1000 Months

Submitted by Ted Gruen (United States), Apr 17, 2012 at 14:41

This appears to be possibly one of the most masterful blows ever delivered for the cause of Islamic triumphalism. It reaches out not to today's religion-indifferent adults but to their children. Massively funded, I can see that "The 99" will show up as a free handout at malls and stores wherever kids congregate. Otherwise, I don't think kids will pay much for it.

The Qur'an (Sura 97) states obliquely and without elaboration that Lailat ul-Qadr (the Night of Power) is better than one thousand months. Lailat ul-Qadr happens once a year during Ramadan, but the early commentator al-Bukhari stated that "better than 1000 months" goes back to the story to a certain Jew who fought for his religion for that length of time, only to have it all came to naught because of the supposedly false cause he fought for. Start at 1948, the year of Israel's founding, add 1000 Islamic calendar months or roughly 80 calendar years, and you get only another 15-16 years after 2012 until the Big Bang that will wipe out Israel, according to that sort of scenario, just the sort of thing that will not improbably show up in the literally puerile pages of "the 99."

But at the same time "the 99" and similar ventures could all fall flat as a tool for bending future Western public opinion to the will of Islamists. Malleable as kids' minds are, for example, they have not become decidedly philo-Japanese since the introduction a generation ago of Japan-produced anime cartoons. Why? Most of them can tell remote fantasy from the reality they and the rest of the world live in.

Sorry, folks, but the designation of a certain "Isaac Solotaroff"as the producer of the film that apparently is part of this Islamist propaganda effort evokes a wry comparison in my mind with the Brooklyn-accented narration by a certain Mr. Rosenthal of a Gulen-produced, English-language program on Jinn that was broadcast a few years ago on Turkish satellite TV available in the United States. In a voice that bespoke the straightfaced earnestness of this apparent Jewish convert to Islam, the audience was soberly informed with sweet music in the background that in the future the Jinn [supernatural creatures, beside angels, mentioned in the Quran] would make themselves manifest and explain all scientific truths to mankind. Just the sort of stuff that may eventually show up on the fantastical pages of "the 99," too.

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