Now the fight over the right to drag threads over or off one’s face may drag France into a period of high security alert this October. The Internet and cell phones are alight with traffic heating up faster than an Apple G4 microprocessor. What heats it up are rumored concerns of an imminent, Mumbai style attack planned by al-Qaeda operatives from North Africa. They may unleash suicide commando raids gunning down and grenade stoning apart crowded and iconic public places across Germany and France. Both countries are on high alert though American government sources are less concerned about alarming Americans abroad.

Perhaps American intelligence keeps alive an old pattern from nine years ago. French intelligence was monitoring the same kind of email and cell phone traffic on 10 September 2001. They tried to warn their opposites in the CIA and Pentagon. The latter were still scratching their heads about taking French warnings seriously when on the following morning (September 11th) a Boeing 757 jet full of hijacked civilians of American Airlines Flight 77 swooped down at grass-top level at over 530 mile per hour. The raped jet struck the west face of the Pentagon like a lightning bolt from the blue turbaned al-Qaeda Talibani.

Is a large-scale attack coming soon to the European tourist destination nearest to you?

My oracle says not in October. Look out for November because it is the 11th month and the al-Qaeda inspired jihadists love to mark their targets on dates playing with the numbers 11, 9 and 7. Be mindful of days like 11/6 (upside-down “9/11″) or 11/7 or 11/9. Remember to mark these days on the European calendar as 7/11 and 9/11/10. You can read more about it in an eBook about 2010, click here: terrorist attack.

Whatever the numbers, Guy Fawkes (the English terrorist who planned to blow up English Parliament at the end of the 16th century) is a jihadi Shaheed (Muslim martyr) in our times. He is in search of a kafir (infidel) target to powder keg. It may not be British Parliament on his hit list to be blown all-a-sinders, but to paraphrase the famous Guy Fawkes rhyme, “Remember, remember, any night in November” 2010 as a time to be extra vigilant against terrorist attacks in Europe, in America, and especially in India. Be watchful where many Western tourists and/or Western disciples of Eastern teachers gather in ashrams or meditation resorts from Mumbai, Pune or down in Bangalore. Meditation and awareness is your greatest defense against terror of all kinds — jihadist or the greater terror of being under the sleepwalking influence of a conditioned mind.

Terrorists are watching you as you watch your selves. They are waiting for your awareness to loosen, for your security guards to be withdrawn. Stay alert in November and all will be well.

A terrorist is like black magician. He needs the victim to unconsciously give his or her power away to his fearful bluff of cursing. A terrorist is an unconventional warlock, ever vigilant for a moment of weakness in which to strike. A curse works because you give it your energy. An act of terror works only when you give your watchfulness away.

***

Back on 8 August I received an email from “RA” about another kind of terror. The kind people sometimes vent when a “spiritual terrorist” shares an insight that can blow up one’s apple cart of borrowed beliefs. There are good terrorists as well as bad. The good shock us out of our false reveries and pretenses. They blow up the foundations of our under-”mind”, which are the twin towers, parliaments and pentagons of borrowed knowledge, identities and dogmas imposed on our innocent, nascent, birth-given intelligence. I have known such a spiritual terrorist and I aim to become one.

RA
I listened to your comments on Nostradamus on a History Channel special called the Nostradamus Effect. Your commentary was quite interesting, so I went to find a book or two by you and was surprised at how virulent some people seem to be when it comes to your work. I’ve found that when many voices are raised to silent one voice, there’s usually something interesting to pursue there. Not always, but often. Why do you think some people have taken such a critical view of your work.

HOGUE
Thanks for your letter today, RA. I receive many letters each day. Many of them are unconsciously motivated and driven by narcissistic projections of the letter writer who either praises me because my round peg by chance happens one day to fit their round whole of biases. Other readers react against me because my round peg by chance pinches their square whole of preconceived antithesis. With time, nearly every narcissistically positive commentator on my writings will eventually find I do not fit with his or her projections, thus I am rejected off handedly. With time, nearly every calumny-texting, vitriolic emailer will by pure accident of bias find I sometimes do fit with his or her worldview. Then suddenly my credibility is resurrected. My peg at last fits in their whole of mindset.

Your letter, RA, is rare because it contains words composing a thoughtful set of questions and comments that indicate someone who may be a true skeptic; namely, someone who inquires in the spirit of what ancient Greek word skepticos originally meant: “to investigate without prejudice for or against.”

I am not agreeing with what you have said like one of my narcissistic readers. There is a very fine line of difference. I harmonize with what you are saying because it has been my own direct experience not a mere belief upheld without it. How you have sought inquiry is how I also seek it. Whether what I say or who I am resonates with you or not, will have as little or as much value to existence depending on your capacity to delve deep with an open mind and heart of true inquiry into what this John Hogue is all about.

