Ariel Sharon, Rabbi Kaduri, and the imminent arrival of the Messiah

There's an awful lot of internet traffic today devoted to imaginary prophecies concerning visions allegedly visited on Mizrahi rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri.

Kaduri was quite a character. Spent his whole life reading scripture and seeing visions. He kicked the bucket just weeks after Sharon went into what was to be his terminal coma. But he's having a bit of a resurrection today, thanks mostly to Christian Zionist propagandists in the US.

I'm personally a bit of a skeptic when it comes to visions. Oh, I've certainly had my share... that's why I'm profoundly skeptical. But Kaduri was mostly a big deal among the more orientalist folks in the Holy Land, and God knows those are the folks who will go in for visions and prophesies and quackery of all stripes.

It's a bit of Netanyahu-inspired folk-lore that Rabbi Kaduri once confided to him that Jehovah himself had revealed in a vision that anyone to the left of Likud was no longer an authentic Jew.

Netanyahu himself is of course the ultimate pragmatist and he knows quackery when he hears it, but he's certainly not adverse to harnessing it for his own ends.

Pretty much the only people anywhere even more susceptible to quackery are American Christian Zionists like Paul Begley.

What is really astonishing, and this is a profound indictment of the American education system, is that millions of people lap this stuff up.

Sharon dead - coast now clear for return of Christ?

Ariel Sharon was many things; a great Israeli patriot, a mass-murderer of biblical proportions, and at least according to Charles Krauthammer, the founder of the independent Palestinian state of Gaza.

But I had no idea that Ariel Sharon was single-handedly preventing the coming, or second coming, depending on your perspective, of the messiah.

Apparently it's got to do with some visions visited upon the late Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri.