and should be burnt as well. There is no escape from the inexorable logic of sola scriptura.

When the discussion turns toward a consideration of creation, I once again complicate things unnecessarily by dragging Aristotle into the discussion. The universe is created by God and, therefore, a manifestation of the God's mind. Therefore, we can know the mind of God by studying creation. Every time I make an overture like this I am stopped by the Islamic notion of the word of God. Citing St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, I claim that pagans will be held accountable for their actions even though they lack any revelation because unaided reason can derive the moral law from creation. Every time I make a claim like this it has to be translated not only back into Farsi but also into the philosophical framework of Islamic sola scriptura, which claims that all knowledge comes from the prophets. There is simply no possibility of a figure like Aristotle in this conceptual framework.

If I bring up Aristotle, I am accused of being a polytheist because he worshipped 21 gods. No, I say. Logos was part of the universe because the universe was created by God. Of course, this claim is predicated on a notion of the Trinity. Creation is the revelation of God the Father, a concept which is heretical in two ways according to Islam. First of all, because it is predicated on the Trinity and, secondly, because of the claims it makes about unaided human reason. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, I claim, merely articulated what was already there. They were midwives for Logos and, like midwives, they brought the concept of God's eternal pre-existent Logos into the world. When I make this point, the imam says that Aristotle is not necessary. I respond by asking, necessary for what? God's death on the cross was necessary for the salvation of the human race, as is the Church he founded as the source of grace. In conceding that Aristotle is not necessary for salvation, I in effect concede the imam's position, since he is only interested in what is necessary. Since Aristotle is not necessary he can be dismissed along with philosophy in general.

The imam then brings up Kant and Hume and Marx. How does the believer deal with them? He wonders. By refuting them, I say, but that is only possible if they are measured against Logos. I claim that Kant et al. can be refuted by showing where they deviate from Logos, but the Nasiri claims that since Logos is a Greek and therefore pagan concept, this means fighting the infidel on his own terms, something which is pointless at best and tantamount to idolatry at worst. This attitude leads to a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment, which isn't necessarily bad, but with that rejection goes a rejection of all philosophy, including Plato, Aristotle, and the idea of Logos, which is crucial to the application of Gospel principles to future contingencies.

The result is the curious duality of the third world, which accepts the technology which is the fruit of the West's acceptance of Logos, but not the philosophy which would allow its proper application. In this regard, Islam is no different than the post-Enlightenment West. In applying a fundamentalist sola scriptura understanding of the Koran to modern technology, certain issues have fallen through the cracks, and human sexuality is one of the most significant.

The Rise of Asharism and the Closing of The Muslim Mind

Unlike Christianity, whose seminal texts were written in Greek and, therefore, within the orbit of Greek philosophy, Islam arose in an intellectual backwater in the middle of the largely polytheistic Arabian peninsula, with a sacred scripture written in a language that lacked a firm foundation in Logos. It then spread like wild-fire through regions of Christendom weakened by Christian heresies. Muhammad began preaching monotheism to the citizens of Mecca at around 610 A.D. Forty years later Muslims ruled Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. Over the course of the next century, Islam had became the religion of everyone from the western borders of China to the Pyrenees. It was at this point that Islam, as part of the consolidation of its conquests, came into contact with Greek thought.

The outcome of that meeting was by no means a foregone conclusion. It would take Christianity, which was rooted in Greek language and culture, roughly 13 centuries to sort out the relationship between faith and reason and to come up with a measured response to the challenges of thinkers like Tertullian, who wondered famously, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"

Islam, which lacked the cultural patrimony of the Greek language, had to confront Hellenic thought less than a century after the first Hajj, which took place in 630 A.D., when Muhammed led his followers from Medina to Mecca, where he cleansed the Kaaba of its idols and rebuilt it as the house of God.[11] Given the intellectual disparity between the largely illiterate conquerors and the philosophically sophisticated centers of Hellenistic learning that they conquered, conflict between faith and reason was inevitable. The surprising thing about early Islam's contact with the realm of Greek thought is how well it went at the beginning.

After Abk Ja'far Abdullah al-Ma'mkn ibn Harkn defeated his brother in a battle for the throne in Bagdhad and became caliph in 813, he "took the title of imam, and chose a Shi'a as his successor."[12] The decision was significant because Shi'a Islam's rationalist heritage would preserve it from the ravages of fideism which would soon sweep through the Sunni majority. Al Ma'mun gave his official protection to the Mu'tazilites, who created the first fully developed theological school in Islam, championed the primary role of reason; reason's ability to know morality; the goodness and justice of God as required by reason; the unity of God; and the necessity of man's free will. They represented the beginning of the hellenization of Islamic thought insofar as they employed Greek philosophical concepts and logic in their consideration of theological questions.[13]

According to Robert Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamicist Crisis, "Al-Ma'mun, strongly influenced by the Mutalzilite movement, was the greatest patron of philosophy and science in the history of Islam."[14] The Mu'tazilites were rationalist theologians who felt that God's power was equaled by his reason and that the one could not contradict the other. The Mu'tazilites, according to Reilly, "would have been in accord with Thomas Aquinas's proposition that man can apprehend created things with his mind because they were first thought by God."[15] The Mu'tazilites felt that creation was intelligible because it was created by God, who left his indelible stamp on it. God, in turn, was "guided by the rationality of the universe he created," which meant that man could apprehend the mind of God by studying his creation. The notion that "not acting reasonably" was "contrary to God's nature," was "a respectable theological position within Islam."[16]

This happy state of affairs did not last long. The next two caliphs upheld al Ma'mun's defense of Mu'tazilite doctrine, but:

In the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja'afar al-Mutawikkil (847-861), the tables were turned. The mihmah was shut down and the Mu'tazilite judges responsible for the inquisition were cursed from the pulpits by name. Holding the Mu'talizite doctrine became a crime punishable by death. The Mu'tazilites were expelled from court, removed from all government positions, and their works were largely destroyed. Al-Mutawakkil released the aged Ibn Hanbal from prison and prohibited "discussing the intricacies of what is creed and what is uncreated in a copy of vocal recitation of the Qur'an."[17]

The defeat of the Mu'tazilites would have far-reaching consequences for Islam. For one thing, it deepened the split between the Sunni and the Shi'a. That chasm exists to this day and brings with it major geopolitical ramifications, of which the current civil war in Syria is just one manifestation. The Mu'tazilites "fled to the more hospitable Shi'a areas under the Buwayid rulers in eastern Persia" at around the same time that the 12th Imam went into the state of occultation that has lasted until this day. The absence of an infallible imam meant that "the Shi'a had to think for themselves,"[18] something which prevented the excesses of fideism which would ravage their Sunni brethren for centuries there after. Eventually, according to Reilly, "the most widely accepted Shi'a teaching contained elements derived from the Mu'tazili school."[19]

The expulsion of the Mu'talizites from Bagdhad meant the end of theology (or Kalam) and its replacement by jurisprudence and casuistry. It meant the loss of Logos in public discourse, which meant the rise of fideism, a sola scriptura approach to the Koran, and the end of both philosophy and science.

The anti-rationalist view never triumphed in Christianity because Christ's identity as the Logos incarnate was firmly established in the first sentence of the Gospel of St. John, when the evangelist wrote "En arche een ho Logos," In the beginning, there was reason and order (Logos). "If Christ is Logos," Reilly writes:

if God introduces himself as ratio, then God is not only all-powerful, He is reason. While the Mu'tazilites claimed something similar, they did not have a scriptural authority of similar significance to confirm their position in an unassailable way, while their opponents had ample scriptural material to oppose them.[20]

The turn against reason which began under the reign Caliph Ja'afar al-Mutawikkil found its completion under the intellectual guidance of Islam's Tertullian, Abu Hasan al-Ash'ari (873-935), founder of the eponymous Ash'arite school of Islamic thought which viewed God "as pure will, without or above reason."[21] Al-Ash'ari had been a Mu'tazilite until the age of 40. He then turned reason against reason by making God's word an expression of his Will rather than an expression of his reason or Logos. Logos, at this point, simply evaporated from the Islamic universe. As a result of this turn against reason, "there is no rational order invested in the universe upon which one can rely, only the second-to-second manifestation of God's will."[22] As a result, "reality becomes incomprehensible and the purpose of things in themselves indiscernible because they have no inner logic. If unlimited will is the exclusive constituent of reality, there is really nothing left to reason about."[23]

The triumph of the Ash'arite school of thought in Islam meant the end of a comprehensible universe. In the absence of Logos, which is to say, the evidence of reason in creation, every thing from politics to physics became a function of will, because as Father James Schall puts it:

The rational creature can only "participate" in the eternal law of God if that law is itself founded in Logos, in Word [or Reason]. If it is grounded merely in will, even if it is God's will, as various theologies and philosophies are tempted to maintain, there can be no real "participation" in the eternal law by the human being. Why? Essentially, because there is nothing to participate in if what is grounded in and known only by will can, at any time, be the opposite of what it is at first thought to be.[24]

Any notion that God was in any way bound by the rational nature of his Being became in the minds of the Ash'arites an affront to his omnipotence:

The notion that God had to do something was anathema to the traditionalists and to the Ash'arites. For them, Allah is not bound by anything. Nothing is obligatory for Him. If it were, His omnipotence would be compromised. The Mu'tazilite response to this was that God must be consistent with Himself, and that in no way compromises his omnipotence. It simply defines who He is.[25]