I have come to understand that originality and fresh intelligence can act like sand rubbing raw the oyster or it can act like a brush combing against the grain of what is traditional, robotic and politico-spiritually correct. Like you, when faced with a thinker or mystic or any figure in any field of endeavor that stirs a large and virulent protest from all sides, rather than join in the chorus I am compelled to learn for myself who that person is and what they are saying. Such universal controversy is a sign that something new and important may be hiding just under the surface related to the target of all-sides, negative attention.

I look at history. When has the new been easily embraced by the status quo in any dimension of life? When has progress in human consciousness not met resistance? Of course there is always the danger that controversial figures are being irritating just because it satisfies a recalcitrant ego trip. Then again, not all gold is pyrite. Not all pearls are plastic. It is worth the risk to inquire further into a man or a woman at the center of so much controversy from all sides. The passion of detractors can indicate that a nerve has been touched, a tradition exposed or illusion’s sleep disturbed. So off I go to directly understand that person who stands alone as a majority of “one” against the crowd. Does he or she become this out of hubris, or authentic and progressive humanity flowering from within?

Originality is by its essence a force that undermines complacent status quo thinking, feeling and experiencing. We seem embodied in a mortal universe (perhaps not the only universe around) that is wired to resist progressive evolution of thought and spirit. Yet it evolves. The sand chafes the oyster, yet from time to time pearls of great beauty and richness arise. Unconsciousness exerts the pressure of form-ality that turns coal into diamonds. Mediocrity and conform-reality have their parts to play. The question is, for each of us to contemplate: Am I choosing to be a force of form-ality; or, am I the diamond in the rough, in the making? Am I the garden’s mulch or am I the flowering?

RA
Also, I’m trying to find a copy of your book cited on the History Channel: Nostradamus and the Anti-Christ. Is it published yet?

HOGUE
Yes, RA. I publish it as an eBook. Much of my work now is self-published, because the evolution of my work since I published my last book in paper in 2003 — Nostradamus: A Life and Myth — no longer ingratiates me with the corporate media pigeonhole set for authors and scholars in the prophetic field. I hope to see that change, but I also understood long ago as a tomorrowist that the future of the written word depends upon delivery systems made of photons and electrons stored on screen tablets like Kindle and iPads, not on ink staining the skins of murdered trees. I try to live by the future I foresee, so several years back I began publishing my books as electronic books that I sell at my web site and soon through other electronic avenues.

Here is a link to my web page concerning Nostradamus and the Antichrist (Mabus). It is the second highest ranked page on the topic in the world.

John Hogue

(04 October 2010)

The Tale of Two Nuclear Crises: Past and Future

Friends
History repeats itself with fatal intent in terrorist attacks on Mumbai last week. I fear they are strategically aimed to accomplish what was tried nearly seven years ago but failed only by the grace of a momentary pause of human reflection before pushing the button of nuclear war.

On 13 December 2001, five al-Qaeda backed jihadists from Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorist groups operating from mountain bases in the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir, infiltrated India and stormed it’s parliament building compound in New Delhi. Their goal was a suicide mission to decapitate the Indian government in enfilade of AK-47 bullets and by blasts of suicide body bombs that would enrage India enough to start a nuclear war with Pakistan.

Indian security forces checked their charge at Parliament’s threshold, killing all five terrorists. Five policemen, a Parliament security guard, and a gardener were also killed, and 18 others injured. No parliamentarian was killed, however, the damage was done to tenuous Indo-Pakistani relations. Few in the West who at that time, reeled from 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist strikes on the US just three months earlier, understood or even cared to understand how far more dangerous were the consequences of this terror attack on India. It was clear to me, at least, having spent much time in and out of South Asia since 1980 that Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad were trying to goad India into a border standoff with Pakistan — both being nuclear powers. Their aim was part of Usama bin Laden’s grand strategy to destabilize the region with an Indo-Pakistani military crisis that might lead to a nuclear war. Millions in Pakistan would be sacrificed for global Jihad. Dozens of millions of non-Muslim Indians would be killed as well. Terrorist organizations in the western Pakistani mountains and in Kashmir, up-wind of the fallout and devastated cities would be free to flourish and metastasize in the post-war chaos.

The attack of five terrorists on Indian Parliament was far more serious than any hijacked jet taking down the World Trade Center or crashing into the Western wall of the Pentagon in Washington DC.

