Archive for April, 2010
One that calls for a response
Apr 22nd
Daniel Greenfield, blogger at Sultan Knish said: “We are no longer bidding for the Muslim world as an ally. We are bidding to prevent it from being our enemy. But the problem is that the very people we’re bidding for already see us as the enemy. We are not going to change that with free English lessons, weapons and speeches praising their enlightenment, and clapping with delight when one of their clerics sorta suggests that terrorism is probably wrong. We’re not children and we’re not cowards, and we should stop acting like both. By competing for Muslim favor, we are only bidding ourselves, and paying up to the very people who are our enemies. By competing for their favor, we are only undercutting ourselves.”
God says: “The kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power … “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever … “Yahweh has established his throne in heaven and his kingdom rules over all.” (I Corinthians 4:20; Daniel 2:44; Psalm 103:19).
The Jerusalem Connection says: The God of Holy Scripture has no competition – Allah notwithstanding. As a matter of fact when Messiah comes all false religions will be destroyed and only Yahweh and his Messiah will be served and worshiped. To compete for Muslim favor is to deny the supremacy of the one true God, the God of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So Many Tears
Apr 20th
By Stan Goodenough
“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon Me,
Because the LORD has anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.” (Isaiah 61:1-3)
Almost hidden under waves of red hair, his young eyes smile out from my television screen, bright windows to his irrepressible soul. A brief shadow flickers across his face. Slowly the smile fades, dulling his eyes; straightening his mouth. A questioning look replaces the happiness of a minute before. The camera holds it, holds it, holds it, then gradually fades to grey.
Like the now dark screen, the beautiful light in that life has gone out. His father’s weeping, recorded moments before – deep, wracking sobs – throbs in my memory. Also his mother’s empty eyes as she recalls the piercing words: “Ari is no more.” We have been allowed to see the precious family photographs: the new-born infant suckling at the breast, the toddler taking his first steps, the boy with his gaily painted Purim face, the mischievous teen, the serious scholar, the young man in love, the new recruit with his arms around his IDF buddies. Family and friends share their memories, one after the other breaking down as they get to the part where he fell in the war.
Today is a terribly sad day – Memorial Day in Israel. All day long I have watched the photos of the beautiful young men who fell in defense of this small nation. I listen to their parents; their children, their siblings – - tears flow again and again, and mine fall too. So many tears. So much pain for such a small land.
Wailing sirens across the country marked the start of this national day of anguish at eight-o-clock last night.
In Jerusalem’s Old City, the cameras panned across, and zoomed in on, the ranks of Israel’s bereaved families; filling the public stand in the plaza at the Western Wall. A young woman, widow of the latest soldier to fall, put the flame to the Torch of Remembrance.
Scars of irretrievable loss lie in deep grooves across faces, old and young; red eyes swim, and teeth bite down to steady shaking lips.
President Shimon Peres addressed the mourners, telling them nothing could counterweigh the loss of a loved one.
“I am aware that nothing can compensate for the sound of the steps of a son you expect to hear in the staircase and that has suddenly turned silent, the son whose uniform you hung on a hanger in the closet and that generates a yearning to smell the smell of his body one last time.
“Facing your tormented eyes – there is a loss of words,” Peres continued.
After the speeches a man who lost his son in Gaza read – with heavily accented Hebrew – the Kaddish – song for the dead. Like the parents of many, he had made Aliyah, immigrating with his children to the promised land of the Jewish people – and added the payment of his son’s life to all the others who have made the supreme sacrifice to secure this nation in its land.
All afternoon, and late into the evening, Israel’s television screens have been filled with tales of tragedy. Photographs and home movies of young men, full of life and fun and promise, are followed by the shared memories of those they have left behind – wives, girlfriends, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons.
For every life lost in defense of the Jews’ right and ability to live in their homeland – tens of people mourn. On Memorial Day that mourning – even when subdued by the, sometimes many, years that have passed – returns in force.
It unites the nation in grief.
“Snap out of it,” I try to deal with my own emotions even as I deliberately immerse myself in Israel’s hurting. “You don’t know any of them.”
I don’t. I know none of the soldiers that have fallen in Israel’s seven wars – and in the between war terror campaign; I know none of the civilians that have been murdered in acts of terror; I know none of the families who – so heartrendingly – play back their memories. But I can’t deflect the piercing points of pain.
The words of Psalm 13, put to music by Brian Doerksen, roll in on my mind:
How long, O Lord, will You forget me? How long, O Lord, will You look the other way? How long, O Lord, must I wrestle with my thoughts ? And every day have such sorrow in my heart? Look on me and answer, O God my Father, Bring light to my darkness before they see me fall. But I trust in Your unfailing love. Yes my heart will rejoice, Still I sing of Your unfailing love; You have been good, You will be good to me.
By tonight this weeping, anguished nation – hated by almost everyone, surrounded by enemies who daily prophecy (falsely!) their national destruction – will be wrung out like a sponge; emotionally spent.