British-Lebanese scholar George Hourani claimed that "the turning point in the suppression of Mu'tazilism occurred in the 11th century with creedal proclamations of the caliph Qadir beginning in 1017, followed by Hanbalite demonstrations in Baghdad in the 1060s and the favor shown to the Ash'arites by the Seljuq sultans and their wazir Nizam al-Mulk." "Thus ended," writes Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, "the most serious attempt to combine reason with revelation in Islam." "By the 12th century," he concludes, "the conservative, anti-rationalist school of thought had almost completely destroyed the Mu'tazila influence. So hard was this reaction, that al-Ash'ari is considered to be relatively moderate as compared with Ibn Hanbal and later the Wahhabis, who did not allow any form of speculation."[26]

One hundred and fifty years after al-Ashari's death, al-Ashari's disciple Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) completed the demolition of reason which his master began by claiming that "nothing in nature can act spontaneously and apart from God."[27] After abolishing secondary causality and Logos, al-Ghazali put will in their place. Will precedes knowledge. Like the German romantics and American adherents to that school like Ralph Waldo Emerson, "it is the act that produces knowledge" for al-Ghazali. Unlike St. John, who claimed that "In the beginning was the word," al-Ghazali, like Goethe's Faust, claimed that, "Am Anfang war did Tat." Or as Reilly puts it:

"In the beginning was the Word" is transformed into "In the beginning was the Deed." This contrast captures the two radically different theologies of the Mu'tazilites and the Ash'arites. Fazur Rahman summed up the differences by saying that Ash'arism "had rendered God a concentrate of power and will, just as the Mu'tazila had made him a concentrate of justice and rationality."[28] In positing God's will as the antithesis of his justice and rationality, al-Ghazali "broke the back of rationalistic philosophy and in fact brought the career of philosophy . . . to an end in the Arabic part of the Islamic world."[29]

In 1180, almost 100 years after the publication of al-Ghazali's book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Averroes (1126-1198) tried to launch a rationalist counterattack against al-Ghazali's defense of the Ash'arite creed with the publication of The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which is "an almost line-by-line refutation of al-Ghazali's book."[30] But the attempt failed, and Averroes's books were burned in the town square of Cordoba instead. After Averroes's defeat, "the great majority of Islamic jurists adopted [al-Ghazli's] ideas . . . spurning deductive reasoning altogether"[31] and producing ideologies like Wahhabism, which are "even more inimical to the primacy of reason that Ash'arism."[32] The result in the political realm was the degeneration of the caliphate into an inscrutable dictatorship in every Islamic country, except those which espoused Shi'ism, "which has not granted de jure legitimacy to any ruler after the occultation of the 12th imam."[33]

The triumph of Ash'arism had incalculable consequences because it made moral philosophy, as in Aristotle's Ethics, impossible. There is no sense in this form of Islam of man fulfilling his nature, or of the "good" as that which aids him in doing so, or of the fulfillment of man's nature as defining his "good." Rather, the good is understood only as a matter of obedience to the external commandments of God — whatever they may be — unrelated to any internal logic in man himself or in creation.[34]

That means there is "no entelechy, no such thing as 'having one's end within,' as Aristotle put it. Just as God does not act teleologically, His creatures have no telos."[35] Everything that resolves itself into will, as Shakespeare pointed out, becomes a function of appetite, which eventually destroys itself. Duncan Macdonald comes to the same conclusion as Shakespeare:

Al-Ghazali's "primary conception is, volo ergo sum [I will; therefore I am]. It is not thought which impresses him, but volition. From thought he can develop nothing; from will can come the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Willer, so, too, is the soul of man. They are akin, and therefore, man can know and recognize God."[36]

It should be obvious by now that the history of western philosophy is in many ways the reverse of the history of Islamic philosophy. After Aquinas integrated the good in Aristotle and the Greeks into Scholasticism which came up with a synthesis of both faith and reason that respected the claims of both, the West betrayed the hard-won enculturation of Logos that Aquinas achieved and turned from reason to will. The nominalists of the Middle Ages had always posed a threat in this regard, but their latent threat became overt when Martin Luther demonized reason as a whore and thereby opened the door for Nietzsche, who would complete Luther's train of thought at the end of the 19th century with his attack on Christ/Socrates and the promotion of Dionysian will as their alternative.

The parallels between the Ash'arite School of Islamic thought and modern philosophy which are so striking at first glance are ultimately predictable because of the limited number of available options when it comes to the relationship between thought and being. Like David Hume, al-Ghazali insisted that there is no "natural" sequence of cause and effect. According to al-Ghazali,

The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary. . . . Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not in being necessary in itself, incapable of separation. . . . The agent of burning is God. . . . For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only simultaneity, not causation, and in reality there is no other cause . . . but God.[37]

Aquinas identifies this claim as "the error of the Law of the Moors,"[38] but it is also the error of David Hume and Jacques Derrida. Like the Deconstructionists, "Al-Ghazali taught that the intellect should only be used to destroy itself."[39] David Hume is as vehement in his rejection of faith as al-Ghazali is in his rejection of reason, but both men find common ground in their mutually shared skepticism, which denies a Logos which includes faith and reason. In a universe which is purely a manifestation of God's will, God becomes a Nietzschean.[40] All philosophers become sophists, and truth, as Thrasymachus predicted, becomes the opinion of the powerful. In a statement that had direct relevance to the birth control discussion I had with the imams in Qom and the second thoughts the Ayatollah Khamenei was having over the government's support of population control, Sheikh Nabhani "taught that there was no such thing as morality in Islam; it was simply what God taught. If Allah allowed it, it was moral. If He forbade it, it was immoral."[41]

Reilly sees a connection between the voluntarism of the Ash'arite school of Islamic thought, the voluntarism of modern western philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche, and the voluntarism which underpins the philosophy of Salafism, which is the ideological driving force behind Islamic terrorism. According to Tony Corn: "In the past 30 years, one particular brand — pan-Islamic Salafism — has been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the failure of pan-Arab Socialism and, in the process, to marginalize the more enlightened forms of Islam to the point where Salafism now occupies a quasi-hegemonic position in the Muslim world."

The main proponent of Salafism is Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian author, educator, Islamist theorist and poet, who was convicted of plotting the execution of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and executed by hanging.[42] Qutb's writings expressed what can be called without exaggeration, hatred of the United States as obsessed with materialism, violence and sexual pleasure, a hatred which Qutb's brother Muhammed conveyed to Osama bin Laden, who was his student at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.[43]

The Islamism that Qutb promoted is based, according to Reilly, "upon a deformed ideology that nonetheless shares in the classical ideological conflation of heaven and earth into one realm." The goal of Islamism is "to reestablish the Kingdom of God upon earth" or "to create a new world."[44] In spite of his aversion to Marxism, Qutb was influenced by its teaching, something which caused the Islamists to mix the totalitarian program of the Communists with the Ash'arite interpretation of Islam. Reilly sees a "nearly complete ideological affinity" between the Nazi or communist revolutionary points of view and the Islamism of Qutb. His logic in linking the three, however, is less than persuasive because the ideology of race, while present in Zionism, is completely absent from both Islam and Communism.

In his analysis of the closing of the Muslim mind, Reilly fails to see that Sayyid Qutb is the uncanny ideological Doppelgaenger of Leo Strauss, and that Salafism is not only the mirror image of neoconservatism in the Islamic world, it is a creation of neoconservatism as well.[45] If there had been no neoconservatism, Qutb would have languished in the journals of Middle East Studies departments. Because of the neoconservative takeover of American foreign policy during the Reagan administration, and in particular because of Bill Casey's mobilization of the mujahadin in Afghanistan, Qutb's ideas became the marching orders for America's proxies in the war to topple the Soviet Union, and after the successful conclusion of that war, Qutb's ideas, spread by American assets like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, would become the basis of Islamist terrorism campaigns throughout the Arab world. Whenever Qutb's Islamism was in danger of failing because of its penchant for murder, terror and violent wretched against Muslims, the neoconservatives would rehabilitate it to act as a tool of American foreign policy, as in Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria, or as a foil that made their efforts seem necessary for America's survival.

After his stay in American, Qutb returned to Egypt, and after supporting the revolt of Gamal Abdul Nasser against the English, ended in prison where he was tortured by Egyptian secret police who were trained by the CIA. In a series of books written in prison, Qutb called upon a revolutionary vanguard to rise up and overthrow the leaders who had allowed their people to be infected with Jahilya, which is to say, libido dominandi, the use of sexual liberation as a form of political control. Qutb justified the murder of secular Islamic leaders by arguing that they had become so secular that they were no longer Muslim. In 1966 Qutb was put on trial for treason. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and on August 29, 1966, Qutb was executed. But his ideas lived on because of Imam Zawahari. Zawahari was to become the mentor of Osama bin Laden.

One year after Qutb's death, the social order collapsed in America in a series of riots in places like Detroit and Newark which called the entire liberal agenda, epitomized by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and his civil rights act into question. This collapse lent new power to Leo Strauss's ideas. In the early '70s Irving Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected policy makers in Washington who were determined to find out why the liberal policies of the Great Society had failed. Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama had been taught Leo Strauss's ideas at the University of Chicago. Irving Kristol's son William had studied Strauss's theories at Harvard. Together, this group became known as the neoconservatives.

In the place of the liberal ideas which had now failed, the neoconservatives proposed "myths" about the threat of a common enemy which would stop the social disintegration they believed liberal freedom had unleashed. American foreign policy, they averred, needed to break with the pragmatism of Henry Kisssinger, and return to the Manichean scenario of good vs. evil which had motivated America during the anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s. The neoconservatives allied themselves with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, President Ford's chief of staff, and hired Harvard historian Richard Pipes to concoct a scenario which would explain how the now moribund Soviet Union constituted a clear and present danger to America. The cadre which worked under Pipes came to be known as Team B, and their findings were published by a neocon front operation known as the Committee on the Present Danger.

