What does Barack Obama mean to the sort of folk who have joined his cultish following? To get some insight, I asked my neighborhood witch. She is very sweet, really: she has an Obama bumper sticker on her car; she prefers to be called a Wiccan.

“So, what is Obama all about?”

She told me he was all about “change,” about changing the world, about momentous, even turbulent, changes. Obama was about upheaval and overturning. She said that change was closely associated with the number five which was ruled by Mercury, the planet of communication. Fives are all about change and communication, she repeated. “That’s how come Barack can cast a spell over people – he’s a spellbinding communicator.”

I thanked her for her insight. She continued gently patting the gnarled oak at the corner of my property, for which she had a particular affection. I left her a wiser man: Barack was all about change and the number five, the number of change.

At this point I confess that, like many other Mensa members, I am afflicted by a quirky penchant for seeking patterns and hidden associations beneath the surface of everything. For example, way back in the mid-1970s I was engrossed in a book titled Secrets of the Great Pyramid. It was crammed with lore about the Great Pyramid at Giza, much of it rooted in the proportions and angles and orientation of the big tomb. I was also reading a book about the future of computers – the personal computer was only a dream back then; I couldn’t even afford one of those new fangled four-function calculators that were selling for $150 each, so I did all my math in my head or with the aid of my grandfather’s hand-me-down wooden slide rule.

Anyway, the computer book said that someday computers would bounce data around inside themselves on beams of light. That was when this question popped into my head: How long would it take for a beam of light to traverse one ancient Egyptian “sacred” cubit? After converting one cubit into inches and the speed of light into inches-per-second and putting it all into scientific notation, I did the final division on the slide rule.

That’s when I got the jolt: light traverses one cubit in the square root of pi nanoseconds! That means there are two universal constants hidden inside the cubit – the speed of light and the ratio of every circle to its diameter. What a fun discovery! Does that have any bigger implications? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a random coincidence.

After the witch explained that Barack Obama was all about spellbinding communication and change and the number five, the thing in my head that keeps me hunting for hidden patterns got me to doodling with Barack Obama’s name. The witch believes that names are very powerful, but then again she also believes my gnarled oak draws up power from deep in the earth.

So, I picked up a pencil and I wrote down his name: Barack Obama. If you assign a number to each letter of his name as though A equals 1, and B equals 2, and so forth, then Barack adds up to 36 and Obama adds up to 32.

Do these numbers share anything in common? Yes, they do: they are both simple even-number submultiples of the number 576. For example, the Obama number, 32, will sum to 576 in exactly 18 steps. If we introduce Obama’s “essence number,” the number of change, the number five and multiply it by his 18 steps number we get the number 90. If we then add this 90 to the single number that links his first and last names, the number 576, then we get the number 666.

What could this number signify? I have no idea. Could someone please help me here? Perhaps I could ask Minister Louis Farrakhan; he’s totally into numerology. The most eminent Islamic scholars may have denounced his Nation of Islam as a racist heretical cult, but the man has his numerology down solid.

Minister Farrakhan is unrelenting in his praise of Barack Obama. Farrakhan has enjoyed a near monopoly on interpreting Islam to black Americans ever since he captured the leadership of the Nation of Islam following the death of Elijah Muhammad, the cult’s bossman for more than forty years, who died disgraced after it was revealed that he was a long-time child molester. Farrakhan was only too happy to re-inflate the moribund Nation of Islam and reinvigorate its most racist impulses, among them its core theological tenet that the white race was created by a demented genetic scientist named Yacub for the sole purpose of bedeviling black folks. Perhaps it was this racist fanaticism that attracted the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s spiritual mentor, to the super bigot Farrakhan. Both men were outspoken in their hatred of whites and especially the Jews. Hadn’t Farrakhan cursed the Jews as “bloodsuckers,” hadn’t he defamed Judaism as a “gutter religion,” hadn’t Obama’s pastor approved a Trinity United Church bulletin broadside that accused the Jews of developing a monster weapon that would only slaughter black folks, but spare everyone else? Hadn’t Obama’s pastor of twenty years bestowed an achievement award on the racist Minister Farrakhan?

Nation of Islam theology affirms that the cult’s founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad, a door-to-door umbrella salesman, was the Mahdi, the Muslim savior, sent to Detroit by God around 1930. NOI cultists also believe that spaceships are lurking behind the moon and will one day be deployed for the wholesale extermination of sinners (white people).

