Just because Osama is paranoid doesn’t mean the infidel isn’t out to get him, we captioned this Photoshopped image of the tormented one back in April of 2004, when we donned our tin foil hat and came up with a…

Unberievable!

I was looking forward to a good apocalypse; all those breathless TV anchors, excitedly reporting the bright light in the sky over Jerusalem, the mass casualties, ‘oh the humanity of it’.

Now my life returns to boredom.

Dare I point out that all of you are laughing after the fact?
Dare I remind you, ‘it ain’t over yet’?

You (all) seem to recognize that at some point in time someone, somewhere will actually have to do something to fix the problem.

(Good thing my Google toolbar has spell check. Otherwise my comments would be easily dismissed.)

FWIW kaltes I disagree strongly that Spencer & Lewis were practicing Nostradamism at all, for the reasons just (inartfully) presented. It was the mullahs who picked the night of Rajab 27 to announce their response (convenient date close to August 31, perhaps) and Farid Ghadry who insisted that Ahmadinejad would illuiminate Jerusalem’s night sky.

Yeah I didnt mean spencer was literally doing it, it wasnt like he was telling people to stock up on bottled water in preparation for the apocalypse and stuff like that, but still. I remember watching an interview he gave about this, I think allah had it linked here in a hotair post. Spencer was talking about how something big was going to probably happen or something like that. There might be a year where this date has significance, but it wasnt going to be 2006.

I dont think the muslims will ever nuke Jerusalem, because so many muslims live there and so many Islamic holy sites are there. Tel Aviv is a different story.

They (Iran) said today, “We’re willing to talk about nukes until we get a nuke.”

Oh, and don’t forget the Rampaging Racoons in Olympia, Washington!

Picking dates is foolish. Not that I’m surprised there were kooks (on BOTH sides, as some noted) who just “knew” today was the day the world was going to end. Because as foolish as it is we STILL do it anyway. You’d think that with all the groups and ideologies and “prophets” who tried to pick a date before we would have learned by now that they simply are NOT going to get it right. Pity that we haven’t. Not that I wouldn’t be surprised if someday in RETROSPECT people look back and say “wow we should have seen that coming a million miles off”. But I think it’s pretty obvious nobody will really see it coming — certainly at least not the exact date.

RH

1. [RD] Light over Jerusalem was … an inference based on a date … and thus should not carry the same stigma for the bearer of that information …

Contradiction alert: I should have said “a supposition” and “conjecture”, i.e., someone presenting a conjecture as a conjecture and sharing information that demonstrates plausibility should not be stigmatized as if they were the source of a prediction based on “insider information” that turns out to be bogus (unless they themselves blur the line).

2. I used a Western date to make a point about the Islamic calendar. (doh!) Our foes evidently keep an eye on both calendars, as they’ve used dates from both in the past to make [different] symbolic points.

One small negative w/Bernard Lewis is the degree to which his rosy view of the achievements of, and treatment of non-Mulsim minorities in, medieval Islamic culture may be overshadowed and superseded by more recent – and more revealing – studies of dhimmi (raya) status and jihad slavery over 12+ centuries of Muslim rule (10-20 million Africans, 1-2 million Europeans, …).

I kind of hope that an internal accident is being arranged for them.

Death to Islam, and
their mediot stooges!
Duty, Honor, Country
(in THAT order)
Rowane

The most I’d accuse Spencer of is rumor-mongering, and attempting to argue that mullahs’ deeds may indeed be motivated and timed by special dates (of all kinds) on the Islamic calendar, “more than you think.” (As if we needed reminding after al Qaeda’s “commemoration” of September 11, 1683.)

Because of his language skills (arabic, aramaic, latin, greek, persian, turkish, hebrew) he also has access to the other side of the story many people cant see.

Numerology seems to figure a lot in many of these islamic terror groups. Apparently 911, 711 were chosen for some such reason. Lewis did notice the danger of Osama:

In 1998, Lewis read in a London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi a declaration of war on the United States by Osama bin Laden, a person of whom Lewis had never heard before. Recognizing in bin Laden’s language the ideology of jihad, Lewis wrote an essay A License to Kill in which he warned about the danger presented by the holy warrior

Here is a Humanities Bio

Lewis is hated by the leftist anti Bushies

He is also hated by (don’t click on this if you cant handle larouchian speak) Lyndon LaRouche
He got a good ref from Slate

Personally, I take him seriously if only for his ability to read islamist publications directly. I am more careful on sept 11, too, because of the symbology of the numbers.

Please. If you’re going to inject end-times crap into foreign-policy, you need a better defense than this when it goes bust.

In fairness, it was Amhadenijad (or however the hell its spelled) who injected end-times crap into the foreign-policy discussion. It can therefore be forgiven, to some degree, when other people raise the possibility that he is serious.

I was planning to spend much of the day blogging about the end of the world. As good residents of the blogosphere know, there was something special about August 22. Something about a Hidden Imam and a flying horse if I remember correctly. Bernard……