[risk]

Well put. The Dajjal concept is not too far away from the Illuminati/Mason/NWO/lizard conspiricy theory notions. It all comes down to the same thing: being told to give up faith in the enlightenment because "it's all a big hoax" intended to cloak some dark, sinister ambition.

[Dajjal]

What if these disparate elements shared beliefs, joined forces, won a much larger audience, broke out of their intellectual and political ghetto and became capable of challenging the premises of public life in the US?
This is the frightening prospect ....

This is exactly what we are seeing in much of the Muslim world today. Before 1980, imams taught from their pulpits and in their madrassas that the Dajjal would appear some day in the unspecified future and be destroyed by the Mahdi.

Since 1980, more and more have been teaching that the "Signs of Qiyama (the End Times)" are all around us, and have reinterpretted the Dajjal to be not an evil individual, but the political / economic / cultural influences of Western Civilization.

And the Mahdi is being interpretted increasingly not as one great Muslim king, but as the collective violence by all terrorists against any Western person or institution.

A major effort of the War on Terrorism must be to directly counter this apocalyptic thinking and to marginalize these beliefs within the Muslim world.

(Go to my FR homepage for more information.)