At the same time that the neoconservatives were beating the drum for the resumption of the anti-Communist crusade in America, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a medical doctor from a prosperous elite family in Cairo, was spreading Qutb's ideas via an underground Islamic cell he had created in Egypt. Qutb's ideas were spreading rapidly, especially among the student population, because they exposed the real corruption in Egyptian society which the millionaire elite bankers tried to conceal behind the façade of westernization at the hands of western banks and social engineering campaigns like birth control. Zawahiri, who had imbibed Marxist revolutionary ideas from his mentor Qutb, was convinced that a vanguard could rise up and overthrow the corrupt Sadat regime.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, another Rockefeller puppet, in 1979, Zawahiri began to feel that his dream of establishing an Islamist state was possible. Khomeini put forward the idea of an Islamicist state that was remarkably similar to Qutb's idea. He acknowledged this by putting Qutb's face on one of the postage stamps of the new Islamic republic. "Yes," Khomeini told the West, "we are reactionaries and you are Enlightenment intellectuals."

Anwar Sadat was appalled by Khomeini's revolution in Iran. "This is disgraceful," he told one reporter. "This is a crime against Islam." He then went on to say that his airplane was ready to fly at a moment's notice to Tehran and bring the Shah to Egypt. Neither leader, however, survived the Islamist ferment that was destined to bring down every secular regime in Islam. The Shah died of cancer in exile in the United States in 1980, and Sadat fell dead one year later under a hail of bullets fired by soldiers who belonged to the secret organization Zawahiri had founded on Qutb's principles known as Islamic Jihad. The assassination was successful, but it failed to cause the revolution it was intended to create. That night Cairo remained calm; the masses failed to rise up. Zawahiri was arrested and put on trial, footage of which shows Zawahiri shouting from his cage in English: "Who are we? We are Muslims who believe in their religion."

Zawahiri was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Like Sayyid Qutb, Zawahiri was tortured, and under torture he began to interpret Qutb's theories in a far more radical way. Zawahiri concluded that the masses didn't rise up in the aftermath of Sadat's assassination because selfish individualism had corrupted them as completely as it had corrupted their leader. Like Lenin and Trotsky, Zawahiri concluded that only a revolutionary avant garde could do for the masses what the masses were incapable of doing for themselves.

The neoconservatives had come to the same conclusion in America, and it was they who would play the role of avant garde in the newly elected Reagan administration, which had come to power by exploiting Jimmy Carter's weakness in dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis.

The neoconservatives got key appointments in the Reagan administration. Paul Wolfowitz became head of the State Department policy staff, and his close friend Richard Perle became assistant secretary of defense. Once their ally Willam Casey was appointed head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the neoconservatives believed that they had the power to implement their vision of America's revolutionary destiny. After reading The Terror Network by Claire Sterling, a piece of journalism confected from black propaganda which the CIA had invented to smear the Soviet Union, Casey persuaded Reagan in 1983 to sign a secret document that fundamentally changed American foreign policy. The country would now fight covert wars to push back the hidden Soviet threat around the world.

It was a triumph for the neoconservatives. Their fictions had triumphed over reality. The CIA knew that the terror network Claire Sterling described in her book didn't exist because they themselves had made it up. None of this mattered to the neoconservatives, who now found themselves joining forces with the Islamists in Afghanistan, where together they would fight an epic battle against the Soviet Union. Both the Islamists and the neoconservatives came out of Afghanistan believing that they had defeated the Soviet empire and were thus in possession of the power to transform the world. The neoconservatives saw themselves as revolutionaries who were going to transform the world. As Richard Perle put it: "We're closer to being revolutionaries than conservatives because we want to change some deeply entrenched notions about the role of American power in the world."

After Casey concluded a pact with the Northern Alliance, American money and weapons began to pour across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan, and CIA agents began training the Afghans in the techniques of assassination and terror, including car bombing. In order to supply the manpower necessary to defeat the Soviet Union governments through out the Islamic world began emptying their prisons of their inmates and sending them off to the jihad in Afghanistan. One of those inmates was Ayman Zawahiri, the man behind the murder of Anwar Sadat. Zawahiri set up the headquarters of the newly revived Islamic Jihad in Peshwar, Pakistan, where he met a Saudi who shared his views by the name of Osama bin Laden. Zawahiri convinced bin Laden only violent revolution could succeed in purging western decadence from the Arab world. He also persuaded him to use the considerable financial resources at his disposal to create violent revolutions in Algeria and Egypt.

In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden had become convinced that an armed vanguard could reproduce the Islamist victory in Afghanistan in every secular Islamic state in the world. At around the same time, the neoconservatives came, mutatis mutandis, to the same conclusion. The same neoconservatism which had driven the Soviets out of Afghanistan could now drive secular Islamic leaders like Saddam Hussein, who had been America's proxy in the 1980-87 war with Iran, from their thrones and establish a purer form of American-style democracy in their place. After the successful conclusion of the war to liberate Kuwait, neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz wanted to press on to Baghdad to bring about a transformation of the Middle East. They were furious when George Bush senior and Council on Foreign Relations types like Brent Scowcroft refused, and at this point they called down political fire upon their own position and worked for the defeat of George Bush, Sr.

The Islamist counterparts to the neoconservatives would go into eclipse during the 1990s as well, but largely as a result of the negative effect their terrorist campaigns had on the masses in countries like Algeria and Egypt, which were subjected to a campaign of terrorist bombings which turned the masses against them. In the early '90s Algeria and other Islamic countries were being torn apart by a vicious wave of Islamist terror. Jihadists who had returned from Afghanistan were trying to topple these regimes. The revolutionaries soon found that the masses did not rise up and follow them. The regimes stayed in power and the radical Islamists were hunted down. The masses refusal to rise up showed that they too had become corrupted.

In Algeria this logic went completely out of control. The Islamists killed thousands of civilians because they believed all of these people had become corrupted. By 1997 the Islamist revolution was failing. In Algeria, they started to kill each other. By 1997 Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan. Now they were facing failure. The attempts to topple regimes in the Arab world had not succeeded. The people had turned against bin Laden and Zawahiri because of the horrific violence, and Afghanistan was the only place they had left to go. This is when they started developing a new strategy. In May 1998, bin Laden and Zawahiri announced a new Jihad, which would focus on attacks against America itself.

In 1998 the neoconservatives found themselves in the same situation as the Islamists. The attempt to mobilize the Christian right to gain power via a moral revolution in America had failed and they had become marginalized in both domestic and foreign policy. What saved both groups from political oblivion was the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. In their response to 9-11 attacks, the neoconservatives would transform the failing Islamicist movement into the revolutionary force that Zawahiri had always dreamed of. After the American invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, an invasion which wiped out the last remnants of the jihadists who had fought against the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives reconstructed the failed Islamist movement as a phantom enemy which would consolidate the neocon hold on power during the administration of George W. Bush.

Osama bin Laden had no formal organization until the Americans invented one for him during the trial of the blind sheik who was responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1998. There is no evidence that bin Laden used the term al Qaeda to refer to the existence of a group until after September 11, when he realized this was the term that Americans had given it. The 9-11 attacks brought the neoconservatives back to power in America because this proved that what they had been predicting throughout the 1990s was correct. Now they saw this new war on terror in the same epic terms as the anti-Communist crusade under Ronald Reagan. Or as Richard Perle put it: "it's a war on terrorists who want to impose an intolerant tyranny on all mankind. An Islamic universe in which we are all compelled to accept their beliefs and live by their lights. And in that sense this is a battle between good and evil." The neoconservatives took a failing movement which had lost mass support and began to reconstruct it in the image of a powerful network of evil controlled from the center by bin Laden in his lair in Afghanistan.

As part of his attempt to explain the contemporary political situation in the world, Reilly tries to associate Islamism, Communism, and Nazism, but the triad which really explains world politics in the wake of the jihad to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union was Communism, neoconservatism, Islamism, and the deep structure which underpins all three is the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Unlike David Horowitz, who has discussed this topic at length, Reilly fails to see that Communism's attempt to destroy and rebuild the social order is a manifestation of the Jewish penchant to create heaven on earth, as epitomized by the saying tikkun olam. As Horowitz wrote:

Marx was a rabbi after all. The revolutionary idea is a religious consolation for earthly defeat. For the Jews of our Sunnyside heritage, it is the consolation for internal exile; the comfort and support for marginal life. A passage home. Belief in the Idea is the deception of self that made people like my father and you and me feel real.[46]

Marxism is revolutionary because it is Jewish. As Horowitz puts it:

For nearly two hundred years, Jews have played a disproportionate role as leaders of the modern revolutionary movements in Europe and the West. . . . By carrying the revolution to its conclusion, socialists would usher in a millennium and fulfill the messianic prophecies of the pre-Enlightenment religions that modern ideas had discredited. Through this revolution, the lost unity of mankind would be restored, social harmony would be reestablished, paradise regained. It would be a tikkun olam, a repair of the world.[47]

Blinded by his neoconservatism, Reilly fails to see that Islamism is a manifestation of the Jewish revolutionary spirit, and that when Qutb calls Islam "to unite heaven and earth in a single system" he is really calling for the Islamist version of tikkun olam. This may help to explain some the paradoxes of American foreign policy as well as the intellectual lacunae in Reilly's otherwise informative book. If there is ever a version of Islam that is incompatible with the Logos of the Catholic faith, it is the Islamism of Qutb and followers like Islamic cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the blind sheikh) who exhorted his followers to "Kill them [Americans] wherever you find them."

