Ashley Mote, Member of the European Parliament 2004-2009, writes that the European Union turned a blind eye to illegal sales of uranium to Iran (and even possibly paid for them), and so surreptitiously helped the Iranian regime to arm itself with nuclear weapons. The uranium, he says, was shipped from the former Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Joseph Conrad set his famous story of savagery and cannibalism, Heart of Darkness.

Note: Neither the Democratic Republic of the Congo nor the European Union is a democracy.

Two news items in the media over the last day or so oblige me to break silence on Iran’s acquisition of weapons-grade uranium. They have had it for several years.

Today the Daily Express reports that Iran has “two tons of uranium” which “would be enough for two nuclear warheads”. Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a report headlined “Iran on the brink of a nuclear bomb.”

Comments on the web this morning are suggesting both stories are exaggerations at least, and fabrications at worst.

I profoundly disagree.

While I was in Brussels between 2004 and 2009 I and others established beyond doubt, with the assistance of retired diplomats from the former Belgian Congo, that weapons-grade uranium was being shipped from the former Belgian Congo direct to Iran, despite a world-wide ban on such traffic.

The Belgian EU Commissioner Louis Michel, supposedly responsible for the EU’s humanitarian aid to the third world from 2003 to 2009, was – at the time – directly related to one of the directors of the company in the Congo making the shipments.

He refused to answer any questions on his links, or to account for the EU funds being sent to the Congo.

Worse, despite the considerable evidence I and others presented to OLAF (the EU’s supposedly ‘independent’ fraud investigation organisation) they refused to look into the matter. The director-general, a former German judge called Bruner, told me in committee that “we do not snoop on our friends”. …

Personally I have not the slightest doubt Iran is determined to have its own atomic bomb and will stop at nothing to get it. What the former diplomats told and showed me let me in no doubt whatsoever. I saw, and still have copies of, bills of lading and other export documents. I am also of the firm opinion that the EU has (perhaps unwittingly, but I doubt it) helped finance Iran’s acquisition of weapons-grade uranium over several years.

If you ask me why key people inside the EU’s secretive supreme soviet might countenance such dangerously de-stabilising mischief, I need only point you towards the almost pathological hatred of the USA to be found amongst almost all its members.

Restraint does not remove the need for war, it intensifies it.

The following was made as a comment by C. Gee on our post below, A lethal terrorist ambush, about the attempt Sunday to break Israel and Egypt’s blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza with a flotilla of ships under the auspices of Turkey.

We are moving it to our front page because what it says needs to be said:

Turkey insinuated itself into the ME “peace”. Under that cover it is promoting Muslim/Iranian interests. It is an agent provocateur and will undermine and humiliate Israel wherever it can.

There were no repercussions for Turkey when it refused entry to US troops during the Iraq war. The Turkish bluff at being a NATO ally – or a candidate for Europe – should be called. It is clear Turkey is a paid-up member of the North Korea-Iran axis. It has nuclear ambitions of its own, I have no doubt.

The Israeli government should demand an apology from Turkey – for attempting to break the blockade and for the ambush and attempted kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. If they do not receive such an apology, Israel should regard the incident as an act of war. Certainly Israel should reciprocate any summoning or recall of ambassadors.

If anything should wake Israel up to its peril, it is this incident, coinciding as it does with the US endorsement of the non-proliferation conference statement. Israel is isolated. It can expect no help from Obama. On the contrary, Obama will use this incident as cover for his stand against Israeli “intransigence”. Expect Obama to talk about being slapped in the face by Israel; about how Israel has sabotaged Obama’s peace efforts and sanctions efforts. Expect a cram-down of the two-state solution. Expect more statements concerning Iraqi air-space and the interception of Israeli bombers. ( But above all, expect more statements concerning “the unbreakable bond between America and Israel”. )

The Israelis – boarding the ship with paint-ball rifles and pistols – were ambushed by their own and the West’s liberal moral vanity as much as by the terrorist-supporting “activists”. Over and over again, the Israelis have tied their hands behind their backs, have ceded to their enemies and acceded to their friends. They have fought humanitarian wars – on the ground, rather than from the air – costing Israeli lives to minimize civilian casualties. They have turned back from Lebanon before the job was done. Each time Israel stops short of victory because of “moral” pressure, it escalates the nature of the final reckoning. Thanks to decades of holding back on war, the war that Israel has to fight next must be extremely violent, convincingly lethal. From paint-balls to, no longer unthinkably, nukes.

If Israel does not act decisively against Iran now, it will be unable to, ever. It cannot wait for a regime change in America. Turkey will make sure that the UN sanctions against Iran (feeble as they were ever going to be) will be postponed for the world to decry Israel. But who are we fooling? Sanctions were never going to halt Iran’s nukes. Obama knows that. For all we know, Iran already has a bomb – whole, from North Korea.

With North Korea playing out its own provocations (unmet), testing to make sure the US will do nothing, and Turkey/Iran doing the same in the Middle East, the Obama policy of trying to make America liked will result either in war – or Israel’s surrender. The truly awful realization is that a huge number of people in America, including Jews, will not think the price for being liked is too high.

