Israel at War - On the Iraqi Front

One of the strangest news items of the day comes from Iraq, where...

A suicide bomber on a bicycle blew himself up Sunday amid a crowd of demonstrators in northern Iraq who were protesting Israel's airstrikes on Gaza, killing one demonstrator and wounding 16 others, Iraqi police said.

Apparently, these Al-Qaeda in Iraq guys just like to kill - it doesn't matter that they kill demonstrators against Israel. I can tell you that I won't be shedding too many tears for those killed and wounded, though.

Anyways, we could expect the usual rhetoric...

"The ones who targeted our brothers in Gaza are the same who targeted us in Mosul today. They are agents of Israel," Mahjoub said.

Yeah, right, like Israeli agents conduct suicide bombings at all, let alone those targeting civilians.
Oh, and Mosul - isn't that Nineveh? The city whose destruction was barely averted by a last-minute Teshuva spree? The city whose destruction is predicted in part of Tzephania and all of Nahum?

What other rhetoric do we hear from other parts of Iraq? This one:

Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said condemnation didn't go far enough.
"Expressing condemnation and denunciation for what is going on against our brothers in Gaza and expressing solidarity with them by words only doesn't mean anything in the face of the big tragedy they are facing," he said in a statement released by office in Najaf.
"Now more than at any other time, both Arab and Islamic nations are required to take a practical stance for the sake of stopping this repeated aggression and to break the unfair besieging of these brave people," the statement said, without giving details of the proposed stance.

This cleric's dream of a united Yishmael against Yisrael using a "Practical stance", which days ago seemed far-fetched, seems a lot closer to reality now, despite the recent suicide bombing. And it is a scary one. We need some major Teshuva to battle against it as Yishmael has merits of its own. We're waiting for the time mentioned in the Zohar (second-to-last page here): עד דאשתלים ההוא זכותא דבני ישמעאל.