Monday, January 29, 2007
God sometimes you just don't come through:
Shiite death cults! U.S.-plus-Maliki apparently fought Shiite death cults in Najaf yesterday who plotted to blow up Najaf shrines -- not Sunni psychotics -- in an attempt to get the messiah's ass down to earth tout suite. Shades of the Machteret Yehudit! The Los Angeles Times quotes a dude saying, "Everyday someone claims he's the Mahdi."
He lamented that Iraq's death and destruction had convinced some Shiites that the end of days was coming.

"There's nothing bizarre left in Iraq anymore," Nomas said in a telephone interview. "We've seen the most incredible things."
Can we talk about this for a second? The Iraq war is so fucking awful that even some Shiites -- beneficiaries of the political process , remember -- would rather blow up their own shrines and bring on the apocalypse than continue to, you know, live. Somehow I don't think this will come up in Admiral Fallon's nomination hearing tomorrow. We don't need Petraeus in Iraq, we need Buffy the motherfucking Vampire Slayer.
--Spencer Ackerman
> Shades of the Machteret Yehudit!

Wanna fill us in? Google says that's a Jewish Resistance group in Algeria from 1940-1942.

What is the relevance here?
Blogger charlie | 5:21 PM

Sorry, my fault. The Machteret Yehudit ("Jewish Underground") was an ultraorthodox Israeli settler militant group that plotted to blow up the Temple Mount in (if memory serves) 1984. The idea was the Haram al-Sharif was on top of the Temple, and the Messiah won't come if there's no Temple, so you have to blow up the third holiest site in Islam. Shin Bet foiled the plot, and it's a good thing, too -- if memory serves, a Harvard analysis gamed out a scenario where it could have led to a nuclear exchange.
Blogger Spencer Ackerman | 6:21 PM