The Silence of the Lambs

Address of Grand Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadhlullah

On the Birth Anniversary of Imam al-Mahdi (aj)

Allah says in His Glorious Book: {Allah only wishes to remove uncleanness from you, members of the Family, and to purify you} [3:33]. The first member is Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib ('a), while the last is Imam al-Mahdi (May Allah hasten his relief) whom Allah, the most exalted, has prepared to fill the earth with justice having been filled with wrongdoing.

The struggle between Israel and Hezbollah – the Islamists would call it a jihad – probably will affect state campaigns only slightly.

In Connecticut, where anti-war candidate Ned Lamont is challenging incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman, some subtle shifts in emphasis may be expected. Lieberman’s opponents have been unusually quiet of late. The conflict has been going on for more than a week and promises to continue much longer than that. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, so is this portentous silence.

The left in Connecticut takes its cues from the anti-Lieberman blogging community -- a coalition of anti-war protestors, leftists whose ambition it is to take over local Democrat parties and virulent anti-Bushites. One senses that the ideologists and strategists of the movement – but not, of course, the singular minded Cindy Sheehan -- are somewhat befuddled. They may be waiting for the script to come down from Mount Olympus.

The survival of Israel as the only working democracy in the Middle East is very much at stake; that has always been the case. There are two heads to the terrorist snake. One wants the obliteration of Israel, and the other an Islamic caliphate, ambitions supported by a majority of Muslims both in the Mid-East and in Europe. These goals are interdependent. The firing of missiles into Israel, like the notion that one is about to be executed in the morning, clarifies the mind wonderfully.

The calls for a negotiated peace to the present conflict must be understood in the context of a future Islamic victory. The opponents of an Islamic caliphate, for instance, have insisted that the terrorist, the vanguard of that caliphate, are living in the 10th century. Surely the heirs of the Enlightenment need not fear retrograde terrorists. In the battle of ideas, the West is certain to win. Very nearly the opposite perception is true. The terrorists are living in the future, not the past -- it is the future, not the past, that makes men mad -- and they have bloodily laid claim to the future. It cannot be said that the terrorists, the vanguard of the coming Mahdi, do not have the courage of their convictions. Peace, in these circumstances, is no more than the temporary absence of hostilities, a lull before the storm that the illustrious President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assures us will wash away everything. This peace, the peace the terrorist want is full of the bleating of lambs. It will be followed by the silence of the lambs.

The sounds of silence are all around us. The only serious hostility in Connecticut is that between Lamontites and Liebermanites; and, as one commentator reminds us, “Lieberman is dropping like an anvil pushed out of a C-130. That's the trend” – a good sign, some think.

Here is a typical blogbleat lifted at random from a popular progressive blog site. I’ve corrected only the spelling and punctuation:

Thank you President Bush and Joementum for leading us to a more unstable Middle-East!!! Joe's lap dog actions for Bush have not even bought us friends in Iraq. And you ask why Lamont has 51% of my party?

The author is apparently Jewish, and elsewhere in the postings we are reminded that Lamont leads Lieberman among Jewish voters in Connecticut.

Actually, that datum is not too surprising. In sophisticated states like Connecticut, political affiliation usually trumps personal prejudices; one supposes a sophisticated poll might detect that a majority of Jews in the state would prefer that the state of Israel should not succumb to the Mahdi’s army. Combined with supremacist arrogance – fundamentalist religious fanatics surely cannot triumph over Enlightenment Europe in a futile attempt to reverse Spain’s 10th century Reconquista – noblesse oblige is a heady brew.

Israel certainly knows that the active hostility of Arab states predates the Bush administration. But then, the view from Connecticut and the view from Israel are understandably different; and, noblesse oblige, isn’t everyone is entitled to their point of view?