Immigrant Muslims sense that Nation of Islam cultists are pretenders because of their careless disregard of Islamic holy texts. And what do the holy texts of Islam teach? They teach that there is nothing lower in the world than a Muslim apostate – a Muslim who renounces Islam. Do you know anyone who is a Muslim apostate? Of course you do.

Barack Hussein Obama was born a Muslim because his father was a Muslim. It makes no difference whatsoever that Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. did not choose to be a Muslim or that his father was a diffident Muslim: Barack Hussein Obama was born a Muslim. His decision to renounce Islam rendered Obama an apostate. According to holy text, it is not a crime for any Muslim to kill a Muslim apostate. Indeed, any Muslim who hinders another Muslim who is in the act of assassinating a Muslim apostate risks being denied his soul’s chance of entering Paradise. That means that any Muslim security guard who hinders an assassination attempt on Barack Obama will be damned for all of eternity. In the eyes of serious Muslims, the millions who take their Koran straight up, Barack Obama is someone who was tempted away from Islam by Satan. In the eyes of some influential Muslims, the apostate Barack Obama might actually be a manifestation of Satan on Earth.

A Little History

Let’s review: Of the five crusades, Muslims have the fondest attachment to the Crusade of Richard the Lionhearted, from 1187 to 1192. In this drama the Muslims are triumphant: The Arab hero Saladin, “the lance of jihad,” crushed the crusader army at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Memorials to Saladin pepper the Middle East. The late Syrian President Hafez Assad spiced up his office décor with a gigantic painting of the Battle of Hattin, which he proudly displayed to Western visitors. One day, he would say, a new Saladin would appear.

The present president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fancies himself to be the new Saladin. At this moment he is spending the wealth of Iran on long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons development. He has declared that Israel should be wiped off the map; me says the Holocaust never happened; he thinks Hitler was defamed. The absence of moral outrage among Muslims suggests widespread silent support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s master plan.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad grew up in the provinces. He is the son of a blacksmith and the fourth of seven siblings. He owes his career and his notoriety entirely to the Islamic Revolution and to his enthusiastic participation in the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary wing of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Islamic takeover in 1979. He is a man of limited experience; his Muslim beliefs are sincere and narrow. He is inclined toward spontaneous pronouncements such as, “The wave of the Islamic Revolution will soon reach the entire world” and “Our revolution’s main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi.”

The Mahdi is a captivating figure in Islamic eschatology. According to the Shiites, the Twelfth Imam went into “occlusion” (vanished) at the age of five in the year 941; when he returns he will reign on Earth for seven years and then he will administer a final judgment and bring about the end of this world. His return will be preceded by a time of chaos, war and a cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good (Islam) and the forces of evil and darkness. Guess who gets to play the role of Evil & Darkness?

Central to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s piety is his devotion to the Hidden Imam who the president of Iran reveres a “the Savior of Times.” During a speech to assembled world leaders at the United Nations, Mr. Ahmadinejad bewildered his audience with a prayer for the appearance of the Mahdi: “O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.”

He later recounted how one of his companions had told him that when he uttered the words “In the name of God the almighty and merciful. . .” he was suddenly suffused with a glowing aura: “He saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink. . . And they were amazed, as if a hand held them there and opened their senses to receive the message of the Islamic Republic.”

The assembled leaders were certainly amazed. They had expected a conciliatory Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to offer a proposal that would lessen their fears that Iran was refining weapons-grade nuclear materials. Instead, they were treated to one of his signature apocalyptic visions of an imminent clash between the pure-of-heart Muslims and the evil West.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clearly stated his primary mission in a speech in Tehran on November 16th, 2005: “. . . to pave the path for the glorious reappearance of Imam Mahdi, may Allah hasten his reappearance.” All of Iran was ablaze with talk of the Mahdi and the supporting role Iran and its president were playing in the Mahdi’s anticipated return. Amir Mohebian, political editor of the newspaper Resalat caught the Iranian zeitgeist: “If I think the Mahdi will come in two, three, or four years, why should I be soft? Now is the time to stand strong, to be hard.”

