TEHRAN — A man wrapped in a shawl stood at the door.

“This is Jesus,” said another man.

Jesus sat and peeled an orange as his companion, Nader Talebzadeh, began to speak, precisely, so as not to be misunderstood on a matter so sensitive. The Iranian director’s new film is based on the Islamic version of the life of Jesus, depicting the man Christians believe to be the messiah and son of God as a tormented Judean prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim faith.

One might imagine such a tale may not screen well in the red states of America. The film, nearly 10 years in the making, draws on the Koran and the putative Gospel of Barnabas, considered by many Western scholars a medieval fable. The premise of “Jesus, the Spirit of God” is that Jesus was compassionate and performed miracles, but was not crucified or resurrected from the dead. The message implies that Christianity, a faith of 2 billion people and the core of much Western philosophy, is based on a falsehood.

“I pray for Christians. They’ve been misled. They will realize one day the true story,” said Talebzadeh, whose film has been screened at international film festivals and is being marketed for wider release.

“People might use this film as a strategy to further demonize Iran,” he said. “They may succeed. But I hope once you see that the focus of the film is sacred, it will overwhelm. No one would have imagined that an Iranian would make a film to glorify Jesus.”

Not to mention an Iranian who supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and believes 9/11 was partly a U.S. government conspiracy. “Someone masterminded something,” he said. “And this is the cause for a lot of evil America is doing in this part of the world.”

There is another irony. The actor who plays Jesus, Ahmad Soleimani-Nia, once was a soldier in the Iranian army and later a welder for Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, which the Bush administration accuses of pursuing nuclear weapons. Such footnotes don’t seem odd when talking with Talebzadeh, who has kept Nia in Jesus character — flowing hair, beard, mystic pose — for seven years because he never knows when he might shoot new sequences for the film.

“Jesus, the Spirit of God” comes out of Iran at a time of hostile rhetoric between Washington and Tehran and a divide between Islam and the West that has produced jihad websites, DVDs on the apocalypse, editorial cartoons lampooning Muhammad and a recent Osama bin Laden tape condemning Pope Benedict XVI for a “new crusade” against Islam.

Religion has long been at the heart of tensions between East and West, but it is being swept into a wider cultural war played out on the Internet, film and satellite TV in which icons and sacred texts have been attacked and manipulated. A new Dutch film by a right-wing politician, who compares the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” depicts Islam as a violent faith. In response, a Saudi blogger posted a video suggesting that the Bible could be read as a document for war.

Talebzadeh knows that his Jesus walks on volatile terrain; one wonders, given the tenor of the times, how many fatwas would be issued if a Western director made a film suggesting that Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden under Islamic tradition, was someone other than the prophet.

“There is so much wrong with this man’s understanding of Jesus and Christianity,” wrote an incensed Christian blogger, referring to Talebzadeh in a conversation about the film that is unfolding in cyberspace. “It’s another piece of Satanic propaganda intended to accomplish no meaningful purpose in this world.”

The rough, choppily edited $5-million film, condensed from a 1,000-minute-long series that will soon air on Iranian TV, reveres Jesus as a blessed prophet speaking parables and moving through soft light and angelic chants amid a ruckus of zealots and conspiring Pharisees. The narrative and dialogue are attributed to Islamic teachings and Jesus’ disciple Barnabas, whose gospel the director said was hidden by church authorities so as not to undermine the established Christian faith.

Scholars believe that the gospel, not included in the canon of the early Catholic Church, was written by others centuries later and ascribed to Barnabas. It overlaps with the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but it does not present Jesus as the son of God. Barnabas’ tale resonates with Muslims who believe that it supports the Koran’s teaching that Jesus, though born of a virgin, was not divine, but one of the last great prophets. Talebzadeh’s film shows Jesus ascending to heaven before Roman soldiers come for him; Judas, the disciple who betrays him, is transformed into the likeness of Jesus and crucified. According to Islamic traditions, Jesus is alive and will return to defeat evil.

“Barnabas is a missing link the world is not ready to accept. It’s a piece of literature we should look into,” said Talebzadeh, a man with a graying beard who sat in his office the other day before a bowl of fruit.

Draped in a shawl and legs crossed as if in meditation, Nia-as-Jesus lingered behind Talebzadeh looking very much like a 1970s rock star. He was quiet, serene, a former welder with a thespian calling drifting between the Koran and the New Testament. He had never acted before, but his light skin and angular features mixed with Middle East repose conjured an aura of Western aesthetics and Eastern spirituality.

“I’ve never been able to resolve why I am so drawn to Jesus,” said Nia, a Muslim born in the western mountains of Iran near Iraqi Kurdistan. “It goes back to when I was a boy of 7 or 8. I saw a painting of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and I identified with Jesus. He has always been with me. In my neighborhood, with my long hair and beard, I am known as Jesus.”

Talebzadeh grew up in Iran under the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1970, he moved to the United States, where he says he studied at American University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University in New York. He witnessed a convulsive American decade of antiwar protests over Vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon.