We are in potentially greater peril now than in the 1930s.

The president of the United States does not like the country he leads. He may sometimes feel the need to say or do something to suggest that he has America’s interests at heart, but the weight of evidence that he does not accumulates and becomes too massive to miss. Not only does he apologize for America abroad, he even has his envoys deplore its laws in talks with foreign regimes, as Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner did recently to the Communist Chinese. And he personally endorsed the criticism of the same laws – Arizona’s new legislation dealing with illegal immigration – made by Mexico’s President Calderon, when the two of them stood side by side on the White House lawn.

And now it emerges that he initiated or at the very least advocated the agreement that Iran made with Brazil and Turkey to have some uranium enriched for it – a ploy that his administration condemns as an effort to stall new UN Security Council sanctions against Iran. The sanctions would be weak, and very unlikely to stop Iran making nuclear bombs, but the administration boasts of getting Russia and China to vote for them.

Obama performed this outrageous, underhand act last month in a letter to President da Silva of Brazil.

The New York Times reports:

Brazilian officials on Wednesday provided a full copy of the three-page letter President Obama sent to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in April, arguing that it laid the groundwork for the agreement they reached in Tehran.

“There continues to be some puzzlement” among Brazilian officials about why American official[s] would reject the deal now, a senior Brazilian official said. “The letter came from the highest authority and was very clear.”

So there was a fourth party to the agreement, which was announced one day before the US presented its draft resolution on Iran sanctions to the Security Council.

As it was the work of all four leaders, Prime Minister Erdogan and Presidents Ahmadinejad, da Silva, and Obama, it should rightly be called the Iran-Brazil-Turkey-US Agreement.

Jonathan Tobin, writing at Commentary-Contentions, points out:

If the mere fact of this new deal wasn’t enough to undermine international support for sanctions, the revelation that Brazil acted with the express written permission of Obama must be seen as a catastrophe for international efforts to restrain Tehran. Why should anyone take American rhetoric about stopping Iran seriously if Obama is now understood to have spent the past few months pushing for sanctions in public while privately encouraging third parties who are trying to appease the Iranians?

Obama delivered a commencement speech at the US Military Academy at West Point which was studded with ironies.

From the Washington Post:

Obama pledged to shape a new “international order” based on diplomacy and engagement.

His presidency has been notable for diplomatic failures and not a single success. As for “engagement”, his obstinate persistence in trying to “engage” Iran has given it all the time it needed to develop nuclear bombs and build the ballistic missiles to deliver them. But a record of failure does not prompt Obama to reconsider his policy.

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation,” he said. “We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice — so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”

Just where has he “steered currents in the direction of liberty and justice”? Where has he got nations that do not “meet their responsibilities” to “face consequences”? Russia invaded Georgia, took and occupied two of its provinces, and Obama has not done a thing about it. What international cooperation has there been to make Russia withdraw?

“The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times,” he said in prepared remarks. “Countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; preventing conflict and healing its wounds.”

He may be seeking such an international order, but he’s done nothing to bring it about. Far from “countering violent extremism and insurgency” he refuses even to name the perpetrators of it (Muslims) and the cause they serve (Islam). If he hoped his audience would assume he meant Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be remembered that he was always against the war in Iraq, has shown reluctance to win decisive victory in Afghanistan, and has told the enemy the dates when he’ll withdraw American troops from both battlefields regardless of whether anything that could be called victory has by then been achieved.

On “securing nuclear materials” he held a useless international conference, when Canada and one or two other non-belligerent states promised not to give fissile material to terrorists, but no real danger was eliminated.

And then he comes on to the tired and stupid mantra “combating climate change”. Combating climate? It’s a primitive and ignorant notion. Call in the rainmakers, or cool makers, or warm makers, and let them start their chants!

“Sustaining global growth”? How he feeds the buzz-words (such as “sustaining”) to his far left constituency and at the same time tries to give the impression that he is on the side of prosperity (“global growth”). But his flowery phrasing cannot conceal his lack of understanding.

In Iraq, he said, the United States is “poised” to end its combat operations this summer, leaving behind “an Iraq that provides no safe haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant.”

Since Obama came to office, there has been far less reporting of terrorist activity in Iraq by the anti-Bush and pro-Obama media. But in fact terrorism in that arrondissement of hell has not stopped. Lately it has intensified. The chances of Iraq becoming stable, “giving no haven to terrorists”, and evolving in this century into a truly democratic state are not worth betting on.

To address the military at all must, he knew, offend the far left constituency to which he long ago sold his soul. Much of his message was aimed at propitiating that radical left rather than reinforcing the morale of American soldiers.

Civilians, he added, must answer the call of service as well, by securing America’s economic future, educating its children and confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change.

His far left critics would understand that when he spoke of “securing America’s economic future” and “confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change” he meant with “green jobs” and redistribution. As for the education of children, they will take it to mean indoctrinating hapless kids with leftist ideology – a cause Obama served actively years ago in Chicago.