This command found its uncanny fulfillment in the murder of Ambassador Simpson in Libya. Hilary Clinton and John McCain have sown dragons' teeth by supporting the Salafists, a point that Reilly fails to make in his book, which, it must be admitted, was written before the advent of the Arab Spring and the change in American foreign policy from support of secularist puppets like Mubarak to support for Salafist puppets like Morsi. Yet, in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts, it is precisely the Islamist followers of Qutb that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States are now backing in the current civil war in Syria. Reilly criticizes the notion of perpetual war when it is endorsed by the Islamists but fails to see that that motto was articulated first by Trotsky, and that the most ardent followers of that principle are Jewish neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, who was a Trotskyite during his days at the Community College of New York, and his son William. The Kristols, pere et fils, were the intellectual architects of the current war in the Middle East. The one irony that Reilly can't seem to grasp, much less articulate, is that the neoconservatives, who are the ideological mirror image of the Islamists, put the Islamists in power in both Egypt and Libya, thereby jeopardizing both Israeli and American interests in the region. Nowhere do we find better substantiation of the old saw "politics makes strange bedfellows" than in the current incoherent policy of the State Department in the Middle East.

Trying to make sense of intellectual shift in the Islamic world away from secularist leaders like Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Muammar Khaddafi, Reilly claims that "Islamism within Islam may be roughly analogous to the development of liberation theology within Christianity. Especially in Latin America, Catholicism was infected with Marxist ideology by way of Christianity's preferential option for the poor,"[48] but the analogy limps in comparison to the connections between neoconservatism and Salafism which Reilly fails to see.

Reilly has a difficult time separating his neoconservative Americanism from his Catholicism, as when he uses "Article 18 of the International Declaration of Human Rights" which "stipulates that every individual has freedom of thought, which includes the freedom to change one's religion and beliefs" against the Muslims without understanding that no Catholic could subscribe to Article 18 if it meant a repudiation of Baptism. Indeed, the Church has a duty to use coercion to hold a Catholic to his baptismal promises, as she did during the Spanish Inquisition. We can disagree about the application but not the principle. Similarly, Reilly goes on to praise Muhammed Abdelmottaleb al-Houn, "who has the courage to say, 'If we must choose between human rights and shari'a, then we must prefer human rights.'" The patent absurdity of a statement like this becomes apparent when we transpose it to the Catholicism which Reilly espouses. Does Reilly really believe that if we must choose between "human rights" like abortion and gay marriage and the Magisterium, that we must prefer human rights? If this does not apply to the Magisterium, why should it apply to shari'a?

Reilly goes on to ridicule Hasan Nasrallah's claim that Hezbollah had "divinely guided missiles" which defeated the Israelis in their ill-fated incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Like Nasrallah, Mahmoud Chalhoub claimed that "Even the Israelis talk about a man all in white [the Mahdi] rid[ing] a white horse, who cut off the hand of one of their soldiers as he was about to launch a missile. . . . we have missiles guided by God."[49] Reilly, who is married to a Spaniard, should know that Cortez made similar claims about his conquest of Mexico. Cortez claimed that he saw St. James riding into battle on the side of the Spaniards, and if St. James, also astride a white horse, helped the Spaniards prevail over the Aztecs why shouldn't the Mahdi guide Hezbollah's missiles? In making his case against fellow believers, Reilly tries to outsecularize the secularists. If it is absurd for a Muslim to say, "When you shot, it was not you who shot but God," then it is just absurd for a Catholic to say, "If the Lord does not build the house, then in vain do the workmen labor." Reilly approves of secular prejudice in making his case against Islam, which would, if applied to Catholicism, completely undo his own position as well.

Reilly gets in trouble when dealing with contemporary Islam because of his neoconservative prejudices in general and in particular because of his reliance on the Middle East Media Research Institute (or MEMRI) as a source for his claims about the intellectual climate in the Islamic world. MEMRI purports to be a source of information on the Middle East, but it is nothing more than a front for Zionist propaganda, which scours Arabic newspapers for horror stories but never gets around to translating the racist diatribes of Israeli rabbis. MEMRI's main ploy involves citing any Arabic use of the word "Jew" as ipso facto proof of anti-Semitism, as in the quote, cited by Reilly: "If you study European history, you will see who was the main power in hoarding money and wealth in the 19th century. In most cases, it was the Jews." Reilly falls for this ploy completely, without any sense that one respected Catholic source after another made exactly the same claim. To give just two examples, both Civilta Cattolica, the official organ of the Vatican, and Georg Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI's great uncle, criticized Jews for their business practices in ways that would land them on MEMRI's hate list.

Similarly, Reilly, again citing MEMRI as his source, attacks "Iranian Filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh," as someone who "denies the Holocaust and states: Al-Qaeda and the Mossad carried out 9/11 together," without any indication of 1) just what holocaust denial means in this particular instance and why a delict confected by Debbie Lipstadt should be normative for Catholics and 2) how many Americans contest the conventional 9/11 narrative as well. If it is our right as Americans to contest the government's narrative on, say, why Building #7 collapsed, why are we denying this right to Iranians, or ridiculing them when they make use of it? The answer to that question can be found in the Jewish control of discourse, as manifested in MEMRI's ability to colonize the minds of neoconservative Catholics like Bob Reilly. If Reilly had done his own research into the career of Nader Talebzadeh, he might have discovered that Talebzadeh directed a 20-part film on the life of Jesus Christ, which won praise from the Vatican for attempting to give an Islamic understanding of Christ. But facts like that don't foster the demonization of Muslims that MEMRI exists to foster in the minds of the easily duped goyim. If there were a United States Media Research Institute in Iran, it would be able to come up with ideas far more absurd than MEMRI factoids like "Birth Control Increase [sic] STDs"[50] or the claim that Jews were responsible for "82 percent of all attempts to corrupt humanity" because they "were responsible for 82 percent of the world's video clips"[51] upon which Reilly bases his case against contemporary Islam. The Iranian equivalent of MEMRI could claim, without the faintest hint of exaggeration, that the president of the United States believes that two men have the right to marry each other, the topic of Reilly's current book project.

Fortunately, Reilly ends his inquiry into the closing of the Muslim mind on an even-handed note that is a welcome relief from the MEMRI agit-prop that disfigures much of his book. Reilly sees an intellectual symmetry in the current geopolitical situation, in which the divorce of reason from faith which has led to the current crisis in the West finds its mirror image in the divorce of faith from reason which has led to the intellectual crisis of Islam. Both have led to catastrophe, but in an inspired moment, both could just as easily lead to a mystical convergence, according to which the rejection of the Enlightenment on the part of the West would correspond exactly with the rejection of the Ash'arite anti-Enlightenment on the part of Islam.

The main thing blocking this convergence is ideology — in particular, the ideology of neoconservatism, which supports modernity, in the West and the ideology of Salafism in the Islamic world, which supports all of the voluntarism of western modernity as well. If there is a flaw in Reilly's book it lies in 1) his inability to see the fundamentally revolutionary character of neoconservatism and its incompatibility with the classical rationalism of the West and 2) his failure to see that both Salafism and neoconservatism are manifestations of the Jewish revolutionary spirit that has plagued the West since Annas and Caiaphas mocked Christ on the cross. The answer lies, as Reilly rightly states, in "The recovery of reason, grounded in Logos," as "the only sentinel of sanity," a recovery that "is imperative for the East as well as the West."[52]

The Logos of Sex

I then try to deal with the Logos of sex. Humans were created by God, a fact which implies that there is a Logos to human sexuality; therefore, it would be wrong to interfere or deliberately disrupt that Logos by denying, for example, its procreative dimension by contraception. As I am waiting for the imam's response, someone brings up coitus interruptus, which the Imam defends, claiming that "just because you open a can of coke doesn't mean that you have to finish it." By now the camera men have joined in the discussion. In what amounts to a tacit rebuke of what Nasiri just said about coke and sex, one of the cameramen claims that coitus interruptus leads to prostate cancer. Someone else claims that sodomy between a husband and wife is permitted because it is not forbidden by the Koran. The imam does not dispute this, prompting me to contend that a sola scriptura approach to the Koran has hampered Islam's ability to deal with sexual issues, which I go on to claim are the most crucial issues facing the Islamic Republic of Iran at this moment in its history.

On February 7, 2013, Stratfor, the global intelligence agency, announced that the economic sanctions which the United States had imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran were beginning to "unravel." On February 6, 2013, the European Union's Court of Justice removed Bank Saderat, one of Iran's largest foreign exchange banks, from the sanctions list. Bank Mellat, Iran's largest bank, had already been removed from the sanctions list a week before on January 30.

Following the announcement of the European Court of Justice, United States Vice-President Joseph Biden proposed high level talks to end the nuclear impasse. The proposed talks were rejected by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameni, but taken together with the Obama's administration's decision in the fall of 2012 not to attack Iran militarily, it looked as if a major change in Iran's policy were in the offing.

Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving, especially in diplomatic circles.

What looked like a thaw in relations acted as a cover for covert psychological operations of the sort I described in the speech on sexual liberation and political control which I gave on February 3, 2013 at the Third International Hollywoodism Conference.

Now that the economic sanctions are beginning to unravel and the military option has been taken off the table, Iran is being subjected to an even more intense version of sexual-oriented psychological warfare than the campaign that got unleashed on Palestine during the spring of 2002. During discussions with clergy and women's rights activists during my stay in Tehran, I heard repeated reports of covert dissemination of pornography. We are not talking simply about the sale of bootleg copies of R-rated Hollywood movies on the streets. We are talking about the covert distribution of pornographic DVDs gratis to the population at large. During the night, these DVDs are dropped off at people's houses like so many bottles of milk or newspapers. Oftentimes, the target of these psy ops can have his DVDs replaced by leaving them where the already viewed DVDs were picked up.