Suddenly, almost brutally, we will transition from the day of mourning to the day of rejoicing as Israel celebrates its 62nd year of independence.
Along with tens of thousands, my family will head downtown to join the throngs on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. Cafes will overflow, lively music and dancing will breathe life back into the heart of the capital, fireworks will light up the sky, also over the jewel of Jerusalem, the Old City, whose golden walls have witnessed so much war, so much sadness and, paradoxically, so much joy.
At the Western Wall, in cemeteries, in schools and other public places today, ceremonies of sadness were concluded with the amazingly sanguine national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope).
Indeed, concerning His chosen, battered people, God’s word holds so many promises for the future, when:
“Violence shall no longer be heard in your land, Neither wasting nor destruction within your borders; But you shall call your walls Salvation, And your gates Praise.
The sun shall no longer be your light by day, Nor for brightness shall the moon give light to you; But the LORD will be to you an everlasting light, And your God your glory. Your sun shall no longer go down, Nor shall your moon withdraw itself; For the LORD will be your everlasting light, And the days of your mourning shall be ended. Also your people shall all be righteous; They shall inherit the land forever, The branch of My planting, The work of My hands, That I may be glorified. A little one shall become a thousand, And a small one a strong nation. I, the LORD, will hasten it in its time.” (Isaiah 60: 18-22)
Amen.
One that calls for a response
Apr 15th
Former New York (Jewish) Mayor Ed Koch said: “I weep today because my president, Barack Obama, in a few weeks has changed the relationship between the US and Israel from that of closest of allies to one in which there is an absence of trust.”…our closest ally… has been demeaned and slandered, held responsible …for our problems in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.” Ed Koch says he suspects the plan is “to so weaken the resolve of the of the Jewish state and its leaders so that it will be much easier to impose on Israel an American plan to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, leaving Israel’s needs for security and defensible borders in the lurch.”
God says: “Because they lead my people astray, ‘Peace, Peace’ they say, when there is no peace.” … “I lift my hand to heaven and declare: As surely as I live forever, when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, while my sword devours flesh: the blood of the slain and the captives, the heads of the enemy leaders. “Rejoice, O nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people.” (Ezekiel 13:10; Deuteronomy 32:40-43).
The Jerusalem Connection says: To think that our leaders refuse to consult much less implement the clear declarations of Holy Scripture regarding Israel, is to place this nation in extreme peril. In the last analysis our only hope is to follow Jesus’ command, “Be always on the watch and earnestly pray that you may have the power to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.” (Luke 21:36).
Glory or Weakness?
Apr 13th
By Victor Sharpe
The obscene Goldstone Report unleashed all that we already knew of the world; that it hates the Jew and hates the reconstituted Jewish state. The report’s bigotry, its lies of commission and omission, were made even more unbearable by the fact that a South African Jew foolishly gave his name to it. Such Jews have often wittingly or unwittingly stabbed the very heart of the Jewish People.
I am reminded of some of the words of Menachem Begin when he stood before the graves of three young Jewish patriots, members of Irgun Zvai Leumi, hung by the British Mandatory authorities for merely possessing one unused pistol between them. Begin said the following:
“We believe with perfect faith that the Jewish People is indestructible. A people who suffered the cruelty, the oppression, and the holocausts of the long night of exile, which descended for so many centuries upon it and which, nevertheless, survived each and every one of its more powerful enemies, cannot be destroyed …
“It is this firm belief that is echoed every year at the Passover Seder table: In every generation they rise up to destroy us but the Holy One, Blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.
“And as one marvels at the incredible history of the frailest of peoples and beholds them marching past the graves of the mightiest empires, of kingdoms, that dreamed of Jewish destruction; when one gazes upon the glory of Egypt, a Babylon, a Greece, a Rome, a Spain – all glories of generations past – surely the power of that Heavenly promise becomes felt in the very fiber of his being.
“In the end, at times of crisis, there are no allies for the Jew. At best, nations are motivated by self-interest, and we, the smallest of peoples, offer little to the practitioners of real Politik.
“At worst, there is a deep and abiding antipathy to the Jew, his cause, his land. Who can the Jew trust? None but himself. To whom can he look for assurance and guarantees? Only to himself and his Divine Protector. This is enough to assure Jewish survival. That is enough to swell our hearts with Hadar.”
Menachem Begin’s eulogy contained words of great wisdom and prescience, including the Hebrew word hadar, meaning glory. Indeed, the nations of the world are almost as one now in chastising the Jewish state for daring to defend itself against Arab aggression.
Since the heartrending time in which Menachem Begin saw a world, so shortly after the Holocaust, indifferent and even hostile to the endless and relentless suffering of the Jewish people, there have arisen Christians spanning many nations, who rejected Replacement Theology and have followed a different light. These principled and highly moral folk have found so much in the inextricable Jewish roots of their Christianity that they have come forward as the only friends of an otherwise hated peoplehood: the Jews.