Of course it is. America, the Great Satan, has just chosen as its supreme leader an apostate Muslim turned Christian crusader. Despite being the son of a Muslim and the stepson of a Muslim, despite having lived among Muslims and having received instruction in Islam, Barack Obama chose to cast his Muslim heritage into the dust. Iranian intelligence has correctly characterized Obama as an inexperienced political opportunist who has gamed his way to the pinnacle of power, always under the tutelage of inspired Jewish political puppet masters. There were lots of Jews in the swanky Hyde Park cabal that launched Obama into the political limelight; they helped Obama toss all the other black candidates off the Illinois state-race ballot; their presence deepened the suspicions of black folks in South Chicago that Obama was a tool of the Jews. Obama is deeply indebted to his long-time mentor, David Axelrod, for his ascension to the Oval Office. There is nothing unusual about talented Jews giving political guidance to American politicians, but in the view from Tehran the upstart from Chicago looks like a willing collaborator with Jewish interests.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes that the End of Days is at hand and that it is his duty, if not his destiny, to usher in the Promised One. When an airplane crashed in Tehran killing 108 people, the president of Iran thanked the dead, declaring that “What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.”

Soon after his election Ahmadinejad purged Iran’s national and provincial governments of moderates. He has placed Tehran’s nuclear program under the control of his fellow radicals in the Revolutionary Guard, many of them from the Quds Force in which Ahmadinejad was formerly a brigadier general. The Revolutionary Guard conducted the 444-day hostage taking of 1979-1981 at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. So the young radicals are now the hardliners in control of Iran’s nuclear weapons initiative.

Today’s newspapers (11/13/08) inform us that Iran has successfully test fired a long-range, solid-fuel, surface-to-surface ballistic missile that could easily put a nuclear warhead in southeastern Europe or downtown Tel Aviv. Soon the Iranian fanatics will be able to target all the capital cities of Europe.

With a nuclear arsenal, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could shakedown timid Europeans, he could counterbalance the influence of the United States in the Middle East and he could drive the tribe of Israel into a post-nuclear-holocaust diaspora. It would be a shining new day such as the devout have not witnessed since Saladin expelled the infidels from Palestine; the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be revered for centuries as the good Muslim who drove the crusader interlopers from Muslim lands and set the stage for the return of the Mahdi.

From President Ahmadinejad’s perspective these times are filled with promise. To the north of Iran lies Russia, the mother of failed Marxism, a nation so depleted that it is eagerly offering nuclear technological assistance to anyone with hard currency. China will sell Iran anything it cannot purchase from impoverished nuclear-equipped Pakistan or the little nutball maximum leader of North Korea. Moscow and Beijing will reliably veto any sanctions by the United Nations. The Europeans can be counted on to offer Tehran lots of cash, credit and trade deals in the hope that money will make Iran’s Shia fundamentalists suddenly stop seeing history from a Seventh Century Muslim perspective.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s violent and hateful jabber is custom crafted to resonate with the poorly educated Muslim masses, but he has also garnered a warm response from those Western liberals who were suckled on multiculturalism and spoon fed the mush of moral relativism. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands that Western liberals will overlook his fascist brutality if he audaciously denounces the sins of the West; the liberals will forgive his worst predations so long as he can portray himself as a victim of the West. His grasp of the Western post-modern mindset has convinced Mr. Ahmadinejad that millions of cynical Westerners see nothing exceptional about the culture of the West and will therefore be slow to rally to the defense of its traditional values.

America’s newly elected young president, Barack Obama, is every bit the hand-wringing Western liberal. Everything in Obama’s personal history has inclined him toward doubt and indecision when it comes to the defense of Western culture. Obama’s mother, the anthropologist Ann Dunham, was described by her closest friends as a fellow traveler of the Communist Party, so Obama’s mother embraced the same Marxist critique of our culture that Barack himself was espousing as a “community organizer.” Barack’s mother would also have embraced the perspective of cultural relativism which has been the fashion among left-leaning anthropologists ever since its invention by the founder of new-wave American anthropology, Franz Boas. The cultural relativists tend to over-identify with foreign cultures and Obama’s mom made her over-identification evident by “going native” twice and marrying Muslim foreigners from very un-Western cultures. Obama spent his most formative years embedded in foreign culture and soaking up his mother’s deep-seated alienation from America. Clear evidence that his mother’s Marxist critique of America is a continuing influence on Obama’s thinking is Barack’s enthusiastic embrace of Saul Alinsky’s Marxist methodology of “community organizing.” Barack’s chosen handbook for neighborhood radicalization was Saul Alinsky’s manifesto Rules for Radicals which Mr. Alinsky dedicated to “the first radical,” Satan. Barack Obama cherishes his decades-long collaboration with the self-described communist William Ayers, the violent bomb crafter who dedicated his 1974 manifesto Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism to Sirhan Sirhan, the Jordanian fanatic who assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Barack Obama is neither intellectually nor emotionally equipped to defend our America from a challenging “developing world.” A spellbound electorate has chosen as its leader a man who couldn’t get a security clearance and given him a nuclear arsenal and our most sensitive security secrets.

