This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
"Could a doll from the 1950s and a Hollywood movie be connected to an ancient, Mesopotamian goddess and to the end times?"
"Could there actually be a dark mystery behind 'Barbie'?"
These are just two of the questions raised by best-selling biblical author Jonathan Cahn in a new video probing the origins of the blockbuster film starring Margot Robbie as the popular doll come to life.
"The fact that Hollywood could take that doll and turn it into an attack on half of the human race, on marriage, on life itself is a sign of just how sickened our culture has become," says Cahn in is video titled: "The Mystery Of Barbie, Ishtar, and Smashed Babies!"
To date, the film has grossed $567 million in the U.S. and $1.3 billion worldwide.
"This has to be the most widely distributed anti-man movie ever made," Cahn explains.
"Never before has there been a major motion picture directed at children, girls, to the effect of indoctrinating them against men. Just a few years ago this motion picture could not even have been made as a children's movie, but it shows you how rapidly our culture is changing, or rather, deteriorating."
He says the dialogue of the movie itself gives away the radical feminist messaging.
"It comes from the lips of Barbie herself. She says: 'By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power.'"
Cahn opines: "What kind of human communication is that? It's not. It's certainly not normal human communication. It's the kind of sentence you find in a handbook of radical feminism or a film made by Josef Stalin's revolutionary council or the arts for the propagation of Marxist doctrine."
"It's not about fun. If it were, you would never have such words and phrases and sentences."
"It's aimed at your children, particularly at your daughters. And focusing it all on a doll is a brilliant way to propagandize or brainwash children."
Cahn said one of the most dangerous aspects of "Barbie" is its humiliation of males in society.
"The movie depicts men as evil or dangerous. At best, they're presented at the beginning just as jerks, useless, inferior creatures with no real purpose. ...
"Now imagine a movie aimed at boys that depicted women as inferior, useless and evil creatures that had to be conquered, and boys or men had to separate themselves from them. What would be the reaction? And yet Hollywood is vilifying half the human race, and it's OK?"
"The separating of man and woman in this movie is not an accident any more than it's an accident that one of the Barbies in the movie is actually a transsexual or that Barbie alludes to gay masturbation among the Kens in a movie aimed at children. What kind of culture pushes this on children? A sick culture."
Cahn detailed the very opening of the "Barbie" movie image by image, noting it matches on Stanley Kubrick's science-fiction classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" as seen in the following video:
In "Barbie," girls are shown in a barren setting playing with baby dolls as mothers would care for their infants.
"The girls appear unhappy, somber or miserable as if they're engaged in an act of slavery that they're forced to be part of," Cahn says.
He says the girls then act out what apes did in "A Space Odyssey" when they awoke to find a mysterious monolith in their presence.
"It's central to the scene and to the message: The girls are as apes," Cahn explains.
"In Kubrick's film, the apes represent the primitive. So in 'Barbie,' girls who play with baby dolls are represented as primitive, unenlightened. In other words, motherhood is primitive. Women as mothers, mother and child, it's a primitive, unenlightened, negative state. Again, the doctrines of radical feminism."
He mentioned another key similarity between the two films.
"As the ape lifted up the bone to kill an animal or an ape, the one girl lifts up her baby doll that she's been caring for. And what does she do? She smashes the baby doll against another baby doll and against the rocks. The head of the baby cracks open, explodes. You see the decapitated ahead of a baby against a rock."
Cahn does not mention the Holy Bible itself provides similar baby-smashing imagery in the book of Psalms, where the heads of the children of evildoers are smashed against rocks: "Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!" (Psalm 137:9 NLT)
The author noted how America's original Barbie doll is actually based on a German doll named Bild Lilli that was hardly appropriate for children. The New Yorker Magazine in the 1950s called Lilli a "sex doll."
"Yes, Barbie was based on a prostitute," says Cahn, who then probed deeper into her pagan connections.
"What does Barbie have to do with an ancient Mesopotamian goddess? I wrote of this key in 'The Return of the Gods.' When a civilization turns away from God, it doesn't become neutral or empty. When it turns away from the Spirit of God, other spirits enter into it."
"One of the most ancient of these spirits that I reveal in the book is that of a goddess known in the Bible as Ashtorah or Ashtoreth."
This goddess was also known by the name of Ishtar in Babylon.
"Ishtar was the goddess of sexuality, sexual immorality. She was always depicted as a young woman, she was depicted as a young woman on her own, independent," Cahn said.
"She was often depicted as taking roles traditionally assumed by men. She was not the goddess of marriage. She was rarely linked to marriage; her ways were generally averse to marriage or motherhood. She was the goddess of women who were overall not married. Her ancient literature was pornographic."
Cahn also notes that just as Barbie famously has her boyfriend Ken at her side, the pagan goddess Ishtar is well-known for her boyfriend Tammuz.
"Tammuz was always a secondary character, always in the shadow of Ishtar in effect, an accessory to Ishtar's mythology," Cahn said.
"Ishtar dominates and subjugates her lover. She even destroys Tammuz. In the movie, 'Barbie,' Ken is vanquished along with the other men."
