Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer who covers right-wing groups and movements.
Mike Evans may not be a household name, but he is doing all he can to encourage President Bush to act militarily against Iran before the end of 2008. Just prior to its mid-April release, Evans began his one-man guerilla war in support of his new book advocating military action against Iran, and against what he calls “secular humanist God-haters” and “pro-Islamic radical sympathizers.” And he seems to have won ... at least one battle. On Sunday, June 3, the book, The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While The World Sleeps, landed on The New York Times bestsellers’ list at #1 in the paperback category.
Flying under the mainstream media’s radar, using near-daily e-mail blasts along with postings on his website, Evans convinced large numbers of his supporters to buy his book; a fair number also heeded his plea to help promote it by writing five-star book reviews at Amazon.com.
While the book offers up a host of well-worn Bush Administration talking points—Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was likely shipped to Syria; it’s “better we fight in the streets of Baghdad then in Washington, Los Angeles or Dallas”—it also forcefully argues that Iran is the major player in fomenting unrest in the Middle East, and needs to be dealt with forcefully.
The Final Move Beyond Iraq opposes any withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq anytime in the near future, maintains that the U.S. must “disarm Iran’s nuclear ambitions and stop the rogue state from supplying weapons, jihadists and support to the [Iraqi] insurgency,” and suggests that the U.S. use the 200,000-strong Kurdish army to fight the insurgency.
He calls implementation of recommendations from the Iraq Study Group Report tantamount to a “call to appeasement—just like Chamberlain’s in the face of Nazi aggression in 1938,” and maintains that the war in Iraq is “the initial battle” of what he terms “World War Against Terrorism.”
In the publisher’s press release dated April 17, 2007, the book is billed as “offer[ing] America a final wake up call” and it claims that it “conclusively demonstrate[es] that:
- “An Iranian-sponsored Islamic revolution is spreading and presents America with its greatest security threat since the Civil War”
- “Immediate withdrawal from Iraq would harm American interests and embolden terrorists to attack the American homeland”
- “Iran is the key player in inciting violence in Iraq”
- “The U.S. must strike Iran within the next 12 months, or the next President may be presiding over a nuclear 9/11”
While Evans agrees with many of the Iraq War-advocating neoconservatives that are now calling for a robust military response to Iran, he comes at it from a decidedly different perspective; a Biblical perspective. Evans writes:
I believe this is a battle of two books, two kingdoms and two spirits—and that the key to victory lies more in the hands of the church in America crying out to God than it does in the politicians of Washington, D.C.
The “book is designed as a twenty-one-day study tool, patterned after Daniel’s twenty-one days of prayer told of in Daniel 10 that brought deliverance to his nation and his people. “ Evans has come up with “three weeks of messages for pastors and Bible teachers” and “Power Point presentations” available at his website.
The book’s appendices offers an array of excerpts from interviews with former Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former CIA director James Woolsey, former Chairman of the Armed Services General Hugh Shelton, retired U.S. Navy Captain Charles Nash, who is the founder and president of Emerging Technologies International and a Fox News Channel analyst, Harvard University Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and U.S. News & World Report editor-in-chief Mort Zuckerman.
Evans is described in the book’s “About the Author” section, as “one of America’s top experts on the Middle East” and “a personal confidant to most of Israel’s top leaders.” A bestselling author of Beyond Iraq: The Next Move, and The American Prophecies , he also heads up an outfit called the Jerusalem Prayer Team.
Although he has never had the star power or television presence of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson or Rick Warren, author of the mega-bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life , and pastor of one of America’s most influential mega-churches, Evans nevertheless is well-connected in GOP circles, and has received a fair amount of airtime on scads of network radio and television shows.
During two recent appearances on the cable news networks, Evans expressed certainty that "Iran is going to have to be attacked" before 2008. He also claimed that during a recent visit to Iraq, he was told by intelligence sources that Iran had given the green light to Hezbollah to unleash suicide bombers in the United States this summer.
The fact that Evans was able to engineer his new book rise to the top of The New York Times bestseller list speaks to how politically savvy he is.
In an e-mail dated June 2, Evans sent word of the good news: “This is an enormous breakthrough, and I now have the opportunity to wake-up the nation on the biggest secular shows in America.” Evans is convinced that the rise of his book will open up heretofore television talk-show platforms that have been denied him because of his work.
He also took pains to “warn” his supporters that “the secular humanist God-haters and also the pro-Islamic radical sympathizers will begin the most brutal campaign to destroy the book and more importantly, the cause—the battle for the soul of America. We need a huge surge of support in the first 24 hours.”
The “campaign” Evans talked about is still being waged on such bookselling websites as Amazon.com. There, both supporters and opponents of Evans give freely of their opinions. For the past week or so Evans has been highlighting—in daily e-mails—quotes from his detractors, claiming that there is an organized campaign “to kill” the book “by attacking believers who are standing up and speaking out.” Evans continues to encourage supporters to buy multiple copies of the book, and write more positive reviews.
To encourage the “huge surge,” Evans is offering a free copy of his new DVD—a one-hour documentary titledThe Final Move Beyond Iraq —to those folks that purchase three copies of his book: one from Amazon.com, one from Barnes and Noble.com and one from WalMart.com. “I have been told,” Evans writes, “that for the books to count, they must each be purchased separately.”
According to Evans, the documentary contains interviews with Ya'alon, Shelton, Woolsey and Netanyahu. The film, he says,
includes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letter to the President urging him to convert to Islam, as well as his letter to the American people. Classified footage that was released to me from Iraq is included. You have never seen the truth as it's presented in this one-hour documentary.
The Final Move Beyond Iraq is one of several “apocalyptical Christian Zionist and anti-Islamic titles” available these days from Christian publishers, Richard Bartholomew recently pointed out at TalkToAction, a blog tracking the religious right. Evans’ book was preceded by Jerusalem Countdown , a FrontLine book by Pastor John Hagee—a San Antonio, Texas-based pastor and the founder of Christians United for Israel—which has sold more than 1 million units.
According to Bartholomew, the publisher of the invaluable “Bartholomew’s notes on religion,” FrontLine, an imprint of Strang Communications, will release two other books on the Middle East this fall: Culture Clash: Islam's War on America by Mark Gabriel, and In Defense of Israel: The Biblical Case for Supporting The Jewish State by Hagee.
Bartholomew reported that Harvest House Publishers recently published Middle East Meltdown: Oil, Israel, and the Religion Behind the Crisis by John Ankerberg and Dillion Burroughs, while Global Warning: Are We on the Brink of World War III? by "Left Behind" series co-author and longtime religious right leader, Tim LaHaye is set for release Sept 1.
Tyndale, another Christian-focused publisher will be releasing a third edition of Armageddon, Oil and Terror: What the Bible Says About the Future of America, the Middle East, and the End of Western Civilization , written by Bible scholar John F. Walwood.
Before Evans book was released, Bartholomew pointed out on his blog that Evans had been
roaming Iraq and talking to Kurdish leaders ... Given that Evans is a best-selling and influential author, and that he does enjoy contacts with various intelligence and political sources (he boasts of having advised Reagan's staff), it’s worth keeping an eye on what he has to say, whatever one’s opinion of it.