South of Tehran the desert of festooned with barbed wire and anti-aircraft guns that surround a complex of twenty buildings and a welter of smaller ones. Hidden below the desert are two cavernous production facilities about half the size of the Pentagon. This is Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz. Iran has announced that its factories will produce 54,000 enrichment centrifuges. How soon Iran acquires nuclear warheads for its long-range missiles will depend on its rate of centrifuge manufacture. President Ahmadinejad has announced that Tehran was doing research on the advanced P-2 centrifuge that the Muslim mystic boasted would quadruple Iran’s production of enriched uranium.

So, here we are at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century and Islam remains a menace to its neighbors. For all its bearded graying imams and ayatollahs, Islam remains the rambunctious adolescent of the world’s religions. The upstart faith that stormed the gates of Jerusalem at age 26 is still trying to impose its Seventh Century orthodoxies on the rest of the world in the name of Planetary Islamic Manifest Destiny.

Provoking Our Enemies

In recognition of the fact that rogue Islamists are now exploiting the protection of hardened subterranean facilities, like the uranium enrichment facility buried beneath Natanz, the Bush administration began researching the utility of bunker-busting nuclear weapons in 2003. President George W. Bush included proposed spending for further research of such weapons in his federal budget plan for the 2006 fiscal year at the bargain price of only four million dollars.

The bunker-busting nuclear weapon, officially known as the “robust nuclear earth penetrator,” together with “mini nuclear” bombs with a yield of less than 5 kilotons, would have been the muscle behind the Bush administration’s ready-for-use nuclear policy. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was one of the most vocal opponents of the bunker buster, which she said “sends the wrong signals to the rest of the world.” Barack Obama has repeatedly stressed his desire to diminish American military strength and shrink America’s nuclear capability. He envisions a weaker, more talkative, America – an America he will defend with his charisma. He doesn’t see that weakening America would be a provocation that would embolden America’s enemies.

When congressional liberals denied funding for proposed research on tools to crack open Iran’s nuclear warhead factories, they sent all the End-of Days Muslim fanatics a clear signal that America won’t be wrecking their hardened subterranean weapons facilities or their buried stashes of chemical and biological agents with any really big hammers. And besides, it would look “unfair.” After all, if Western democracies have nuclear weapons, then why shouldn’t fanatical theocracies have nuclear arsenals? America’s public image is at stake here; we wouldn’t want to look like a bully who couldn’t empathize. And so on. . .

One thing is for certain, if the non-Muslim world dithers, then the day will arrive when the cult of the Twelfth Imam will have a rocket standing tall on the launching pad and ready to fly. This arrow of Allah will perfectly express the blind bigotry of fourteen centuries of aggressive Islamic jihad. Going nuclear is just the predictable “next step” for jihadi who dream the dream of global Islamic Manifest Destiny.

The millions who adore him think Barack is a prince of peace. Hadn’t Obama’s followers called him The One and the Messiah? Hadn’t Obama himself risen up before the murmuring throngs and declared: “A light will shine down, from somewhere; it will light upon you; you will experience an epiphany and you will say to yourself, ‘I have to vote for Barack.’” He’s describing a religious conversion. He has spent the last two years posing as a pseudo messiah. None of this was lost on the Islamic fundamentalists in Tehran. America, the Great Satan, and all its power are now in the hands of an apostate who was lured from the true faith by the Devil himself.

In Tehran it’s springtime for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has taken the measure of our seductively charismatic supreme leader and he has seen the fulfillment of Islamic prophesy. The storm clouds are gathering; the new Saladin knows what he must do. In the approaching final act of his End of Days Islamic drama, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must best the apostate Barack Obama, who is every inch the oily tempter that Islamic texts predicted Satan to be. Look out folks, here comes the Master Faith.

Now, about Barack’s connection to the number 666. . .

Thomas Clough Copyright 2008 November 13, 2008