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[ by Charles Cameron — two or three glimpses from Iran re the OWS movement ]

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You have have seen this already if you follow Aaron Weisburd, whose Internet Haganah has more detail on IRGC involvement in propaganda with an OWS flavor, including another striking graphic that’s just too fine for me to resist:

What interests me, though, is an additional “dot” provided by Tim Furnish, who (as always) is tracking the Mahdist aspects.

On his MahdiWatch blog today, Dr Furnish points us to a piece by one Charles Dameron (not even a typo-relative of mine) on Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, headlined Iranian Ayatollah: OWS A Sign Of The 12th Imam, and carrying the following report:

Most Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters would probably tell you that they’re out to change the world, or at least the United States’ marginal tax rates on high earners.But most of them — one hopes — probably wouldn’t profess to having any interest in hastening the reappearance of a religious messiah and ushering in a global, cataclysmic Day of Judgment.

Don’t tell all of this to Iranian Ayatollah Mohsen Heydari. He’s convinced that the OWS protests are the self-evident harbinger of a long-awaited event in Shi’ite eschatology: the reappearance of the 12th (Hidden) Imam, whose End of Times return will bring Islamic peace and justice to the world.

“The Occupy Wall Street movement is the big step to prepare the ground for the appearance of the 12th Imam,” Heydari told mosque congregants in the Iranian city of Ahvaz, the capital of the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, on November 7.

The remarks came during a special prayer service for the celebration of Eid al-Adha, a major religious holiday that ends on November 9.

Talk about the imminent arrival of the 12th Imam is a perennial feature of political and religious discourse in post-revolutionary Iran. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad famously expressed his wish that God would “hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace,” during a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2005.

I am not in any way suggesting that Iranian “borrowing” of OWS imagery should be held against OWS, though I think the more thoughtful OWS supporters would wish to be aware of it.

The important point, it seems to me, is that the overtly apocalyptic tie-in with expectation of the return of the Twelfth Imam is yet another indicator of the significance of the Mahdist current within Iranian military and government circles.

Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba by Stephen Tankel

PRAGATI, India’s National Interest Review magazine has published my review of Dr. Stephen Tankel’s book on Lashkar-e-Taiba, titled Storming the World Stage. The article is not yet online (I will add the link when it is released) but the issue digest PDF version is below:

pragati-issue56-nov2011-communityed.pdf

“Jihad for all seasons”

….Carnegie and RAND scholar Stephen Tankel has endeavored to demystify and deconstruct LeT in his meticulously researched book, Storming The World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba and bring into the light the complex relationships that entwine LeT with the Pakistani state and the subterranean universe of radical jihadi politics.  Conducting extensive interviews with Islamist militants, Western and Indian intelligence officials, Pakistani politicians and ISI officers and buttressing his narrative with sixty-three pages of end-notes, Tankel has produced a portrait of Lashkar-e-Taiba that is accessible to the layman while remaining a methodical work of scholarship.

…. An organisation that, like Hezbollah, is state-sponsored but not controlled, Lashkar-e-Taiba is suited for waging what military analyst Frank Hoffman terms “Hybrid War”, but how LeT would play that role in an Indo-Pakistani War is left to the reader’s inference. LeT also demonstrated in Mumbai a fluid tactical excellence in its use of off-the-shelf technology, small arms and mobility to reap an enormous return-on-investment by attacking soft targets, much along the asymmetric lines advocated by warfare theorist John Robb. Tactics that are a critical threat to any open society by forcing it to take preventive measures which are ruinously expensive and contraindicated to keeping society free and democratic….

Will update post as matters develop.