Apocalypse Soon? If Ahmadinejad has "won" in a landslide, look for him to indicate the Mahdi gave him victory.
UPDATES:
- 7:00am eastern (Sat) — Ahmadinejad will remain president with 63% of the rigged “vote”
- 11:30pm eastern: Despite Western media buildup for Mousavi — and with 78% of the vote counted — Ahmadinejad appears to have “won” a landslide with 65% of the “vote”
- 5:30pm eastern: Iran’s Ahmadinejad moves into big lead in election — Mousavi claims fraud
- 3:30pm eastern: Iranian state TV says Ahmadinejad has won; but rival claims victory for himself
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All eyes are on Iran today. Please be praying for the Iranian people. Humanly speaking, it’s almost impossible for anything good to come out of today’s rigged “elections.”
First, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his cabinet of clerics (the “Guardian Council”) have already chosen four presidential contenders. They denied another 450 or so applicants from even being considered. This gives you a little taste of what democracy means in Iran. Thus, Khamenei and the Radical mullahs around him have already chosen four people they want the country to know would be acceptable to them — that is, people who are loyal to the Revolution, will follow the wishes of the Supreme Leader, and will prepare the way of the coming of the Islamic Messiah known as the Twelfth Imam or the Mahdi.
Second, no matter who “wins,” it doesn’t really matter in any practical sense. In Iran’s Sharia-law driven legal system, all authority is vested in the hands of the Supreme Leader. The role of the president in many ways is to be the public face and voice of the Supreme Leader to the nation and the world. For the last four years, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been been that face and voice precisely because Khamenei wanted him to be.
Third, the system really is rigged. Iranians will feel like they are exercising their right to choose their next leader. But Khamenei is pulling strings behind the scenes to engineer the “choosing” of his preferred candidate. The only drama is finding out whom Khamenei wants to be the face and voice of Iran for the next four years, and whether he believes Ahmadinejad has outlived his usefulness.
Fourth, that said, the God of the Bible — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — is in control. The Lord God Himself is all sovereign and He ultimately will determine who will run Iran, and will do so for His own purposes. Daniel 2:21 tells us that “He removes kings and establishes kings.” While humanly speaking all seems to be lost in Iran, this isn’t really the case. The truth is that Jesus Christ is drawing millions of Iranians away from Islam to become His followers. As I describe in Inside The Revolution in detail, the Lord is using radio broadcasting, satellite TV technology and the Internet to get the good news of salvation to the Iranian people. Jesus is also appearing to many personally, telling them to, “Come, follow Me” — and they are. Iranian Christian leaders tell me they expect more than 10,000 house churches to be planted in Iran in the next 12 to 18 months because Christianity is growing so fast in that country. And one of the main reasons people are abandoning Islam and becoming followers of Jesus is because of the tyrannical leadership of the country. Starting with the Ayatollah Khomeini, and right up to the present with the Ayatollah Khamenei, such cruel, Radical dictators are causing Iranians to become deeply disillusioned with Islam and eager to search for true peace. They are finding it in the Prince of Peace. So, let us pray earnestly for the Iranian people that no matter who wins, they will choose Jesus Christ, the King of kings and the Lord of lords this year.
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UPDATE: WHO IS MIR-HOSSEIN MUSAVI?
Note: There are numerous spellings of his name — Mousavi, Moussavi, Hussein and Hossein.
For the last few days I’ve been noting the evidence that Mousavi is not a moderate or Reformer, as the Western media keeps insisting. Here’s the latest evidence:
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a leading Iranian pro-democracy dissident. He is based in Washington. He gives a summary of the background of the four “candidates” running for president in Iran today. Even this brief snapshot shows how Radical any one of them will be.
- “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by his own admission, was part of the quintet of the Central Committee of the Office of the Unity which led and operationally oversaw the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979. He was the special operations officer in the 6th special corps of IRGC’s Qods Force, responsible for sabotage and cross-border missions. In his current hat, he oversees his government’s expanding drive to perfect the nuclear fuel cycle and acquire the ultimate weapon.