For much of that time, Iran was a U.S. ally. That changed in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic revolution that toppled the shah and resulted in 52 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

“I returned to Iran feeling there was a huge misunderstanding in the West about my country,” he said. “Iran was being demonized.”

Talebzadeh directed a number of documentaries on themes such as the Bosnian conflict and the Iran-Iraq war. In 1999, he began filming “Jesus, the Spirit of God,” which grew out of a passion that began decades earlier when he attended a school in Tehran with Christians and continued over his fascination with the purported writings of Barnabas.

“If there’s one thing in my life I wanted to do, this film is it,” said the director, whose Jesus movie won an interfaith dialogue award at the 2007 Religion Today Film Festival in Italy. “I didn’t say Jesus wasn’t crucified, God did. It’s in the Koran. . . . The film is made with faith. I tried to do it as beautifully as I could.”

He added that he hoped his 35-millimeter film would start a conversation between religions: “In the 21st century, the arts and the media have to create an area for more cordial discussions between faiths at a time when information is moving in the blink of an eye. . . . We should be joining people together, not giving distortion and misunderstanding. We have to say, ‘Have you looked at this door to know the truth about Jesus?’ ”

Some Americans have peeked through Talebzadeh’s door. He showed the movie to four audiences in the United States, and it was recently screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. He said many people were open-minded and intrigued by the historical and religious questions it raised.

“The truth has a whole, different vibration to it,” he said. “If you enhance it with artistry, you can create a discussion.”

Not according to the website of the Worldwide Church of God in Fairfield, Calif.: “Attempts by the Iranians or anyone else who try to deny that Jesus Christ is the true messiah will ultimately fail. The Holy Bible confirms the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in numerous ways, and no amount of filmmaking or lecturing or rhetoric to the contrary can defeat that fact.”

Nia-as-Jesus finished his orange. Talebzadeh, whose office was warm in the afternoon sun, kept talking about the film, about divinity, about how to capture truth.

He turned in his chair toward Jesus, and was still, after all these years, amazed at the likeness, the highlighted hair, eyes of fervor. He joked that he had been searching for his lead character for a long time when his assistant director spotted Nia on the street one day and said, “I found your Jesus.”

~from The LA Times

I just have to add that the preview for this movie looks so incredibly cheesy–I just laughed and laughed when I saw it.  Too bad Mel Gibson isn’t a Muslim–he could do this concept justice.  Oh my, oh my.

Seriously.

Dependence on foreign oil is a national security issue. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of the foreign oil we purchase is from States that are openly hostile to our interests, or who we probably should not be aligned with, such as the Saudis who have supplied many of the terrorists, extremists, and funding for terror against the United States and the West, not to mention their insistence on the spread of Wahabism through Suadi funded Islamic schools and mosques across the globe.

Other oil producers, like the UAE, are less radical in practice, but still represent a culture that America should hardly embrace or support–after all, we are supposed to represent freedom, personal security, and individual liberty. We are supposed to embody justice and economic prosperity for the masses, not just the elite oil cartels and dictators who populate the Middle-East leadership.

Then, too, there is Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, the Western Hemisphere’s answer to its relative lack of dictators and despots. Mr. Chavez is quite friendly with the rogue leadership of Iran, and further shows the fallacy behind so-called socialist States. Chavez should be decrying the inequity present in most Middle-Eastern States. After all, he is a populist and a champion of the little guy, right?

Nevertheless, as bad as Chavez may be, at least we aren’t supporting suicide bombers and the total repression of women when we buy his oil. We’re supporting his inflated ego, and we’re not really doing the world a service by inflating him further, but we’re not funding radical imams who incite violence against Western States and Israel….at least, I hope we’re not. Where Venezuelan oil profits go is a good question. Surely Chavez is aligned with some very unfriendly people. Should some of that money find its way into the hands of organizations whose intent is the destruction of Israel or the United States, no one would really be surprised.

The Price of Oil

Oil money is blood money, no doubt about it. I understand that right now, we have very little choice in the matter. Our economy depends on oil, sadly, and alternative energy sources are still in their infancy. This is one reason that I’m fully behind the reinstitution of Nuclear Power in the United States. New reactors should be built, and this should be done sooner than later. The more we can get away from oil and coal (which has its own long list of problems) the better.

The cost of oil is also paid by the people of the Middle-East, whose leaders maintain their tight grip in part due to their vast oil wealth. Using religion as their front, the leaders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria to name a few, manage strict, brutal control over their populations. Islam has been radicalized over the past 100 years, in part due to the natural reaction to Colonialism, but largely due to the rapid increase in wealth in the region, and the imbalanced way that wealth has been distributed. Lack of freedom, the radicalization of Islam, and an inherent yet reasonable mistrust of the West, all contribute to what has become the Iron Veil.

Religious Violence

Most of the religions of the world have embraced violence at one time or another. And most adherents to their religion have remained blessedly peaceful even during the darkest of times. Nevertheless, in Medieval Europe Christians allowed other Christians to kill millions of women in so-called witch hunts. The Spanish Inquisition was one of the bloodiest campaigns the world has ever seen.