Here’s a dry summary of the speech by Arthur Herman in the National Review Online:

On Saturday, Pres. Barack Obama gave a commencement speech … which in effect told the thousand or so soon-to-be second lieutenants that, if he has his way, they’ll soon be out of a job.

Obama outlined for the cadets his vision of a new international order organized around bodies such as the United Nations. In Obama’s future, American military force will give way to American diplomacy joined together with new multilateral partnerships, while “stronger international standards and institutions” will replace unilateral assertion of national interests — including our own. Obama told West Point’s Class of 2010 that he sees them not battling our enemies but “combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth, [and] helping countries feed themselves” even as their citizens achieve their “universal rights.”

He’s still dreaming the dreams of his father.

At last the day came when China and Russia agreed to support a US resolution in the UN Security Council that would make Iran regret it had defied the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, promise never to make nuclear bombs, stop threatening to destroy Israel, and utterly renounce its wicked ways.

As you can imagine, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton felt immensely triumphant – not so much because Iran would now be forced to do all that, but because getting Russia and China on their side had been really hard. It was especially great for Hillary, as she hadn’t achieved anything else to boast about since becoming Secretary of State.

What dire punishments, what unendurable difficulties, will the resolution impose on the Iranian regime?

Sorry, we can’t tell you. The draft of the resolution has not been made public.

However, some information about it comes from unofficial sources.

One report claims that it will ban Iran from building ballistic missiles. (Which it has already done, without permission.)

And what penalties will it impose if Iran disobeys? These:

It “calls on countries to block financial transactions, including insurance and reinsurance, and ban the licensing of Iranian banks if they have information that provides reasonable grounds to believe these activities could contribute to Iranian nuclear activities.”  And it “recalls the need for states to exercise vigilance over all Iranian banks, including the Central Bank, to prevent transactions contributing to proliferation activities.”

“Calls on them to”, and “recalls the need to”, but does not require them to do so.

Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, says it will give “greater teeth” to some sanctions already imposed which haven’t proved effective, and “add strong new measures to intensify pressure on the Iranian government to resolve concerns that its nuclear program is peaceful and not aimed at producing nuclear weapons.”

And that seems to be the most that can be hoped of it.

“The draft resolution is weaker than the original Western-backed proposal, especially on financial and energy-related measures. Rather than place sanctions on Iran’s oil industry, the proposed resolution simply notes the potential connection between Iranian energy revenues and funding for the country’s nuclear program and calls on U.N. members to be aware of it.”

The draft was introduced into the Security Council last Tuesday. (It was urgent, Ambassador Rice said, but she “wouldn’t speculate on when the resolution will be put to a vote”.)

On the day before, Iran announced an agreement it had made with Turkey and Brazil [?] to send some if its low-enriched uranium to Turkey (which has as yet no enrichment facility), in exchange for higher-enriched fuel rods – which Iran will use only in an innocent medical research reactor, built long ago for Tehran by the United States. (And meanwhile, of course, it will continue with its own high-enrichment program.)

But if Iran had hoped that this little ruse, this piece of side-play with Turkey and Brazil, would thwart the resolve of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, it was underestimating the stuff they’re made of! They pressed on, confident that Russia and China were right behind them.

That is, if those two powers stuck to their side of the bargain.

The US had had to pay a price for their co-operation.

First, various provisions had to be stripped from the draft before either of them would even consider giving their nods to it.

Chiefly, the one sanction that would really hurt Iran, aimed at its oil and gas industries, had to be removed. Both China and Russia had invested too heavily in them to allow anything like that.

Next, according to another report, they had to drop sanctions against three Russian organizations that had aided Iran’s nuclear program (and that until now the Russian government had denied were giving any support at all to Iran). And “penalties against a fourth Russian entity previously accused of illicit arms sales to Syria were also lifted” as part of the deal. So were “US sanctions imposed in October 2008 against Russian state arms trader Rosoboronexport for … illicit assistance to Iran’s nuclear program.”

Now Iran may expect aid from Russia to resume or continue. (And so may Syria.)

Then China had to be paid. Part of China’s demand was that America should take no notice of certain nuclear-related transactions it has made with Pakistan, in particular its contracts to build two reactors in that country, which is already a nuclear power.

Pakistan in its turn is providing nuclear and ballistic missile technologies to both Iran and North Korea.

And North Korea has announced that it is developing a hydrogen bomb – a claim that the Obama administration refuses to believe. (North Korea recently torpedoed a South Korean ship, and warned that any retaliation will mean all-out war.)

So let’s say well done Barack, Hillary, and Susan! And thank you for keeping us safe.

Who or what now holds the office of President of the United States of America?

The answer to the question is itself a question mark.

David Solway asks the question and his answers are questions. Here is part of what he writes:

Who is this guy? And what does so enigmatic a figure augur for the United States and, indeed, for the future of us all? No matter what hypothesis or conviction one espouses concerning his definitive DNA, it seems fair to say that a shadow of the clandestine — or if one prefers, the inscrutable — envelops this president.

