by James M. Wall

Forget about Pastor Jones and his hate-filled threat to burn the Koran. With the eager assistance of  what passes these days for mass media, Jones has had his moment in the glare of worldwide publicity.

He called off his dangerously provocative bonfire with his own triumphant Mission Accomplished declaration:

“We feel when we started this out that one of our reasons was to show, to expose that there is an element in Islam that is very dangerous and very radical,” Jones said. “I believe that we have definitely accomplished that mission.”

That declaration came, of course, after Jones received a call from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Imagine the scene: “Pastor Jones, burn a single Koran and American soldiers will die. You will be blamed. How will your patriotic followers like to hear from the Secretary of Defense that you have caused an American death in Afghanistan?”

What we must worry about now are not people like Jones, but with that so-called respectable crowd of politicians who have seized the attention of the American public with their own more sophisticated brand of hate and fear.

Start worrying with a film produced by Newt Gingrich and Citizens United.

Citizens United is the organization whose legal appeal produced a US Supreme Court decision which ended all limits on political campaign contributions from corporations.

And Gingrich? Well, he has been around since he set himself up as a Georgia college professor, after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta. Gingrich looked around the state of  Georgia for a congressional district where he could talk pretty to enough conservative voters to secure himself a seat in Congress.

It took Gingrich a few residential moves until he settled into a secure district from which he could transform himself from a lowly back-bencher to become the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Echoing Kris Kristofferson’s 1971 ballad, “Silver-tongued Devil”,  Newt sang his song and took off for glory.

At the peak of his power, Newt led the Republican crusade to save the country from Bill Clinton. The errant president survived, while Gingrich soon crashed and burned.

Now he’s back, building a new congregation of believers with the help of a new wife who has joined him in his prophetic warning that Islamists are coming to take over the world.

He is using another anniversary of 911 to introduce us to his new film, which premiered in Washington Saturday night.  It is ready for viewing on DVD. Here is the trailer. Be forewarned, it is ugly stuff.

In the film,  Gingrich and Citizens United warn Americans of the “impending threat of radical Islam.” As one talking head says in the trailer, “This is the end of times. This is the final struggle.”

The movie, America At Risk, paints the world as a dangerous place filled with radicalized Muslims who want to — and, importantly, can — destroy America.

“The war on terror, and the ideology behind it, have only just begun,” Gingrich’s wife, Callista Gingrich, intones while she and Gingrich stand in front of a green-screened New York skyline.

This is the same Newt Gingrich who just might emerge as a serious candidate for president in 2012. David Corn, writing recently  in Politics Daily, makes the case:

The other day an associate of Newt Gingrich surprised me: He told me there’s a 97 percent chance that Gingrich will run for president in 2012. Really? I replied, with a laugh.

Yes, he said seriously. He noted that he had recently spoken to the former Republican House speaker and had picked up a he’s-going-for-it vibe and that, more telling, he had seen that Gingrich was surrounding himself with veteran political operatives who would only likely flock to Gingrich for a presidential bid.

Then on Thursday, Gingrich delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute — one with a highfalutin’ title: “America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan” — that sure made it seem he’s looking to be the darling of GOP primary voters who yearn for Dick Cheney.

In his typical bombastic style, Gingrich blasted President Obama and his aides for being national security wimps. He declared, “America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home, and that is a reality our elites are hiding from.”

He proclaimed that it is “clear the Obama administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America.” And he essentially charged Obama-ites with treason: “It is the natural path of secular socialist intellectuals to prefer our opponents to us and to accept their lies over our truths.”

Gingrich could emerge as the alternative to the less erudite candidates now circling around the Republican nomination.  And with his “America at Risk” rhetoric turned up to dangerous levels, he would be a natural to pick up the banner of Israel in the struggle with Islam.

Think back, Pilgrim, think back to September 11,2001, and pay attention to Lobeblog‘s Marsha B. Cohen, with her recent column on the hectic days that followed 911:

On September 11, 2001, after two terrorist attacks occurred on US soil, Israeli political figures anticipated that the Americans finally be able to empathize with Israel’s vulnerability to terror. In the hours immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Israeli leaders envisioned a massive U.S. retaliation in which Israel was uniquely equipped to be a partner, even a mentor, of the U.S.

“The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life,” then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared in a televised statement just after midnight on September 12. “I believe that together we can defeat these forces of evil.”

Israel and its US Zionist friends are pushing the world into a gigantic war with Iran in time for a newly-slected Republican congress to take up Sharon’s offer of mentorship under the leadership of a future Republican president who reads Camus.

America is “at risk” and Obama is not responding to the danger, so goes the Gingrich warning of fear.  Could it lead to a Gingrich presidency? All speculation, of course, but in politics, it is always wise to connect the dots.