Posted on 11/03/2001 4:00:51 PM PST by Jean S
The great capitalist cathedral is approaching fast.
What arrogance, he thinks - the infidels' erecting twin towers to heaven. Though they soar upward, they really descend into hell.
He declares aloud: "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger."
Steel crunches steel. Joy fills his heart. They have accom-
plished their mission: to ram a jet plane down the throat of the heathen beast. The next stop: paradise.
The hijacker's skin burns; his blood boils; his bones disintegrate.
He finds himself in a courtyard, reclining on a chaise longue, with a couple of flasks of wine and baskets of bread and fruit at his disposal. Birds sing. Butterflies hum. Flowers bloom. Servants attend him: They include chaste, beautiful girls with luscious ebony eyes.
Ah, the black-eyed virgins, he thinks, smiling. Martyrdom has indeed taken him straight to heaven. He has bypassed the third stage of life, between the world and heaven.
"Praise be to God," he says.
At that precise moment, the food and drink burst into flames. The virgins turn into hags.
His chair flattens and hardens and by itself straps him in. It then sends up long spikes, which completely pierce him, tearing through fat and muscle and cartilage. He bleeds profusely. But he stays wide awake. "Excruciating" is a mild term for the pain he feels - the pain he can't turn off. He screams and screams.
After what seems like an eternity of agony, he finds himself in a different place, in front of an angel.
"I don't understand," the wretch says. "I thought heaven was supposed to be joyful, not painful."
"You're right," the angel says.
The emissary of God doesn't have to complete the thought. The wretch hears a voice from within himself, a voice that says he had been in hell, not heaven.
"But, but I sacrificed myself for God. I, I helped to strike a mighty blow against the Great Satan. Wasn't I supposed to go straight to paradise?"
"Blasphemy," the angel thunders. "That you did your horrendous deeds in the name of Allah besmirches you all the more. It was Satan, not God, you followed.
"Alas, in twisting religion for demonic purposes, you follow a well-worn path to the worst realms of hell. It's the same path the American Rev. Jim Jones took in the 1970s, when he misused his God-given gift of charisma to feed his own personal desires and, in the end, to have his followers kill themselves."
The hijacker's inner voice, long muffled, tells him the angel is right.
"Then I'm no martyr?" he asks, trembling.
"Martyr?" the angel says, contemptuously. "I've known martyrs, courageous people who put their lives on the line for a just cause - people like Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of the United States. They did not seek death. They did not try to take innocent victims with them. They sought to nurture, not just destroy.
"No, you are most certainly no martyr. Rather, you are a murderer hundreds of times over. And you violated another of God's major commands by killing yourself. What's more, you compounded your sins with blasphemy."
"But, but I was tricked by my leaders, who I thought were holy men. They convinced me that, by killing Americans, I would be doing God's will."
"Only you are responsible for your actions," the angel replies. "You failed to heed your inner voice.
"Because you deceived yourself into believing you would go straight to heaven, God thought it fitting that you skip the third stage of life and go straight to hell.
"Still, God has spared you the very worst of hell, which he has reserved for the masterminds behind your crime."
Great despair settles onto the hijacker. The truth of all the angel says shines clearly. He wonders why he lacked such clarity while in the world. He wonders why he was so foolish as to stifle his inner voice.
He had tricked himself into believing he was dedicating his life to a noble purpose. But now, he clearly sees he was only serving Satan. He knows he must be punished even more.
The angel says:
"You must die many, many times. You must feel the pain of all who perished because of your actions. You must feel the hurt felt by their children and parents and spouses and friends."
The hijacker finds himself back in his torture chamber, screaming.
Gregory Stanford is a Journal Sentinel editorial writer and columnist. His e-mail address is gstanfor@onwis.com
Quote from article:
It is worth noting that Russian President Putin is a former head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the renamed KGB. During the late 1990s, Russia’s foreign minister was Yevgeny Primakov, a KGB "Arabist" who was one of the chief architects of the international terrorist network. German analyst Hans Graf Huyn points out that "until 1985 Primakov was Director at the Moscow Institute for the Middle East (where he had studied). Together with Lumumba University, this Institute was active in establishing terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland, Libya, and the Near East." Primakov was also instrumental in building intelligence services for Iran and Iraq, which in turn support and control terrorist groups throughout the Middle East and Europe.
Hence, I have a sneaking suspicion that Rosie is actually one of the fabled 72 Islamic virgins !!!
They are probably in paradise. Hells bells, Where they came from makes Hell look good.
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