- “Mir Hossein Moussavi is the current reincarnation of the moderate political animal in Iran. He was a founding member of the Islamic Republic Party- think of it as the mullahs’ Third Reich. Among honors on his resume, he lists: 144 extraterritorial assassinations during the premiership, the massacre of nearly 30,000 political prisoners on the eve of the signing of the 1988 UN Iran-Iraq cease-fire accord, and the 1983 embassy and marine barrack bombings in Beirut.
- “Mohsen Rezai ranks high in the pantheon of terror. He commanded the IRGC during the disastrous war with Iraq, with ultimate responsibility for sending tens of thousands of under-aged adults to their death in the battle fronts as human mine sweepers, many of whom were shrouded in army-issued blankets to prevent their body parts from splattering. Rezai played a decisive role in coordinating and directing the 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires, for which he was implicated by an Argentine court and for whom, in 2007, Interpol issued an arrest warrant.
- “Mehdi Karoubi is the least consequential. Nevertheless, he occupies a special place among the regime hierarchy. For, he is a permanent member of the Expediency Council, chaired by former president, Rafsanjani.”
CNN is quoting an Iranian professor at Georgetown University as saying Moussavi is deeply anti-American and in no way a Reformer. “‘Twenty years — what has he done in that time? No one really knows,’ said Shireen Hunter, a Georgetown University visiting professor and Iranian author of numerous books on the nation’s political history who interviewed Moussavi just as he was officially exiting politics. ‘What you have is a war and a history that the younger Iranians do not know about or remember, so they know less about him and see him as the reformer he says that he is,’ Hunter said. She spoke with Moussavi for her 1992 book, Iran and the World. ‘I quoted Moussavi as saying that Iran did not suffer as much from the Soviet Union as it did from America,’ Hunter said. ‘He was very anti-Western. He presided over a lot of nationalism [during his time as prime minister,] and now he is saying that he is a reformer? I don’t believe in born-again Democrats. I’m skeptical.'”
The Weekly Standard brings additional nuggets to light:
- In 1981, when Mousavi first appeared, UPI explained that “Appearances aside, Mousavi heralds a more vigorous propagation of the radical Islamic foreign policy of exporting Iran’s revolution.”
- In 1987, Reuters quoted Mousavi at a demonstration in Tehran saying “Tomorrow will be the day we step on the Great Satan. Tomorrow is the time for America to see our iron fists.”
- In 1988, Reuters reported that Iranian Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi called Israel a “cancerous tumour” and said the Palestinian move to accept UN Resolution 242 would anger Muslim revolutionaries.
- In 1989, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Washington Post described Mousavi as “a leading radical who in the past has competed with Khamenei for primacy in setting government policy pledged subservience, along with his entire cabinet, to the new leader.”
- In 1989, Mousavi called for Salman Rushdie to be killed. The Times (London) reported that “Mr Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the Prime Minister, said the Ayatollah Khomeini’s order that Mr Rushdie should be killed ‘will undoubtedly be carried out and the person who has become a tool of Zionists against Islam and brazenly attacked it and the Prophet will be punished’, according to Tehran Radio.” And in that same year, the Washington Post described Mousavi as a “leading hardliner,” with links to regime attempts to assassinate political opponents in exile.
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HEADLINES TO TRACK:
- IAEA: Ahmadinejad election rival (Mousavi) launched Iran nuclear program
- Israeli analysis: ‘Mousavi win wouldn’t stop nuke drive’
- Israeli analysis: Mousavi bad for Israel — will bring Tehran closer to bomb
- Israel’s Netanyahu To Deliver Major Mideast Speech
- Can Netanyahu Repair the Rift With the U.S.?
- Analysis: Netanyahu cornered by hawks and Obama