The Jewish Connection

Well, that's really good news. That Muqtada al-Sadr has decided, after all, on an extension of the cease-fire he imposed upon his Mahdi militia. While he remains piously incommunicado, in some unknown place in Iran, continuing his religious studies, intent on arriving at a level of learned scholarship to rival that of his deceased - dispatched-by-Saddam - father.

Another six months of declining to clash with American troops in Iraq. Big relief. Really. Fact is there are more than sufficient militias, eager to battle it out with foreign troops in Iraq, so one less to worry about is one less to worry about. And so, it can be anticipated further than the current situation of low-frequency spear-throwing may continue.

And how's this for high-flown rhetoric; the Iraqi government characterizing this new move, along with the al-Sadr movement - which, if one recalls, is questionable in any event, since Muqtada al-Sadr, once a semi-integral part of the government, chose to step down and go his own way, rejecting the Shia-Sunni coalition in favour of battling American troops - as "a cornerstone of the political process on the path to building a new Iraq".

Some path, that. And the really hilarious, if not downright hideously Machiavellian part of this is that Iraqi government security forces, controlled by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq - a Shia militia - has been waging its own low-profile, but exceedingly provocative war of attrition on Muqtada al-Sadr's faithful, arresting them, harassing their families and overall offering goodwill gestures on behalf of the government.

Sunni malovently against Shia, Shia confronting Sunni, all bitter enemies and not to be placated by the simple fact that they are all Muslims, all ethnically, culturally and socially similar, all human beings with the same needs and aspirations. And now - Shia against Shia, where does it end? The implacable hatred evidenced by one sect of that great religion against the other. If they so much detest one another, how to measure their detestation of Jews?

Funny that: Shias hold the ghostly personage of the 12th imam to the most sacred level of belief; that he will one day return to earth from his present mysterious place of residence to which he departed centuries ago and where he remains in a shroud of mystic revelation. Salvation will arrive with his presence, for it is held that on the day of Judgement he will appear among his followers to lead the way.

And with him at that signal time in the future toward which all pious thought is centred? None other than a learned and wise Jewish man, one whose presence on earth, and whose prescriptions for a life well lived have come down through the millennia to inform countless believers in his divinity of the rightness of his message: Jesus Christ.