Pornography is only one aspect of this attempt to resexualize the culture as a prelude to returning sexuality to the status it enjoyed as a form of political control under the Shah. The dissemination of contraception propaganda and devices, begun under the Shah in collaboration with the Rockefeller Population Council, is an even more effective as well as pernicious form of using sexual liberation as political control.

Biden's overture was rejected by the Supreme Leader, but the fact that he made it at all at this moment in time indicates that the US bargaining position had been weakened by the European Court of Justice's decision, and that it would continue to weaken over time as more and more countries jockeyed for favorable positions vis a vis resuming trade with Iran. "Some naive people like the idea of negotiating with America [but] negotiations will not solve the problems," Khamenei said in the remarks, which were posted on his website. "If some people want American rule to be established again in Iran, the nation will rise up to face them."

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, responded to Biden's overture in a way that was both cautious and positive. If we put the removal of the military option together with the unraveling of the sanctions plus Biden's offer to negotiate together, it looks as if the US is trying to negotiate with Iran from a position of strength that is only going to diminish with time. That means increased psychological warfare, which would explain the fact that pornography is being delivered to the doors of Iranians like daily newspapers.

The Iranian leadership, however, is under its own form of pressure, one which is every bit as urgent as the pressure which the expiring sanctions has placed on the Obama administration. The Islamic government's acceptance of contraception has created a demographic time bomb which is going to destroy the revolution from within. Widespread use of the birth control pill has created a feminist fifth column in Iran that is waiting to be manipulated by Western-funded covert operations. In this respect the Green Revolution demonstrations of June 2009 were a harbinger of things to come. Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani claimed that women played a major role in the Green demonstrations of 2009, when[53] "Iran's body politic was invaded by feminine power."[54]

My contention that the sola scriptura approach to the Koran has hampered Islam in dealing with sexual issues finds independent corroboration in a speech which the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameni gave on October 10, 2012. In that speech Khameni claims that it was a mistake not to abandon the population control policies which the Islamic revolution of 1979 had inherited from the Shah. Khameni claims that:

we should have abandoned the population control policy in the mid-1370s [1990s]. I myself played a role in this mistake. Of course, it was a good policy at that time, but it should have been abandoned in the mid-1370s. We failed to do so, which was a mistake. As I said, our government officials and myself are responsible for this mistake. I hope Allah the Exalted and history forgives us. It is necessary to safeguard the young generation. As I said in a speech in the month of Ramadan, our country will grow old if we continue in this way. Our families and youth should have more children. The way it is practiced today, the policy — which limits the number of children that a family can have — is wrong. If we manage to keep our population young over the next ten, twenty years and far into the future, our youth will solve all the problems that our country is suffering from by relying on their characteristic preparedness, dynamism and talent.[55]

The main internal threat to the ongoing existence of the Iranian revolution of 1979 is birth control. After initially encouraging a high birth rate as the demographic basis for political and economic national power under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary government after Khomeini's death in 1989 inexplicably reversed his position and instituted what would turn out to be one of the most effective birth control campaigns in modern history. When Khomeini took power in 1979, Iran's birth rate was 6.5. By the time his successor Khameni gave his speech in the fall of 2012 lamenting the population decline, the Iranian birthrate had plummeted to a European level of less than two children, which is to say below replacement rate.[56] The New York Times was not slow in exposing the irony of the situation:

Under the grip of militant Islamic clerisy, Iran has seen its population of children implode. Accordingly, Iran's population is now aging at a rate nearly three times that of Western Europe. Maybe the middle aging of the Middle East will bring a mellower tone to the region, but middle age will pass swiftly to old age.[57]

Accounts differ on why and how the change came about. Some claim that the changes were instituted by the Rafsanjani government after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini; other reports claim that Khomeini himself was responsible for the change. One source claims that: "In the late 1980s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme leader, issued fatwas making birth control widely available and acceptable to conservative Muslims."[58] Either way, the birth rate plunged, but more importantly, as the LA Times put it, the promotion of contraception began "to usher in social changes, particularly in the role of women."[59] Crippled by a sola scriptura approach to morality, the religious leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran inadvertently created a feminist fifth column which would rise up against the revolutionary government during the Green Demonstrations of 2009. Or as the Los Angeles Times put it:

Without intending to, Iran's clerical leadership helped to foster "the empowerment of Iranian women," said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iran expert at Virginia Tech. "The mullahs may be winning the battle on the streets, but women are winning the battle inside the family."

Now the Supreme Leader is faced with the unenviable task of putting the contraceptive genie back into the moral lamp from which he conjured it over 20 years ago. No wonder he is asking Allah the All-merciful for forgiveness. President Ahmandinejad has joined in the anti-contraception campaign by claiming that:

Doubling the country's population of 75 million would enable Iran to threaten the West, he said. He has denounced the contraceptive program as "a prescription for extinction," called on Iranian girls to marry no later than 16 or 17 and offered bonuses of more than $950 for each child. So far, he has been widely ignored. "Iranian women are not going back," said Sussan Tahmasebi, an Iranian women's rights leader now living in the United States.[60]

On 25 July 2012, Supreme Leader Khamenei stated that Iran's contraceptive policy made sense 20 years ago, "but its continuation in later years was wrong. "Scientific and experts studies show that we will face population aging and reduction (in population) if the birth-control policy continues." Similarly:

Deputy health minister Ali Reza Mesdaghinia, was quoted in the semiofficial Fars news agency on 29 July saying that population control programs "belonged to the past," and that "there is no plan to keep the number of children at one or two. Families should decide about it by themselves. In our culture, having a large number of children has been a tradition. In the past families had five or six children. … The culture still exists in the rural areas. We should go back to our genuine culture."[61]

Informal conversations at the conference indicate that a return to "genuine culture" may be more difficult than overturning it via the introduction of contraception was. The government's decision to reverse Khomeini's pronatalist policies has created a society in which children are not welcome. On February 8, one of the Iranians attending the conference told me over breakfast that he and his wife are expecting their first child. He looks to be in his 30s and so relatively old, although I have no idea how old his wife is. His wife, he says, found the situation difficult because she was ridiculed for giving up a good paying job.

So begins a day of revelation about sexual issues. The wife of one of the members of the cultural nomenklatura gradually opened up and began talking about her experiences. It appears that all women wear the chador and that all women at the same time practice birth control. So when she told her mother that she is considering having a fourth child, the mother exploded and told her that "people will spit on you if you do." She is considering doing doctoral work, and I encourage her to explore the sexual issue. Her husband encourages her as well, which surprises me because I see a troubled look on his face when I raise the issue.

At another point during the conference the same woman tells me that she was fond of watching the TV series Sex and the City, something that would invariably bring up sexual themes, which would invariably pique her curiosity. One show was on dildos, including a discussion of a "rabbit," which turns out to be a type of vibrator. Human curiosity being what it is, this lady followed the "rabbit" down the rabbit hole known as the Internet and ended up viewing videos of the "rabbit" in action.

The more I talk the more the troubled issue of sexuality comes out. At a party one evening, a teenager launched into an attack on the lack of separation of church and state. He was, it seems, denounced for walking down the street holding hands with his girlfriend. He spends most of his time in the United States, where he goes to school and picks up the values that everyone else does in public schools there. Attending high school there has sexualized him. He admits to having had sexual relations with his girlfriend. Now he has become an apostle of American culture. No one should impose religion on other people, which I agree with. But what about the social order? What follows is typically teenage logic. He cites one horror story after another, people being flogged for possession of alcohol, although the actual instance he cites is of public intoxication of a teenager, which would have been against the law in the United States as well. I counter by saying that the suppression of real religion leads to imposition of capitalism. The more religion the less capitalism and vice versa. He seems impervious to anything I have to say, and so I join another conversation, but he eventually walks across the room and re-engages me by saying how unbending I am in my views and how beat up he feels at having talked to me.

When Nader Talebzadeh drove us back to the hotel through the almost deserted streets of Tehran, he claimed that women can walk the streets with no fear. He talks about the war with Iraq and serving as a filmmaker during the war, and surviving not one but three poison gas attacks from Saddam Hussein, courtesy of the Germans who provided the poison gas. The first attack was just mustard gas, the second and third were a combination of mustard gas and sarin. In addition to that, 700 missiles rained down on Tehran during the war, also courtesy of Germany. I nod sympathetically but can't bring myself to tell him that the whole revolution is now up for grabs because the mullahs failed to understand the logic of birth control.

After the second day's theological discussion in Qom, Hojjatoleslam Hosayni took me aside and told me that Islam is not interested in converting other believers. Islam was interested in justice. When the 12th imam returns from the state of occultation, he will arrive with Jesus at his side, and he will bring justice to the world's peoples. Islam, at least according to this imam, is interested in creating a coalition of all believers who will bring about justice.

At this point, the conversation, naturally enough, shifted to the pope, who claimed that Islam was spread by the sword in his by now famous Regensburg speech. I bring up the rumor that the pope has been invited to Iran, but no one is willing to confirm it. Would the pope even come if invited, they wonder. I say that Benedict XVI may not be the best pope to meet with the Muslims, and conclude the discussion by saying that he won't be pope forever. By the time we get back to Tehran, the news of Pope Benedict's abdication is making the rounds in the hotel lobby, and Arash, after recounting what I said to the Imam that afternoon, is calling me a prophet.