Even Obama’s most avid supporters, if they are honest, must allow that, compared to his POTUS predecessors, unambiguously little is known about his antecedents or, for example, the salient facts of his academic career — many of his records are still under seal, his college and university transcripts have not been released and, broadly speaking, his significant documentation is rather flimsy. There is not much of a paper trail here; for that matter, there is scarcely a Hansel-and-Gretel bread crumb trail. How such a man could be elected to the presidency … remains a riddle for the sphinx. …

In any event, there can be no doubt that the dossier is scanty and that this is a truly amazing deficiency. We simply do not have a clear portrait or a crisply factual biography of the president. But what we do know about his close affiliates — America-and-Jew bashing Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, hysterical and racially divisive Cornel West, unrepentant Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, unscrupulous entrepreneur Tony Rezko — is profoundly unsettling. … [T]he asymmetric relation between what we know and what we don’t know must distress any rational person curious about so influential an actor on the current political scene.

That Louis Farrakhan, like millions of others, feels that Obama was “selected” for our times should give us further pause. On the contrary, it may not be out of place to suggest that we are now afflicted with the worst possible president at the worst possible time, with Iran darting toward the nuclear finish line, the Palestinians as intransigent as ever, the Russians moving back into the Caucasus region, negotiating with Venezuela and solidifying ties with Iran, Syria and Turkey, terrorism … on the rise and U.S. citizens increasingly at the mercy of the jihadists, China holding massive quantities of American Treasury notes, Obama considering ruinous cap-and-trade legislation at a time when the AGW consensus is collapsing, the American debt estimated to hit 100% of GDP in 2011 and its unfunded entitlement liabilities totaling over $US 100 trillion, leading to the prospect of monetary collapse. None of these critical issues have been substantially addressed by the president, except insofar as his actions in some cases, lack of action in others, have only exacerbated them. The collateral fact that we really have no valid and comprehensive notion of who exactly is leading us at this crucial historical juncture boggles the mind.

Yes, this riddle of a man, this living quandary named Barack Hussein Obama is so unlikely a president of the United States, it’s as if he has gate-crashed into history.

It has been a pretense all along that the Obama administration wants sanctions against Iran to stop it (as if they could!) becoming a nuclear power. This does not surprise us. We have said before that we believe Obama actually wants Iran  to become nuclear armed – and America to lose its nuclear dominance.

Today DebkaFile, referring to a “surprising report and the confusing signals from Washington of the last week”, observes:

Rather than going all out to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Washington and London are intent on blocking the road to sanctions.

As to Obama’s determination to weaken America, read Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation discussing the new START agreement with Russia in this New York Post article, from which we quote:

Obama says he wants the Senate to pass the treaty before the November elections — most likely for fear that a shift in political power to the right might scuttle an already leaky arms-control proposal.

Yet, from the looks of it, sinking it in the name of our national security might be the best thing to happen to the Son of START.

The key flaws:

* To meet the new START-mandated warhead limits of 1,500, the United States must eliminate nearly 80 more warheads than Russia does.

* Worse yet, America needs to get rid of as many as 150 delivery platforms (subs, bombers or silos) to reach the 700 limit; Russia can oddly add more than 130 vehicles.

That’s right: Moscow can actually raise the number of its launch/delivery platforms under new START. In other words, the “reduction” in START applies mostly to us . . .

* US conventional warheads on ICBMs are counted toward the treaty’s nuclear-warhead limit. This would strangle Prompt Global Strike — a new ICBM armed with a non-nuclear payload that could be used globally on short notice. …

Then there’s missile defense: The White House insists the treaty doesn’t affect it, but the Kremlin’s official take is very different: “[START] can operate and be viable if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile-defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively.”

Not good news, considering Iran will have an ICBM as soon as 2015 — and we don’t have a comprehensive defense against it.

Plus, while treaty limitations may match this administration’s (misguided) missile-defense vision, the question is whether START will hamstring future administrations dealing with yet-to-be-determined threats.

A sea of experts is also expressing concern that, in a world that is arming, not disarming, these major reductions in the US nuclear-force structure may create (or feed) an image of American weakness and decline.

They worry about whether a US drawdown would undermine American deterrence, a bedrock of our defense policy, encouraging other potential rivals to bolster their current or planned arsenals.

But Obama sees it differently, believing US leadership on disarmament (even unilateral) gives us greater moral standing in battling proliferation. …

That’s what he says. But can we believe him? Is it a reason or just an excuse for the disarming of America?

Here’s another essay in our series on religions that are dead or obscure or just curious. This one is about Mani and his cult. I’ve made choices from various accounts of his life and teachings, not out of any conviction that these are the true or truer versions, but because I like their drama and colorfulness. Only fragments of Mani’s writings are extant, and what is known of his life derives from Christian and other writers who have quoted him, among them St. Agustine, and from a Greek codex found in Upper Egypt in 1969, and probably written more than 100 years after his death, which is rather too hagiographic to be considered authoritative.