In Spain peaceful Muslims and Jews were driven from their homes and exiled–or were put to the sword. This in the name of Catholicism. Christians remained silent as their leaders shored up power in the name of religion, using extreme ideologies to pacify their people and tighten their control. Vast wealth discrepancies existed between the peasantry and the elite, and these increased as Empires grew–the Spanish, the Austrian, each torch-bearers of the Holy Roman Empire.

Vast wealth and religious extremism cast Europe under a familiar cloud, one that can be seen above the region once known as Mesopotamia today. Gone are the days of Islamic glory–the Ottoman Empire is fallen; the Caliphates of old are no more. The height of Islamic splendor evidenced in Cordoba is a thing of the far distant past.

Perhaps colonialism left the region vulnerable for what is happening today. Perhaps globalism has followed too close on the heels of its predecessor, and now it is too simple to equate the two, and spread an anti-Western ideology that festers into hate and extremism. Then, too, there is a yearning for days gone by–for a mythical Islamic State that once existed in the form of the Caliphates of old. Islamism today is attempting to spread this Caliphate and with it Sharia or Islamic Law to all the countries where Muslim immigrants and converts have spread. The simplicity and idealism of Islamic Law ignores all the terrifying realities inherent in its practice–but a secular world, a global world, is a frightening thing. Fear of meaninglessness and a distrust of capitalism lead to the adoption of religious extremism. Sometimes this manifests peacefully–Buddhist monks who detach from society; the Amish who abandon technology–and sometimes it is a violent manifestation.

I have no doubt that most people just want to live–most Muslims just want to work, eat, love and build a life for themselves like anyone else. Family, security, stability, and though they may not understand it in some parts of the world, freedom. Freedom to achieve these things without the intervening hand of theocracy or despotism or ancient, brutal legal systems.

The Way Forward: Addressing the Issues at Hand

So from all of this–oil, poverty, economic imbalance, historical distrust of Western society, the equating of Colonialism with Globalism, social despondency–the extremists are able to grow new extremists, suicide bombers, the faithful but impoverished, the martyrs.

So can we combat this rise of extremism? Surely it cannot benefit either the West or the Islamic world. As I stated previously, I believe most Muslims just want to live and let live. The extremists poison the well. Yet, if this extremism is an effect of so many different causes, how can we ever hope to contain it, to quash it, to drive it back into the pages of history?

I think we can fight the spread of Islamism and accept the religion of Islam all at the same time.

First, we must find ways to break our ties with despotic regimes whose only connection to us is through the oil pipelines. Undoubtedly, our support of Saudi Arabia is hypocritical when we are so blatantly against the State of Iran. Both governments should be on our list of antagonist entities. Leveling the economic discrepancies in the Middle-East is vital to creating stability in the region. Dictatorships gorged and fat on their oil riches will never voluntarily move toward economic freedom, as it will invariably cut into their pocket books in one form or another.

Second, we must wage a war of ideas. Somehow we must debunk the notion that colonialism and globalism are one and the same. For one thing, globalism is here to stay. It is the way the world has evolved, and no matter what the isolationists here and abroad wish, there is no way to turn back the clock. We are stuck with a global economy for all the growing pains it may create. Friction is inevitable, but there is no reason it should spark such vehement resistance in the middle-east. The use of Islam as a fomenter of radicalism is one tool the anti-globalists in the Arab world have in their arsenal against the West.

Thirdly, we must maintain a strong military and do whatever it takes to provide stability for us and our allies, especially Israel who endures the most constant battering of terrorism. Any success the terrorists have against the West will serve only to further their cause and popular acceptance. I am an advocate of practical neoconservatism. I believe in the spread of security first, and democracy later. Security is far more important to those nations rising out of the clutches of despotism, than democracy–as is evidenced by the current state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan. No, neither of these wars, nor the larger war on terror can be won through military means alone, but that is no reason to abandon our military and intelligence efforts.

And lastly, we must champion womens’ rights across the globe. The lack of womens’ rights in many regions of the world has lead to the widespread poverty, increased childbirth rates, and yes, an expansion of radicalism. Promoting womens’ rights and education can combat these epidemics in a truly positive way.

The Muslim World

Democracy is important, but it is not the first priority in this war. Security, energy independence, and the continuation of the war of ideas and the war of truth against propaganda, the fight against inequality and social injustice, these are the most important factors in the war on terror.

Until these issues are addressed, the strife will continue. Islamists will continue to radicalize their religion, and dictators will continue to sap their populations and convince them at the same time that their woes are the effect of the West, of colonialism, of Israel.

The Islamic world has as much to gain in the defeat of their tyrants and extremists as the Western world, and the last step in fighting this long war must be taken by the Muslims themselves in decrying and ousting the radicalism from their own populations. It will be nigh impossible for the West to do this alone. A concerted effort by the Islamic world to end terror and accept modernity is necessary. I believe this can be done without sacrificing the culture or faith of Islamic society.

All these things must be accomplished, and we cannot give up on any front if peace is ever to be achieved.