Before long the news accounts begin to pour in, attempting to explain something that hasn't happened in 600 years to a bewildered world. In the letter he wrote in Latin announcing his resignation, Pope Benedict said that he came to the decision to resign as a result of prayer, or as the New York Times put it:

Saying he had examined his conscience "before God," Benedict said he felt that he was not up to the challenge of guiding the world's one billion Catholics. That task will fall to his successor, who will have to contend not only with a Roman Catholic Church marred by the sexual abuse crisis, but also with an increasingly secular Europe and the spread of Protestant evangelical movements in the United States, Latin America and Africa.

On February 14 in an address to the clergy in Rome during the days following his resignation, Pope Benedict made a distinction between "the true Council" and "the Council of the media." If Pope Benedict is claiming that the "Council of the media" supplanted "the true Council," he is undoubtedly correct. But the statement doesn't go far enough. If the pope had spent more time researching the historical forces at work under the rubric of "media" at the Council, he would have had to deal with the role which Time magazine played in deforming the mission of the Council. That would have led him to the role played by Robert Blair Kaiser, which would have led him to the story of Malachy Martin and his role as a double agent working for the Jews at the B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee. His research, in other words, would have led him where he most probably did not want to go because it would have discredited one of the main failed experiments which grew out of the hi-jacked Council, namely, dialogue with the Jews.

The same is a fortiori true of the connection between Time magazine and John Courtney Murray. If Pope Benedict had looked into John Courtney Murray's relationship with Time magazine and Time magazine's relationship, via Harry Luce and C. D. Jackson, to the CIA, his research, once again, would probably have taken him where he did not want to go because it would have led him beyond comfortable generalities like "the Council of the media," to uncomfortable truths about who controlled the media and why they wanted to deform the council.

In the fall of 1958 the Church was in a perilous condition and virtually all of the cardinals who arrived in Rome to elect Pius XII's successor felt that something needed to be done. Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani seized the moment by approaching Pope John XXIII during the conclave that made him pope and asked him to call an ecumenical council to deal with the virtually invisible crisis then facing the Church. Ottaviani, then head of the Sacred Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, was a lifelong resident of Trastevere and an expert not only on the moral effects of film but the creator of a chain of movie theaters dedicated to showing films compatible with Catholic values. Ottaviani would go on to be cast in the role of villain at the council by none other than Time magazine, with the help of the German contingent at the council under the leadership of Josef Cardinal Frings of Cologne. A significant player in the German delegations was the man who would go on to become Ottaviani's successor at the CDF, Joseph Ratzinger:

Ottaviani was opposed in his movements for a rapid Council by German Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne. Frings' often clashed with Ottaviani on which direction the Council should take. In this Frings was assisted by "a progressive firebrand" who was "dissatisfied with many of the answers offered by the Church's official authorities," a young theological advisor named Father Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and then Pope Benedict XVI. The young Ratzinger has been described as "one of the theological young Turks leading the charge against the status quo Ottaviani embodied. ... He was among the behind-the-scenes plotters who ensured that the council foiled Ottaviani on virtually every issue."[62]

The task at hand was two-fold: first of all, restructure the Church from the de facto monarchy it had become under Pius XII to an institution where the authority would be more broad-based and, therefore, more effective in dealing with the local situation. This meant a rehabilitation of the role of bishop so that, secondly, it could meet the challenges of secularism head on.

The Osservatore Romano chose to announce the most momentous Catholic event for the 20th century in its January 26-7, 1959 issue. There were no blazing headlines, just a brief announcement that, in order to meet the errors of the time, and its excessive materialism, the pope intended to hold a synod of the Roman clergy, to call an ecumenical council of the universal church, and to modernize canon law; the council was also to be "an invitation to the separated communities to search for that unity towards which so many souls aspire." Ottaviani concurred on both the internal and the external goals and the best demonstration that he felt the Church was facing an external threat can be gleaned from the preparatory documents which got written under his direction.

In a preparatory schema issued on May 7, 1962 entitled "The Esteem of Virginity and Chastity," Ottaviani said quite bluntly that sexual issues were "the most acute and discussed moral problems of our day." They were eternally crucial because "the Church has always shown that she considers conjugal life as the ordinary way of sanctification for the majority of the human race."[63] However, that plan was in danger of being thwarted by the combination of sexual permissiveness and the newly created media of communication which were constantly attempting to inject this same sexual permissiveness into their programming. "Modern life," Ottaviani continued, giving his assessment of the postwar period,

without doubt, multiplies invitations to evil by such distractions as beauty contests, spectacles, billboards, songs, illustrated magazines, beaches, places of vacation, promiscuity, and certain forms of sport. This is why the Church never ceases to recall to each one the principles of prudence, conscience, and responsibility, the rights and duties of liberty, and the obligation of vigilance and precaution on the part of parents educators and civil authorities. This is also why the church points out as dangerous and condemns as erroneous all theories that are then translated into practice concerning the cult of movie stars, naturalism, the so-called sexual education, pansexualism, and certain injurious aspects of psychoanalysis. . . . it also studied those errors which are directly harmful to marriage, e.g., divorce, or indirectly, Malthusianism, and artificial insemination.[64]

Eventually the preparatory documents would be rejected by the Council fathers, something that undoubtedly caused Cardinal Ottaviani some consternation. However, the rejection was caused more by the approach of the documents, and the approach the council wanted to take to modernity rather than their content. Ratzinger describes "a certain discomforting feeling that the whole enterprise might come to nothing more than mere rubber-stamping of decisions already made. . . . The preparatory commission had undoubtedly worked hard, but their diligence was somewhat distressing." At issue was a new approach to a hostile world. The majority of the assembled bishops had decided the hard line of Pius IX and the syllabus of errors simply did not work.

Instead of condemnation, the Council fathers under the leadership of the Germans and Americans chose dialogue. In his 1966 book on the council, then Father Joseph Ratzinger described of how "the anti-Modernistic neurosis . . . had again and again crippled the Church since the turn of the century" and how with the convoking of the council the posture of rigid defiance "here seemed to be approaching a cure."

"The real question behind the discussion," Ratzinger wrote,

could be put this way: Was the intellectual position of "anti-Modernism" — the old policy of exclusiveness, condemnation and defense leading to an almost neurotic denial of all that was new — to be continued? Or would the Church, after it had taken all the necessary precautions to protect the faith turn over a new leaf and move on into a new and positive encounter with its own origins, with its brothers and with the world of today? Since a clear majority of the fathers opted for the second alternative we may even speak of the council as a new beginning. We may also say that with this decision there was a major advance over Vatican Council I.

Whether the council fathers made the right decision is open to debate. In light of the cultural revolution which followed the council, the council documents seem oftentimes naively irenic. "The Church has nothing to fear from the modern world," is how the situation was described in Lumen Gentium. Well, in a sense it doesn't, but it a sense it does. And in retrospect the forthrightness of the preparatory documents often times seems a welcome relief from the oftentimes naive optimism of the early '60s. "The moral order," Cardinal Ottaviani wrote in one of the preparatory documents on that topic,

has the task, not only of leading man to his true end, but of defending him against all doctrines and practices that would enslave him to the minds, modes and passions that are contrary to the dignity of his intellect. . . . In particular the moral order defends the immutable principles of Christian modesty and chastity. We know the energies spent at the present time by the world of fashion, movies and the press in order to shake the foundations of Christian morality in this regard, as if the Sixth Commandment should be considered outmoded and free rein should be given to all passions, even those against nature. The council will have something to say concerning this subject. it will clarify and eventually condemn all the attempts to revive paganism and all the trends that in the abuse of psychoanalysis tend to justify even those things which are directly contrary to the moral order.[65]

Cardinal Ottaviani could have been a speaker at the third annual Hollywoodism conference in Teheran in 2013, but his concern about the sexualization of Catholic culture fell on deaf ears in 1962, largely as a result of the campaign which the Germans, including Father Ratzinger, and the Americans waged against the preliminary documents.

In the end, the council condemned virtually nothing, and did not have a whole lot to say about the Sixth Commandment in particular either. The irony of course is that the Church was accused of being obsessed with such matters at precisely the time when the obsessions were all on the other side. The Church was opening its windows to the world at the same time that the world was opening itself to a bad case of sexual obsession. The process of undermining sexual morals took on a curiously reciprocal relationship involving Italy and America at the time. Jewish film producers like Joseph E. Levine were buying up Italian B-flicks like the Steve Reeves Hercules movies at bargain prices and reissuing them in America. Italian movies produced outside of the Hollywood production code were being increasingly shown in "art film" houses in the United States as a way of weakening the influence of both the Hollywood production code and the Legion of Decency the Catholic organization which provided the teeth for the code.

At the same time that Italian films were being used to undermine the production code in Hollywood, Hollywood's vision of reality was, as Cardinal Ottaviani noticed, having a deleterious effect on family life in Italy. The only remotely sexy scene which Bosley Crowther could remember from the Italian realist classic The Bicycle Thief, was the poster of Rita Hayworth plastered to a wall in Rome. The image of sexual freedom which Hollywood proposed to postwar Italy would reach its apotheosis in Anita Eckberg in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. During the press conference Sylvia, the Eckberg character, holds to hype her film, Marcello, the reporter and moral center of the film (or immoral center), discusses her with his Italian girlfriend on the phone. Emma, the girlfriend, wants to know if Sylvia is beautiful.

"Beautiful?" Marcello replies, "Well, yes — if you like the American sort of beauty. A doll . . . yes, a big doll."

Fellini's biographer describes Sylvia as "a blonde, bosomy, and glamorous star." Fellini "had seen the prototype of this woman in a full-page photograph in an American magazine."[66] During the press conference, Sylvia announces that she has gotten the part in the upcoming film "because they discovered I have a big talent." She then sticks out her bosom and the reporters laugh.