Mani’s myths and beliefs were trusted by millions for hundreds of years, and however incredible they may seem now, they’re hardly more so than those of religions more familiar to us, that vast numbers of persons trust in our own day.

*

Mani was born about 216 C.E. in Babylonia. His father, it is said, was a Mandean [see our post Yezidis and Mandeans, April 4, 2010] or an Elcasaite. (The Elcasaites were one of the Jewish Christian sects called Ebionites, who believed that Jesus was the Messiah but not divine.) During his childhood, the Persian Kingdom passed into the hands of a new dynasty, the Sassanids, and under their rule Mani flourished for about thirty years from 241 C.E.

It was Mani’s intention to found a new universal religion, and in a way he did.

When he was a child, a spirit whom he recognized as his “twin”, or “Divine Self”, revealed holy mysteries to him. He developed them into a religion that eventually spread from the shores of the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, with Manichean churches concentrated in central Asia. There Manicheism survived for centuries after it was crushed in the West by the Catholic Church. So pernicious an infection did the Medieval Church consider Mani’s doctrine that the word “Manichean” became synonymous with “heresy”.

According to some accounts, Mani’s life ended in prison. But there is a persistent legend that, although his beliefs derived largely from Zoroastrianism (see our post Thus, more or less, spake Zarathustra, May 26, 2009), he suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Zoroastrian state. Exactly how is disputed. Some say he was crucified, others that he was pegged out under the mid-day sun in the midst of a packed arena and skinned alive. Perhaps both methods were employed, one after the other, there being no limit to the zeal of those who would save mankind from false doctrine.

What Mani added to the wisdom of the ages was his own version of the Gnostic myth of the War between Good and Evil – alias Light and Darkness. Darkness encroaches on the Light, there is a cosmic battle, some of the Light is lost to the Darkness, and as part of the strategy of the Light to redeem what it has lost so that the universe can be restored to its proper order, mankind is created.

In Mani’s cosmogony there was no gradual decline of the spiritual and good into the material and evil as in the Gnostic sects that emerged north and south of the Mediterranean, such as those of Simon Magus [see our post The father of all heresy, February 21, 2010] and Marcion [see How a rich ship owner affected Christianity, January 2, 2010]. From the beginning they were both there, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; side by side, two equal Kingdoms. There was no wall between them, only a space. Then a partial but catastrophic intermingling took place, and the right order was lost, only to be re-established when every scrap of the lost Light has been retrieved, literally redeemed, and put beyond the reach of Darkness.

It was a dramatic story, full of sex and violence in the heavens.

The Two Kingdoms, one of Light and one of Darkness, existed side by side. They had always existed.

Then, still before Time began, yet at some point of “time” before Time began, Darkness “encroached” on the Kingdom of Light.

It was a crisis that had to be remedied. The response of the Ruler of the Kingdom of Light was to create beings whose task it was to restore the separation of Light and Darkness. They would take immediate action.

This was the First Creation.

The Ruler of the Kingdom of Light, whose name was The Great Father called forth The Mother of Light, who called forth The Primal Man, who called forth five Sons named Gentle Breeze, Cooling Wind, Glowing Light, Clear Water, Quickening Fire.

The Mother of Light held out her right hand to Primal Man who, led by an Angel [of unexplained origin] spreading light ahead of him, advanced to the edge of the battlefield armed with his Soul (which is also called his ‘Maiden’), and supported by his five Sons, who commanded the legions of the Archons of Light, did battle with Primal Man’s counterpart from the Kingdom of Darkness called the Arch-Devil. (Called forth presumably by a Mother of Darkness, who was called forth by the King of Darkness.)

The Arch-Devil also had five Sons, Smoke, Consuming Fire, Sirocco Wind, Steam, Gloom. And his legions were the Archons of Darkness.

Primal Man used an astonishing tactic. He fed his five sons to the five sons of Darkness, and the Archons of Light to the Archons of Darkness, to “poison” them with Light. But the plan didn’t work. The outcome of the battle was an intensification of the disaster: Light mixed with Darkness.

Primal Man, defeated, was taken prisoner and dragged into the Kingdom of Darkness, where he was chained, and made blind and deaf, and deprived of understanding, so that he forgot the Kingdom of Light. Thus it came about that Good now shared in Evil – though concomitantly Evil was “calmed” [mitigated] by its dose of Good.

Although Primal Man could not remember the Kingdom of Light, he prayed to The Great Father, who heard his prayer, and in response created The Friend of Light, who called forth The Great Architect, who called forth The Living Spirit who called forth his own five sons.

This new party went to the edge of Darkness and looked down into the abyss of Hell, but could not see Primal Man. So The Living Spirit called with a loud voice, which cut through the darkness, and Primal Man heard him and answered the call. The Living Spirit held out his right hand to Primal Man and hauled him out of the pit.

The Call and The Answer [notice how a new noun cropping up in the story can be instantly personified] rose together, The Call to the Living Spirit, The Answer to the Mother of Light “for he was her beloved Son”.

