Rick Santorum’s Terrible Miserable Islamic Nightmare . . . And There’s More
Shi’a: “[T]hey are not interested in conquering the world; they are interested in destroying the world.”
The “left”: “But it’s not just radical Islam; it is also the radical left.
Because what we’re seeing now is the old adage you learned when you were a kid — the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the left — whether it’s here in this country, and certainly around the world — sees America today as the enemy. They fight us on college campuses, and they fight us in the streets of Central and South American countries, in, in other places.”
Rick Santorum, May 3, 2007 speech
All humans are mortal.
Some days it rains.
Rick Santorum is a blockhead.
Mike, Your editor
On March 3, 2007 the Senator Rick Santorum spoke at an event sponsored by the Students for Academic Freedom, a
“national coalition of student organizations whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.”
This is the right wing collegiate euphemism for “death to liberal professors!” At the time of his speech, Santorum had recently emerged the loser in his re-election campaign against Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., and was apparently feeling feistier than ever.
Santorum had always pounded the war drums, imagining himself a latter day Winston Churchill criticizing America for ignoring “Islamofascism,” just as Churchill had castigated Nevile Chamberlain for brokering the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini in 1938. On Iran he’s always been among the leaders of the GOP war party.
So, his speech was about Islam and the west. As you’ll read in the excerpts below, Santorum’s utterly incomplete history of the period – he seems to have not heard of the Ottoman empire – makes one wonder if he’d consulted the “Professor,” Newt Gingrich, to prep him. His equally incomplete religious understanding of Sunni, Shi’a, Wahabi, and, in general, jihad, is, as is true among the GOP, remarkable, in the wrong way.
Nonetheless, below is what my Mother referred to as the “pregnant portions” of Santorum’s May 2007 speech. If you’d like to check the context, read the entire speech here
“And for 300 years, they have been silent. Why? Because they didn’t have the resources or the technology to compete with the modern world. For 300 years, they lay silent.
But now Sunni Islam, through al-Qaeda, which is Sunni; through resources, known as oil; through technology that is now off-the-shelf, and through frustration — imagine you’re a Muslim. You are the person who has the faith that is the successor to the two incomplete faiths — Judaism and Christianity. You are the final revelation. You are the one that is going to control the world. You are the one for a thousand years dominated the world. And for 300 years, you sit in a backwater, looking at Christendom thrive, while you sit in squalor and poverty. How can this be?
And so, strains of Islam started to come, like Wahhabism, that adopted tactics of the modern world, grafted them onto Islam in a corrupted way, and are now projecting itself through these terrorist organizations.
This is what we fight. They want to reconquer the world. They want to establish a new Kalifat that was eliminated by Turkey 100 years ago; by Atatürk. That’s one — and by the way, it’s not just al-Qaeda. It is terrorist groups and nation-states that support these terrorist groups, like Saudi Arabia, all over the world.
Then you have the Shias. But they’re a minority. They were — up until the late 1970s, they were considered the peaceful Muslims. They didn’t fight — most of these wars, they didn’t participate and fight. They didn’t believe — their history tells them, you know, that they’re not to establish a Kalifat. They are to wait to the return of the Mahdi, the return of the Twelfth Imam. It is only till then that they will establish reign in the rest of the world. And they are to wait until then. They are not to govern until the Mahdi returns. That’s what Shias believe.
So you say, Well, then, why do they now govern Iran? Why do they now take arms against us via Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations? Well, that’s thanks to a man named Ayatollah Khomeini, who has taken some of the roots of the modern world, and some of the roots of Sunni Islam, and grafted them onto the Shia religion — which in my mind makes the Shia brand of Islamist extremists even more dangerous than the Sunni [version].
Why? Because the ultimate goal of the Shia brand of Islamic Islam is to bring back the Mahdi. And do you know when the Mahdi returns? At the Apocalypse at the end of the world. You see, they are not interested in conquering the world; they are interested in destroying the world.
. . . . . .“But it’s not just radical Islam; it is also the radical left. Because what we’re seeing now is the old adage you learned when you were a kid — the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the left — whether it’s here in this country, and certainly around the world — sees America today as the enemy. They fight us on college campuses, and they fight us in the streets of Central and South American countries, in, in other places.”
Wow. To say Santorum’s ignorance is stunning is an insult to truly stunning things. More than stunning, it’s obviously dangerous. He’s, beyond all sane “remarkability,” a possible President of the United States, the man who would be not altogether unlikely to say “Good morning” to Iran on Monday, January 21, 2013 with a fusillade of cruise missiles.
He, like Gingrich, sometimes invokes Winston Churchill. Attributed to the great WWII Prime Minister is the following snappy phrase:
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
It its Santorum; nothing penetrates that 13th century mind. Now, though, – replacing Shakespeare for Churchill – I’ll offer a quote.
When we look ahead to a match-up between President Obama and Rick Santorum as a possibility this Fall, and without underestimating Santorum, perhaps this bitter, moralizing, hectoring, egotistically undereducated lunkhead “’tis,” for the President,
