Cheap Seats 2016

End Games - 01/13/16

By Rich Trzupek
  Virtually every religion, including my own, has its own version of the end of the world. It’s a topic that’s too darn tempting to ignore when exploring spirituality.
  In the case of Christianity, Jesus admonished me and all my fellow believers not to try to predict when He would return/the world as we know it would end. Nevertheless, the Christian Bible also includes Revelations, in which a fellow named John (most Christian scholars today believe it was a different John than John the disciple) sets forth a pretty darn frightening vision of the apocalypse.
  However the world is to end or when it is to end, has little practical effect in our day-to-day lives as we plod through our earthly existence. It’s an interesting topic perhaps, but there’s little time to ruminate on such things when you’re trying to figure out who’s going to pick up the kids from daycare and whether you can afford to refi before interest rates go up.
  Except.
  Except that there are a few people, a few very dangerous people, walking this earth as we speak who not only embrace the idea of apocalypse, they believe they can set it in motion. 
  It’s an aspect of this new religious war in which we are engaged that few seem to understand. Certainly almost no Americans seem to understand it and if any of the people running for President get it, they’re keeping awfully quiet about it.
  Indeed, I don’t believe that the vast majority of Muslims – who would disavow this insanity along with rest of us – really understand what ISIS and the mullahs in Iran are about. And if what follows sounds crazy, well – that’s because it is. But it ain’t my crazy, it’s theirs.
  Start will ISIS. The name of their slick on-line magazine is “Dabiq”. What is Dabiq you ask? It’s a village in northern Syria. Oh yeah, and it’s also the place where fundamentalist Muslims believe that the Armies of Islam will utterly and finally defeat the Armies of Christianity in a battle that will mark the end of the world as we know it, see the return of Jesus Christ to earth and usher in a new Islamic paradise.
  Nothing to worry about, in other words.
  To get to Dabiq – to defeat the armies to the west in what is essentially Armageddon in everything but name – you’ve got to get the armies of the west to fight. And how to do that? Well, you act as bloody awfully brutally as you can until the west takes the bait.
  No it’s not about America picking on them. And no Bernie, it’s not about climate change. (Climate change Bernie? Really? Have a Xanex buddy.) It’s about ENDING THE FREAKING WORLD. 
  The loons at ISIS would be more than happy to confirm that for you by the by. But it’s the kind of crazy that we desperately don’t want to believe can exist in the twenty-first century, so we pretend it does not.
  And that brings us to Iran. Soon to be nuclear Iran, that is. As the Iranian people go about their day to day lives, some perhaps exchanging a pleasant “Death to America” greeting on the street, but most – I like to think anyway – not really interested in doing so, the mullahs who rule them are busy planning a more direct, and ultimately more dangerous, route to Dabiq.
  The Iranians are playing a long game. Let those ISIS toads have their beheadings in the desert. Good times to be sure, but how is lopping off a few dozen heads a month going to take down the Jewish scum, much less the Great Satan?
  No, to make that happen, you gotta be the baddest of the bad-asses in the region. And that’s where Iran is headed, with pockets full of newly won cash and centrifuges a-whirlin’. Once they get strong enough, they’ll set off a war that’ll bring the crusaders a runnin to Dabiq! Yee-ha!
  For the mullahs are every bit as intent on bringing on the apocalypse as the new caliphate is, they’re just going about it much more cleverly than anybody wants to admit.
  E-mail: rich@examinerpublications.com
  www.threedonia.com . .