However, the Soul of Primal Man was left behind in the Darkness. Further action was needed.

So now The Great Father created The Cosmos “to unmix what had been mixed”.

This was the Second Creation.

With the creation of the Cosmos, this World and Time began. The purpose of their creation was to “sift the Light from the Darkness”.

Heaven and Earth were made from the skins and carcasses of the Archons who had swallowed the Light. So they were made form the mixed parts of Light and Darkness, but by doing this the Great Father separated the mixed parts from the mass of the Darkness.

The Light that was easiest to extract was made into the Sun and the Moon, which are called the Two Ships, and the Stars. So while the Planets belong to the Archons of Darkness, the Stars are ‘fragments of the Soul’ and belong to the Kingdom of Light.

The Mother of Light, Primal Man, and the Living Spirit prayed to the Great Father to create a New God to redeem the Five Sons of Primal Man, the wind, water, and fire that belonged to the Kingdom of Light. The Great Father heard their prayer and called forth The Messenger.

The Messenger had two forms, one male and one female, both beautiful. [It’s not alleged that the two forms were the same as The Call and The Answer, but it’s a fair conjecture that they might have been.]

The Messenger immediately went about the task of “sifting” and saving the Light by setting the Two Ships in motion, the Sun and the Moon, and starting the revolution of the Zodiac.

He also called forth Twelve Virgins (named for peaceful virtues), who set up an engine of five buckets. The Zodiac, turning like a water-wheel, lifted the Light and poured it into the buckets, and they tipped it into one or other of the Two Ships, which carried it away to the Kingdom of Light and returned for more.

This the cosmic process of salvation was engineered with machines and processes to transport the Light upwards as it was redeemed from its entrapment in nature.

It happened that by the light of the Two Ships, the Sun and the Moon, the Messenger was revealed to the children of Darkness. Both his two forms, Male and Female, were made apparent to them. At once the Archons of Darkness lusted after them, the male Archons after the Female Form, and the female Archons after the Male Form. Their desire brought them to ecstasy, in the throes of which they released the light that had entered them when they had devoured the Five Sons of Primal Man. Their emissions were collected in the five buckets and the two Ships transported the recovered light back to where it belonged.

Unfortunately, a dark substance also “escaped from the male Archons”, and tried [it is instantly a thing with a will] to enter the ships along with the light. The Messenger, hiding himself again, did his best to sort out the good freight of Light from the evil cargo of Darkness. He succeeded by and large, sending the load of Light off through Heaven in the ships, and letting the Dark sink to the earth, where it formed all the flora rooted in our world. All vegetables, herbs, trees and flowers are creatures of Darkness, though they have minute fragments of Light still imprisoned in them.

The female Archons had managed to conceive in the throes of their ecstasy at the sight of the male form of The Messenger; but they miscarried, and their abortions are the animals that roam the earth.

Now the King of Darkness conceived the idea of creating Adam and Eve as copies of the Messenger’s two forms, which he too had seen and admired. He intended the man and the woman to be lock-boxes for holding Light. He threw a cosmic orgy, selected two of the embryos procreated by his demons, and shaped them into the beautiful Male and Female forms. Into them he poured all the Light – which is to say the Soul – that remained in his dwindling store. So the human body is a devilish thing of dark earth, imprisoning the redeemable soul, made of light.

This was the Third Creation.

From then on, the battlefield of Light and Darkness has been the human race. The souls of men and women are themselves the prize. But the more souls there are trapped in lusting bodies the better for the distribution and safe-keeping of the Light. The demons “gave Eve their concupiscence” so she would do her utmost to seduce Adam. They would have children, and generations would follow, more and more bodily prisons keeping the Light from its home. The Light within would try to keep the human creature from giving in to the lusts of the flesh. But they found the struggle to save themselves too hard to win. So the Mother of Light, the Living Spirit, and the Messenger sent Jesus to earth to save the human race, and to reveal knowledge to it.

Just as there was an archetype of Adam – the Primal Man – in the Kingdom of Light, there was also an archetype of Jesus. He was called the Luminous Jesus. He appeared on earth when Adam was made, advised him to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, but not to let Eve seduce him. Adam took his advice, tasted the fruit, and resisted Eve – for a while. But he gave in, and the dire history of mankind began. After long ages Zoroaster was sent to help the human race, and ages later Buddha. Then the second Jesus came, the Passible Jesus – the Jesus who could suffer.

Finally here was Mani, the last best hope of mankind. He renewed the lost mission of the Luminous Jesus. He taught the race of men how to fulfil its part in the great mission – the redemption of the Light from the Darkness.

To do its great work, there were things human beings must do and not do.

They must abominate the Laws of Moses and all the scriptures of the Jews.

They should not copulate, because the begetting of children created more human bodies to lock up bits of the Light. (This command was not strictly obeyed, and many Manichean generations were born.)