The Indo-Pakistani standoff from December 2001 to June 2002 remains at the time of this writing the most potentially dangerous military crisis of this troubled opening decade of the 21st century. Indeed, it remains the closest humanity came since the Cuban Missile Crisis to suffering a nuclear war. The human masses on both sides worked up to a feverish nationalistic state were keen for it. Vast demonstrations in Indian and Pakistani cities lobbied their legislators hard for a nuclear edged stab at the other irritant. Only the “nay” vote of the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee prevented a nuclear punitive strike during the final weeks of the South Indian dry season. India’s military leadership pushed hard for a decision before the Monsoon rains came. Flooded mountain passes would inhibit a full-scale conventional invasion of Pakistani held parts of Kashmir after Indian jets unloaded the atom bombs and a few dozen Agni missiles bearing nuclear warheads fell on Pakistani cities and military bases. Tempers run hot in the 40-degrees Celsius dog days of June before bracing Monsoonal rains cool passions as well as temperatures.

Dial destiny forward. Here we are again, potentially a few weeks or months from a new terrorist triggered nuclear crisis.

On the night of 26 November 2008, well-armed and well-trained Islamic terrorists based in Pakistan infiltrate and strike several high-profile targets in Mumbai’s financial district. Explosions thudded along the Mazagaon docks where terrorist commandos in zodiac rafts disembarked from the hijacked fishing trawler Kuber. They had seized it in international waters after sailing out of Karachi, Pakistan, 38-hours earlier, in a smaller boat undetected by the Indian Navy. They killed the crew of four and forced the captain to set a course for Mumbai waters. They killed him too, once he brought the Kuber to anchor a few miles off Mumbai’s shoreline.

The terrorist commandos landed and fanned out through the streets. Two cut down Indian police, stealing their rover, launching into a spree of drive-by strafing of crowds in busy downtown Mumbai streets. In the late evening hours of 26 November 2008, gunmen sprayed bullets into stampeding crowds of thousands in the sprawling Shivaji Railway Terminus. The wounded brought to Cama Hospital were drilled again by bullets and grenade shrapnel. Mumbai’s downtown police headquarters was hit. Heavily armed terrorists broke into a Chabad house, a Jewish outreach center run by Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox Jews, shooting down a young rabbi and his wife along with five hostages. Bollywood Cinema crowds coming out of theaters were hit. Bullets and grenades sprayed the fallen dead with the food of life in popular Leopold’s cafe. The premier hotels of downtown where most western tourists and business people converge, the Oberoi and iconic Taj Mahal, were set ablaze, wherein terror stalked smoke filled halls and the dark warrens and rabbit hole rooms as hunters of jihad looked for their hiding prey.

The hell of Mumbai’s 9/11 attacks lasted the bulk of three days before Indian paramilitary and Indian Army commando Special Forces in what they would call Operation Black Tornado silenced the last terrorist. White and brown, Muslim or meditator had been coldly and indiscriminately slaughtered and wounded by the hundreds. The death toll is up to 188, with at least 33 foreign nationals and just under 300 seriously wounded or injured. Some of the dazed survivors I saw by chance on a BBC photo being gently ushered by police out of the smoking ruins of the Oberoi are personal friends of mine and fellow travelers on the path meditation.

I currently seek to know who else of my friends and acquaintances was there among the living or under the tarps for the dead.

One terrorist survived to tell his tale to Indian Intelligence Officers, and I dare say he’s using his words as the one weapon left remaining in his possession. His unsheathed and sharpened tongue readily willing to relay evidence of a Pakistani source of his attack could bring on a new military crisis between India and Pakistan. Not only were these men of Jihad well trained in weapons and commando-style operations in the Pakistani terror camps, but they were also trained to play a psych-war game, if surviving, explaining in detail to those in India, just how involved Pakistan was in their plans to hit Mumbai. Beware the tongue of terrorism for it will fan passions of Hindu fundamentalists on the streets and in Parliament to a new war fever pitch once again.

The interrogated has so far not hit his target. Both Pakistani and Indian military spokesmen officially deny seeing any troop reinforcements detected from their opposite along the Line of Control — the militarized no-man’s land dividing Indian-held from Pakistani-held disputed Kashmir. For now, the nuclear nationalism is on the rise only in the streets and not in the trenches along the mountainous Hindu Kush or in the parliaments of Islamabad and New Delhi.

Another scenario is looming. The Indian government demands Pakistan seek and destroy those terrorist camps at once and hand over to Indian justice a list of high-profile terrorist leaders it has incarcerated responsible for ordering previous attacks on Indian soil. If Pakistan does not comply the Indian government says it will “leave all options on the table” for a retaliatory response.

In Part Two of Mumbai 9/11, we will return to points I made in an article written on 31 December 2001 concerning the four Indo-Pakistani wars predicted by Mahatma Gandhi. There’s just one war left to fight. It could be coming soon. It is the one Gandhi feared would be the end of South Asia.

John Hogue
(05 December 2008)