The trajectories of La Dolce Vita and the preparations for the Second Vatican Council parallel each other in an uncanny fashion. In a manner of speaking, the original Vatican II of the preliminary documents was the Church's response to La Dolce Vita. Looked at in another way, both Federico Fellini and Alfredo Ottaviani were both responding to the same stimulus in their different ways. The film is not without its note of moral condemnation, a note which paralleled much of what Ottaviani railed against in the preparatory documents.

"This evening," Fellini wrote in his diary during May 1958, "I went walking along the Via Veneto, trying to see it clearly, how it has changed from 1950, from the time when I would go there by foot every morning through the Villa Borghese and stop at Rosetti's bookstore, and there meet such as Marcari and Cardarelli the poet."

Rome in 1958 was the film capital of the world. Ben Hur was being filmed there at the time. During he period when Pius XII died and the cardinals went into conclave, which is to say, the same time when Ottaviani proposed the idea of a council to Angelo Roncalli, Fellini concluded the final arrangement for La Dolce Vita. The world premier of the film took place in Milan on February 5, 1960 four months to the day before John XXIII announced the establishment of the preparatory commissions on June 5, 1960.

The film caused an unprecedented furor in Italy and the Church took notice at first praising it for its moral realism and then condemning it for its decadence. Fellini had three years before enlisted the help of his friend Father Angelo Arpa in deflecting the censors' blow from his film Nights of Cabiria. Arpa had arranged a midnight viewing of the film for Cardinal Siri of Genoa, a prelate even more conservative than Ottaviani. Siri's only comment was "Poor Cabiria, we must do something for her." It was typical of the reaction of the Church at the time. Both Fellini and Ottaviani had more in common that a superficial juxtaposition of their names would ordinarily indicate. Both La Dolce Vita and Ottaviani's preparatory documents show deep reservations about the direction that life was taking in post-war Italy. The prosperity which resulted from technology more often than not lacked any sense of human direction. It was in many ways epitomized by the automobile, which destroyed the Italian landscape, and the television, which destroyed its social life and morals. Fellini was attracted and repulsed by both. His films became increasingly confessional, confessing his infidelities to Giulietta Massina, his wife, and the woman who had made him a star with the release of La Strada. Fellini was fascinated as well by the automobile, particularly the large American variety. Perhaps more than any other artifact the automobile symbolized the pointless freedom of the age. And Fellini both succumbed to it and railed against it, in much the same way that he succumbed to and criticized the sexual freedom of the age.

"Contemporary life," Fellini wrote defending himself against his critics at the time of La Dolce Vita's release, "is filled with contradictions: a frantic, tense, exciting life and, in fact, a terrible emptiness, an immobility. Men, for example, going from one woman to the next, from adventure to adventure. And all this, only to end up revolving around oneself without really budging."(Alpert, p. 150).

It was a passage Cardinal Ottaviani could have written himself. The automobile becomes the technological analogue to promiscuity in La Dolce Vita. It is an enabling device which makes sexual liberation seem plausible. When Marcello and Maddelana, the wealthy nymphomaniac, take Adriana home to her Bauhaus Wohnmaschine apartment in the roman suburbs they do so in Maddelana's Cadillac convertible. America, as symbolized by the Cadillac, had come to represent freedom from all of the restraints Marcello found burdensome in life, and these had most of all to do with the home. Home, Fellini seems to be saying, oftentimes in spite of himself, no longer makes any sense. And architecturally it doesn't seem much like home anymore either. Adriana lives in the basement of a poured concrete box with four inches of water on the floor. When Maddelena asks if she has any family, Adriana just laughs and mentions a cousin who is vaguely at work somewhere else. The automobile, the contraceptive, the apartment building all have contributed to the destruction of a culture based on the family and has created in its place a culture of anomic, sexually frenzied individuals who spend a good deal of their time in automobiles traveling from one place to the next. "Adriana's home," we are told in the film's scenario, is "one of these starkly functional housing development buildings, surrounded by raw earth." When the trio arrives in the middle of the night, we are told that "the car stops, but the radio continues to blast away." Fellini, we are told by his biographer, came under the influence of American writers like William Faulkner and John Steinbeck right around the time that American troops had entered Rome and he imbibed from these writers an impatience with things traditional, which when generalized to the culture at large, would cause Cardinal Ottaviani to feel the Church was in peril. The works of the American writers struck Fellini as "realistic, sensual, adventuresome, palpitating — a sensation of liberty, of landscapes without horizons." Fellini was clever enough to see through the hype as well. Instead of the automobile-is-freedom advertising campaigns that were fusing the new myth with the old in America, Fellini examines the effect of the automobile and what it stood for in America on Italian culture at the time: Marcello, the reporter, with aspirations to be a serious writer sitting outside the Bauhaus Wohnmaschine in a Cadillac convertible with two women of dubious virtue and the radio blaring rock and roll.

Cardinal Ottaviani saw America as a threat to what was left of the Catholic social order in Europe and proposed the Council as a way of meeting that threat. His vision was overturned by the current pope, who after searching in vain for an alternative Council which would preserve the moral and social order Ottaviani wanted to defend, admitted defeat and resigned. The pope's stunning announcement of February 10, according to which he claimed that he came to his resignation decision as a result of prayer, indicated that God told him that it was time to leave and that he had the humility to accept God's decision. As Malcolm said to King Duncan in Shakespeare's Macbeth, we can say of Ratzinger, "Nothing in this life became him like the leaving of it." Convicted in prayer of his own inadequacy to the task before him, Benedict threw himself on the hand grenade of his own exploding papacy and resigned. The main issue was not a "gay conspiracy" or financial machination behind the scenes. The main issue could be found in the realm of ideas. The pope never understood the Council upon which he had based his entire adult life, and he never understood the Council because he never understood America's role in its systematic deformation. Pope Benedict's predecessor condemned the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 as an unjust war, much to the chagrin of George Weigel and Michael Novak and other representatives of the Catholic Israel Lobby in America, but Benedict could never achieve even that limited form of psychic independence because Ratzinger was complicit with the Americans in the suppression of the Ottaviani council which got aborted when the Germans and Americans united in throwing out Ottaviani's preliminary documents and coming up with something new, something which they never really understood, something which Ratzinger continues to misrepresent as the "Council of the media." The Council of the Media was in fact the Council of Time magazine, which was the Council of the CIA, which subverted what might have been an intellectual threat to the American Imperium.

Where was Pope Benedict when Catholics like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran"? He had fallen silent because, in the words of the same Time magazine that had orchestrated the "Council of the media" in the interest of the American imperium, he had become "The American Pope."[67] Pope Benedict, we are told in an Time article that has eerie similarities to the piece David Wemhoff wrote from a very different perspective in Culture Wars, "has a soft spot for Americans" because of the social engineering that the Americans imposed on Germany after World War II. "Unlike John Paul II, who was intellectually fully formed when he met his first Americans," Israely continues:

Ratzinger first observed them when he was 18. As a defeated German soldier, he spent three months in a POW camp, but was then allowed to return home and witness one of the great modern acts of charity, the rebuilding of Germany by an occupying force that could just as easily have exacted revenge. Cardinal William Levada, the Californian whom Benedict tapped as his successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), says, "He's of a generation that remembers, gratefully."

Ratzinger, according to Time, showed his gratitude to America by supporting the Americans, who "argued that religious liberty was morally imperative and — from experience — that in a multireligious state, Catholicism could best thrive when the government could not play favorites," and the agenda of John Courtney Murray, Luce and the CIA at the Second Vatican Council.

In a 2004 debate with Marcello Pera, then president of the Italian Senate, Ratzinger cited Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, claiming that "America's Founding Fathers were pious men of different denominations who wrote the First Amendment prohibiting state establishment (that is sponsorship) of religion precisely because sponsorship would stifle all non-established creeds — which they hope would achieve full and varied flower."[68]

Even when "Benedict zings the Protestants or his proxies zap scientific atheists, he is actually engaging in cultural pluralism American-style, which resembles a political talk show more than a stately seminar on the Bill of Rights."[69] Pope Benedict "remains true to the Vatican II precept of complementing [the] blind piety that prevailed in the church before the 1960s with the rationalism of the Enlightenment and thus with modernity." Israely concludes his panegyric to "the American pope," by claiming that Benedict "knows that rising religious conflict may be the 21st century's great challenge. He also appears to sense that American power alone won't solve it — but that the power of American values still might."

It would be easy to dismiss this as Time's unseemly projection of an American fantasy onto the successor of Peter, but Benedict had already confirmed much of what Israely had said. In a speech which he gave on Vatican II just before the conclave which elected him pope, he claimed that the Council gave new appreciation of the American revolution as the benign alternative to the anticlerical French revolution. When George Bush greeted Pope Benedict on the South Lawn of the White House on April 16, 2008, five years after the invasion of Iraq which Pope John Paul II had condemned as a violation of international law, and claimed that "Each day across the world the United States is working to eradicate disease, alleviate poverty, promote peace, and bring the light of hope to places still mired in the darkness of tyranny and despair," the pope said nothing to contradict him.[70] Instead of rebuking the president, as his predecessor had done, Benedict announced that he had "great respect for this vast pluralistic society" and went on to laud "American Catholics," who have made and continue to make, an excellent contribution to the life of their country."

It's difficult to know which American Catholics the pope had in mind. Was it pro-abortion Democrats like Teddy Kennedy and, soon to be vice-president Joe Biden? Or did he have Republican warmongers like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich in mind?