There was to be no eating of meat because of the Soul-stuff in animals. Of course there was some Soul-stuff in vegetables too, but less, and unlike animals they did not suffer pain, so they could be consumed.

The good Manichean must not accumulate worldly goods. Poverty is good. You must keep yourself separate from the material world as far as possible. The fewer things you handle the better. You should not build a house to live in. You should not labour more than is necessary. Inactivity is better than activity. The less you move, the less you sin. Even breathing is sinful as it damages the air. You sin when you walk; you even sin when you sleep. All are sinners who live on earth, though with Light trapped in them.

However, you must not kill yourself. To let yourself starve to death would be tantamount to suicide, so either you must make some effort to keep yourself alive, or someone else must do it for you. Clearly, not all the followers of Mani could embrace the extreme that he preached. Those who did were the holiest. They were called the Elect. They lived apart and hardly stirred. Their needs were catered for by a rank of men below them in holiness, called the Hearers, or Soldiers. (St. Augustine was a Hearer for some nine years.) They lived and worked in the world, but care of the Elect was their life’s purpose. The rest of mankind were the Sinners.

At the end of time almost all the Light will have been separated from the Darkness, the remnant of creation will be consumed in a great conflagration, and the universe restored to its original order.

The salvation of Primal Man from the Pit of Darkness is the sign and guarantee of the ultimate salvation of the universe.

Jillian Becker   May 9, 2010

Iran is intent on gaining control of the vital shipping lanes that run through the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz and beyond. To achieve this, it will need to drive out the American fleets. It has been rehearsing the conflict.

In Phases Two and Three of Iran’s biggest sea exercise ever (May 6-7) …  its Navy and Revolutionary Guards acted out a scenario for driving US naval forces out of the Persian Gulf after defeating them – as well as responding to potential retaliatory American WMD strikes. …

The eight-day war game, dubbed “The Last Prophet” or “Judgment Day,” spans a 250,000-kilometer area from the strategic Hormuz Strait to the Gulf of Aden, with the accent for the first time on the Indian Ocean.

Iran has mobilized the best part of its naval, air, commando and elite forces for a drill whose codenames signal its goals: Simulating Iran’s perception of its final battle with America and its ending with US forces beaten and put to flight from the regions covered by the exercise. Thereupon, a victorious Islamic Republic of Iran is seen as assuming the role of regional superpower.

Iranian officials told observers from neighboring countries that Persian Gulf security can be achieved without a “foreign military presence” in the strategic waters. The Iranian Navy, they said, had demonstrated its fitness for sole responsibility over the security of the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s crude is channeled to market.

The war game’s spokesman, Rear Admiral Qasem Rostamabadi, disclosed: “Passing ships were successfully checked by destroyers, frigates, special operations teams and naval commandos in line with the goal of establishing security and peace in transit routes bound for the Hormuz Strait and the Persian Gulf.”

This disclosure meant Iran had already begun grabbing control of the oil routes from the American and emirates’ fleets.

The Iranian naval officer went on to describe the second phase of the exercise as “involving the detection and subsequent destruction of marine and submarine targets as well as conducting rescue drills for chemical, biological and nuclear strikes.” …

Iran’s entire fighter-bomber fleet flew the full extent of its flight range as far as the Arabian Sea and northern Indian Ocean, appearing for the first time over the Somali coast. Iran thus flexed its aerial muscles in pursuit of a far-reaching ambition to displace American naval strength – not only in a broad perimeter around its shores but as far afield as the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea approaches.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Robert Gates, who is almost as silly and useless a Secretary of Defense as Janet Napolitano is a Secretary of Homeland Security, has a plan to reduce American naval power. The  enemy at sea that he (laughingly) recognizes are merely “teen-age pirates” – by which he presumably means Somalian terrorists harassing ships off the Horn of Africa.

Investor’s Business Daily, more concerned with the growing Iranian and Chinese naval power and reach, reports and comments:

Our defense secretary proposes doing what no other foreign adversary has done: sink the U.S. Navy. We don’t need those billion-dollar destroyers, he says. …

We find the recent remarks of Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the Navy League at the Sea-Air-Space expo … disturbing. He seems to think naval supremacy is a luxury we can’t afford and that, like every other aspect of our military, an already shrunken U.S. Navy needs to downsize.

“As we learned last year, you don’t necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades),” Gates quipped.

We are not laughing.

Pubescent pirates aren’t the only threat we face. Last month, a Chinese naval task force from the East Sea Fleet — including the imposing Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers, frigates and submarines — passed through the Miyako Strait near Okinawa, a move that sent shock waves through Japan.

The exercise took place just days after warships from the North Sea Fleet returned from what China’s army-navy called “confrontation exercises” in the South China Sea.

“Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” Gates asked. The answer is yes. Our national interests are global, in every ocean. Some will be in port, and others will be meeting commitments from the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait.

It’s well to consider the “new challenges,” as Gates put it, in the form of anti-ship missiles in the hands of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah or the threat posed by Iran’s arsenal of missiles, mines and speed boats near the Strait of Hormuz. But new challenges don’t make the old ones go away. We must be prepared to meet them all.

