Santorum told Pennsylvania Cable Network viewers and a crowd of lobbyists, reporters and insiders that the current war on terrorism is a new front in a conflagration raging since the Crusades. He said the puppeteers were a 1,000-year-plus lineage of radical Shia mullahs trying to overthrow the West.

Santorum said, “They believe, as all Shias do, in the Hidden Imam, the 12th Imam," the 12th descendant in a straight line from Mohammed the Prophet, who disappeared in 874, at the age of 5. “The Shia believe that he is the Messiah and he is in hiding and that he will return. … They believe … he will return with radical Islam, when Shia dominates the world.

“Well, for over 1,000 years, Shias just believed that over time that they would dominate the world; and you see, by the way, 1,000 years of wars in Europe, where Islam was at the border, a bloody border, with Europe. ...

“Remember, as I mentioned before, for 1,000 years, the East and West fought, up until 1683, which was the high-water mark of Islam into Europe. It wasn’t in Greece or Turkey; it wasn’t in Italy or Spain; it was in the heart of Europe – it was in Vienna.

“In 1683, not that long ago, the Islamists had surrounded the gates of Vienna and were on the verge of toppling it after a siege; ... but the West united, and led by the Poles, [King] John Sobieski and the Polish Hussars defeated [the Arab forces] in a one-day battle on the plains outside Vienna.

“What was the high-water mark of this 1,000-year war? It was the day before. What was the date the day before? Sept. 11, 1683.”

Then, linking that nearly 323-year-old battle to Sept. 11, 2001, and the war the United States and its allies are now waging to the Crusades, Santorum said of the radical Shia mullahs and their followers: “They know their history; they know what they’re about; and they know what they want to accomplish.”

Their goal? To destroy the West, conquer the world and bring their Messiah, the 12th Imam, out from hiding.

If you are of a certain age, this sounds like Leonard Nimoy on his old "In Search Of ..." TV show, which checked out yarns like the one that said space aliens built the pyramids.

If this were The History Channel, Santorum’s yarn would get fiercely debunked. For one thing, those Crusades, the 1,000 years of wars Santorum mentioned, were fueled as much by European invasions and attacks eastward, as by Islamic attacks or incursions westward.

Also, the armies that Sobieski kicked out of Vienna were not radical Islamists led by Shia radicals, but rather the Ottoman Empire.

That empire was a Turkish soufflé of nations that, much like modern Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, had a worldly, not-so-religious ruling class and officer class uneasily leading a diverse, downtrodden, majority-Islamic populace. Heck, its capital, Constantinople/Byzantium, was the capital of Orthodox Christianity until the mid-15th century.

Saying the Ottoman Empire was a tool of radical Shia is as silly as the French anti-American zealots who claim President Bush is governing the nation as the puppet of radical evangelists.

Santorum also chilled a few audience members when he said: " ... We got bogged down with Sunni and Shiite, with secular governments and non-secular governments, and we say, ‘Well, they’re all different.’

"No, they’re not; they’re a common enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the enemy of all those, whether it’s Iran or Syria or Islamic Jihad or Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah or Hamas or Somalia or Syria – the enemy is the West, us, the infidels."

One longtime Harrisburg insider tried to ask Santorum if he really thought we ought to kill every Islamic person who ever yelled “Death to the infidels!”