Although I didn't know it at the time, Benedict's announcement came when I was at the shrine of the sister of the fourth Imam in Qom, which everyone (ironically given the chain of events) here refers to as Iran's Vatican. The sidewalks of Qom were full of people who looked as if they didn't have a lot of money, going about their business, trying to get by, perhaps judging from their looks not eating as much as they should have. I saw old men braving the traffic on antique English bicycles that sported names like Hercules. I saw a family of five perched precariously on a Honda motorcycle as they wobbled off into the ferocious Iranian traffic.

All of these people, going calmly about their business, had been threatened for decades with annihilation by American Catholics like Rick Santorum, not out of any personal hatred — he never reached that level of humanity — but on the off chance that he would find favor with the Big Money Jews who paid his salary as the Catholic bootlicker at the American Enterprise Institute. Or by Catholic convert Newt Gingrich, who was inspired to join Holy Mother Church while screwing a fellow member of the choir, who became his third wife, and then became director of a documentary film on the life of John Paul II, which was to serve as the vehicle which was to bring him to the White House, as soon as he made contact with Big Jew money, in this case the money of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who demanded an immediate attack on Iran as the price of his support.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was the counter-revolution against modernity which should have been launched by Vatican II. The desexualization of the culture which Cardinal Ottaviani proposed in the preliminary documents of Vatican II was derailed largely as a result of the efforts of people like Joseph Ratzinger, as he himself admitted, in collaboration with the German and American bishops. From the Catholic perspective, Islam has always been the scourge of God, which is to say, a divinely ordained corrective punishment for the decadence of Christianity. The Catholic antidote to decadent Jewish movies was the Philadelphia boycotts of 1933; the Islamic antidote was burning the movie theaters down in Tehran in 1979. What could have been accomplished by the Church ended up being accomplished by the scourge of God when the Iranians drove the Shah from the Peacock Throne in 1979 and created their own Islamic counter-revolution.

As early as 1518, Dr. Martin Luther had identified the Islamic faith as the "scourge of God." For the rest of his life Luther believed that the Muslims were God's punishment upon a sinful Christendom who had, among other sins (ingratitude, toleration of wicked sects, worship of the god Mammon, drunkenness, greed, and the split of Christendom which had provoked His wrath), tolerated the papal abomination. They would function as Germany's schoolmaster who must correct and teach the German people to repent of their sins and to fear God.[71]

And so to answer the question proposed by our symposium: Islam is the scourge of God. Islam always arrives on the scene when Christianity has failed. It burst into the world scene in the 7th century when Egypt and North Africa were riddled with Nestorianism and other heresies. It swept away the last remnants of the eastern Roman Empire in 1454 when Byzantium, riddled with Neoplatonist magic, rejected the unity achieved by the Council of Florence and fell to the Turks. Solyman the Magnificent swept away the Hungarian army under Louis II at the Battle of Mohacs and would have taken Vienna in Luther's day if Christendom hadn't rediscovered its unity at the last moment.

It is now time to stop complaining about the "Council of the media" and to admit that the arrival of Islam in the deracinated public housing projects of Bradford and the suburbs of Marseilles is a function of the failure of Christianity — the Reformation first of all, which has now played itself out as support for Gay Marriage and the on-going extinction of England, but of the Catholic Church as well, which has been more interested in dialogue than evangelization. The arrival of Islam on the scene is the sign that God has run out of patience with lukewarm Christians who do nothing to preserve the social and moral order from soul-destroying decadence of the sort found everywhere in Europe and, mutatis mutandis, America as well. Better Islam as the scourge of God than the decadence of once Presbyterian Glasgow depicted in Trainspotting. But better still is the option proposed by Majid Majidi and Hojjatoleslam Hosayni, which to say, ecumenical cultural jihad against Hollywood and the moral corruption which it spreads as the propaganda ministry for the American Imperium.

At the end of a short speech I gave thanking the Hollywoodism conference organizers for the award they gave me, I pulled out my rosary and the prayer beads that a Muslim lady had given me and said the fact they were tangled together was symbolic of the fate of both Catholics and Shi'as in the world today. No one objected to the sight of the cross dangling from the end of my rosary; no one objected when I mentioned the name of Jesus Christ as the antidote to Dracula, the hero of the American-Zionist Imperium and the City of Man. If what happened at the Hollywoodism conference is the scourge of God in our day, we could do worse. We are being swept toward a cultural jihad against the most sophisticated system of moral corruption that the world has never known. I concluded in my little speech by waving my Islamo-Catholic beads before the crowd and claiming, "Fear is useless; what is needed is love."

"There is something about Iranian snow" said Arash as we trudged up the hill to the Shah's palace. "It can snow here and still be warm." What he said is true. The snow was intense but gentle. The flakes melt just as they hit the ground. It must be because of the altitude. Snow is not gentle when it arrives in South Bend. The winters are not as ferocious as they used to be, but the arrival of the first winter storm is invariably bound up with some type of violence as the wind drops down from Canada, picks up moisture over Lake Michigan and dumps snow, often in considerable amounts when it hits the windward shore. The snow we get is invariably wet and icy and a menace to any kind of travel; it is not benign like the snow of Tehran.

Biographical Note

E. Michael Jones, Ph.D., editor of Culture Wars magazine, is the author of many books, some of which are available for Kindle, including:

Abu Ghraib and The American Empire

Assassins and Character Assassins: Spielberg's Munich

Benedict's Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome

Escape From Globalism: Meditations While Rowing Down the Danube

Jewish Nazis

L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues: Chess Records and the Black-Jewish Alliance

The Logos of Architecture and Its Opponents

Niggas in Denial: Pimping the System and The System of Pimping

Protectors of the Code

Requiem for a Whale Rider

Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer Identity

Endnotes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvtt4Jy69LQ

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJXmgbAeU0&feature=related

[4] You can read the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/world/middleeast/stung-by-argo-iran-backs-conference-decrying-hollywoodism.html?_r=0

[5] Michael Jones a fourni la formule choc qui résume les enjeux, autour de l'outrance sexuelle: c'est Jésus contre Dracula. Son exposé a montré que les Irlandais ont un temps (entre 1933 et 1965) contré les Juifs à Hollywood, qui ont infesté d'obscénité le cinéma. La campagne contre le prophète Mohammed (qui sévit maintenant chez les Guignols de Canal+) est le nouveau chapitre pour réduire en esclavage mental les musulmans comme cela a se poursuit depuis longtemps pour les chrétiens (l'affaire des Pussy Riots constitue l'offensive contre le monde orthodoxe). Le Marquis de Sade, après l'expérience de la prison, avait parfaitement établi de lien entre dégradation par la débauche et tyrannie.

[6] Vatican II, p. 754.

[7] Vatican II, p. 754.

[8] Vatican II, p. 755.

[9] Vatican II, p. 755.

[10] Vatican II, p. 756.

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajj

[12] Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamicist Crisis (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2010), p. 19.

[13] Reilly, p. 19.

[14] Reilly, p. 37.

[15] Reilly, pp. 25-6.

[16] Reilly, p. 26.

[17] Reilly, p. 41.

[18] Reilly, p. 42.

[19] Reilly, p. 42.

[20] Reilly, pp. 56-7.

[21] Reilly, p. 50.

[22] Reilly, p. 50.

[23] Reilly, pp. 52-3.

[24] Reilly, p. 27.

[25] Reilly, p. 28.

[26] Reilly, p. 43.

[27] Reilly, p. 52.

[28] Reilly, p. 53.

[29] Reilly, p. 119.

[30] Reilly, p. 120.

[31] Reilly, p. 120.

[32] Reilly, p. 120.

[33] Reilly, p. 131.

[34] Reilly, p. 75.

[35] Reilly, p. 88.

[36] Reilly, p. 110.

[37] Reilly, p. 63.

[38] Reilly, p. 64.

[39] Reilly, p. 120.

[40] Reilly, p. 71.

[41] Reilly, p. 74.

[42] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb

[43] Reilly, p. 177.

[44] Reilly, p. 185.

[45] much of what follows was taken from the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares."

[46] David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p. 73.

[47] Horowitz, p. 119.

[48] Reilly, p. 192.

[49] Reilly, pp. 143-4.

[50] Reilly, p. 155.

[51] Reilly, p. 155.

[52] Reilly, p. 204.

[53] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00576.x/abstract?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+23+February+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+%2805%3A00-07%3A00+EDT%29+for+essential+maintenance

[54] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00576.x/abstract?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+23+February+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+%2805%3A00-07%3A00+EDT%29+for+essential+maintenance

[55] http://english.khamenei.ir//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1707&Itemid=4

[56] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

[57] http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/4958 - idc-container

[58] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/population/la-fg-population-iran-20120729-html,0,4861001.htmlstory

[59] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/population/la-fg-population-iran-20120729-html,0,4861001.htmlstory

[60] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/population/la-fg-population-iran-20120729-html,0,4861001.htmlstory

[61] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

[62] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Ottaviani

[63] Aram Berard, S.J., trans., Preparatory Reports of the Second Vatican Council (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1965), p. 54.

[64] Berard, p. 155.

[65] Berard, p. 52.

[66] Hollis Alpert, Fellini: A Life (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 125.

[67] Jeff Israely, "The American Pope," Time, 4/3/08. http://www.time.com/time/tpriontout/o.0.8816.172724.00.html

[68] Jeff Israely, "The American Pope," Time, 4/3/08. http://www.time.com/time/tpriontout/o.0.8816.172724.00.html

[69] Jeff Israely, "The American Pope," Time, 4/3/08. http://www.time.com/time/tpriontout/o.0.8816.172724.00.html

[70] http://boston.com/news/local/breaking.news/2008/04/individual.rema.html

[71] http://www.lutheransonline.com/servlet/lo_ProcServ/dbpage=page&GID=01031013600972584326486620&PG=01223001361006780322797517