“At the end of the day, we have to ask whether this nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 billion to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” Gates said.

The question is whether we can afford not to. Defense, unlike health care, is a constitutional imperative. …

In her Jerusalem Post column this week, Sarah Honig tells a story about a man being offered a choice between two ways of getting killed.

It is an apt illustration of the choice Obama is offering Israel.

Sarah Honig writes:

Time to quit quibbling. No pedantic hairsplitting can mitigate the evidence: The Obama administration cynically links Iran to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The premise is simple and chilling. If Israel wants a last-minute, last-ditch, quasi-credible American move to keep Iran from obtaining nukes, it must pay the piper by making hefty concessions to the sham paraded as the Palestinian Authority. Boiled down to its bare essence, the White House diktat means that Israel can maybe extricate itself from existential Iranian threats by submitting itself to existential Iranian-proxy threats.

Had Barack Obama ever read Shalom Aleichem’s autobiography he’d have encountered the author’s harrowing recollection of the story his grandfather told him about “the bird-Jew.” That was how the grandfather referred to Noah, a pious innkeeper who lived in constant dread of the gentile village squire. Trembling, Noah headed for the manor to renew his lease. His timing was off, because the courtyard was full of festive guests ready to go hunting.

The squire, in a jovial mood, agreed to renew the lease if Noah would climb the stable roof and pretend to be a bird, so he could shoot him. Fearful of angering the nobleman, the worst consequence the Jew could imagine, Noah obsequiously did his bidding. He went up and, as ordered, bent forward, flung his arms sideways and assumed a birdlike pose. At that point the squire fired and Noah fell, as any slain bird would.

Although realizing he was about to be put to death anyway, the bird-Jew played along with his executioner, still absurdly terrified of what might happen if he didn’t. Obama is the proverbial squire in our own tale, casting Israel as the latter-day bird-Jew.

Israel is now squarely in Obama’s gun sights. It’s blamed for all Mideast ills. Obama, after all, is the high priest of the political theology of American/Western guilt. Israel embodies Western culpability. If Obama preaches American penance vis-à-vis Arabs/Muslims, Israel obviously must atone in more than words for the sins he ascribes to it. …

Patriotic Americans are now told insidiously that by not bowing down to Obama’s ultimatums Israel jeopardizes the lives of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When depicting a pacified Mideast as a “vital national security interest” that must be secured, the “peeved” Obama puts Israel on notice that he will shove a solution down its intransigent throat.

The nature of his cure is determined by his diagnosis, which in turn is colored by his perception of democracy’s foes as frustrated potential friends. In Obama’s universe, it’s the West’s haughty insensitivity which sparks Arab/Muslim hostility. Islamic expansionism and exclusionism aren’t problems but cultural assets for America. Consequently democratic Israel must sacrifice its self-preservation to facilitate appeasement of Muslims sworn to annihilate the Jewish state.

Obama’s radical worldview places the onus on the victim. Its corollary contention is that were the aggressor’s grievances redressed, all would be hunky-dory.

The great American silent majority may not be fully aware of Obama’s dangerous undertones. Many of his Jewish voters willfully prefer not to understand. They’d rather not admit liability for their political folly – a common psychological shortcoming.

So we Israelis are left alone. It’s up to us not to be bamboozled.

While the current US administration calls the shots, there is no Israeli-American alliance we can remotely count on. Obama will do nothing whatever to even diminish the danger of an Iranian nuclear threat against Israel. Otherwise he wouldn’t have frittered valuable time for more than a year, twiddling his thumbs. The sanctions Obama proposes are preposterously useless anyhow and further diluting them to win Chinese and Russian acquiescence would make them altogether laughable. China and Russia, let’s not forget, are Iran’s principal enablers. Obama knows this.

Had Obama wanted to effectively deal with Iran’s rogue regime, he’d need no allies. America could have unilaterally declared stringent sanctions, imposed them on prime trading partners and enforced an air-and-sea blockade that few would have dared breach. No military attack would be required. [We’re not convinced of this – JB.]

But that’s not Obama’s agenda. We must suspect that he desires a nuclear Iran to render Israel more vulnerable, pitiably dependent and pliable, thereby facilitating his envisioned great rapprochement with the Muslim world.

Obama’s endgame is to debilitate, demoralize and destabilize Israel. All he offers Israelis is a choice of how his inimical goal will be achieved. This may be via allowing Iran the weaponry with which to intimidate Israel or by shrinking Israel into the Auschwitz borders (as ultra-dove Abba Eban called the 1949 armistice lines into which Obama schemes to squeeze us).

We can avoid Iranian nukes by opting for the Auschwitz borders or we can avoid the Auschwitz borders but be bullied by Iranian nukes. The unspoken signal from Washington is: Either way, you’re dead. …

We agree that Obama is intent on debilitating, demoralizing and destabilizing Israel, but we don’t think that is his “endgame”.  Those are means to an end.

Obama’s end is to destroy the State of Israel.