Twelve thousand Hamas missiles streaking into Israeli villages and towns from Gaza during eight long years barely raised a collective eyebrow in Europe. But when Jews – finally defending their long suffering citizens – it becomes a different matter.
Even if the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is the most moral army in the world – which it is – and goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian Arab casualties – most often needlessly endangering the lives of its own soldiers – the international chorus can barely conceal its vile charge that Israel acts the way the Nazis did. This in itself is an attempt to free its own crushing guilt at conspiring with, or ignoring, the German Nazi extermination of European Jewry.
Here are the words of British Commander (ret.) Richard Kemp, who told the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that the IDF made a strong effort last winter to safeguard the lives of Gaza’s Arab civilians during its counterterrorist operation.
“During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare …”Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
Needless to say, the U.N. Human Rights Council, infested as it is with many of the world’s rogue states, was not moved by his testimony.
Britain and France could not bring themselves to vote in the U.N. against the odious and monumental hypocrisy that is the Goldstone Report. No doubt Arab oil, economic pressure and lucrative trade advantages were more important to the British Foreign Office and the Quai d’Orsay than morality. In the international corridors of power, it has ever been so.
Debka Intelligence report suggested that the Israeli government could have acted much sooner by informing the world of the numerous functionaries still acting in the Palestinian Authority who committed acts of brutality and terror against Jewish civilians.
“Israel,” it said, “could have catalogued for the UNHRC the relentless crimes and atrocities against humanity perpetrated by the Hamas, Islamic jihad, Fatah, and other Palestinian Arab terror gangs. They delayed doing so for far too long and allowed the anti-Israel coalition to box Israel into a dire corner by delegitimizing the IDF with the Goldstone Report.” Maybe so, but there is still very little Israel can do against such worldwide hatred.
As mentioned earlier, there are those standing with Israel in its lonely passion. Millions of Evangelical Christians, mostly in America, are supporting the embattled Jewish state and providing practical assistance in selfless and loving ways.
But an infernal mechanism is at work. It is unmistakable. The State of Israel is under an existential threat the likes of which, perhaps, it has not seen before. Nuclear war is fast becoming a reality unless the Iranian threat is neutralized or at least set back.
The world, including Obama’s America, may not use force against the madness oozing from Teheran. It is increasingly apparent that only Israel will be left with increasing difficulty to overcome the threat from Ahmadinijad and the mullahs. The immoral world will remain unmoved by Ahmadinijad’s threats to destroy Israel, “the Zionist entity” as he calls it, and will wait instead for Israel to do what is necessary to protect herself and, by extension, the world itself.
Then they will shriek as one in condemnation, while secretly breathing a collective sigh of relief. They did this when Menachem Begin authorized the IDF to destroy Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi nuclear threat at Osiraq. The little men and women in the international Chancelleries cannot tolerate a nation that defies hypocrisy and acts out of a deep sense of morality.
The same little men and women who are the world’s prime ministers and presidents inwardly hate themselves and their inherent weakness. In so doing they project that self-hatred against the very nation, Israel, that exemplifies all that they secretly wish they were. The result is a corrosive envy and an assault upon the victim, the lonely Jewish state; not the Iranian or Arab Muslim victimizers.
Now streak forward in time from Menachem Begin’s eulogy to the betrayal of America and its allies as exemplified at the Nuclear Disarmament conference called by Barack Hussein Obama in Washington, DC. Some fifty heads of state gathering to produce nothing but faithless blather while the Islamic Republic of Iran, which calls for the nuclear destruction of the Jewish state, is not mentioned once. Nothing has changed.
Remember again the Passover, the festival of freedom from tyranny, and the eternal words: In every generation they rise up to destroy us but the Holy One, Blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”
Only a return to and rediscovery of the faith that has sustained both Jews and Christians over the millennia can vindicate the clarion call heard after the Shoah: “Never again.”
And then the choice must be made: Glory or Weakness?
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Abdullah in Wonderland
Apr 12th
By Victor Sharpe, American Thinker
When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, encountering situations that defied logic and characters who acted in bizarre ways, she was fortunate not to meet Jordan’s kinglet, Abdullah II. Kinglet is an apt description for this monarch, first coined by columnist Ruth King.
Jordan’s king, a member of the Hashemite tribe, is named after Emir Abdullah, who was assassinated on July 20, 1951 after leaving Friday evening prayers at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque. Abdullah was in favor of making peace with Israel but, like Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, he was murdered by Islamic extremists for his moderation. The assassinated emir was accompanied at the mosque by his grandson, King Hussein, also the present Jordanian monarch’s father.
In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, King Abdullah II announced that at his forthcoming meeting with America’s president, Barack Hussein Obama, he will ask the president to pile on yet more pressure upon embattled Israel over Arab territorial demands on Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.
The kinglet stated in his WSJ interview that “Jerusalem specifically engages Jordan because we are the custodians of the Muslim and Christian holy places and this is a flashpoint that goes beyond Jordanian-Israel relations.”
And here we descend the rabbit hole. Abdullah II chose to hide the unpleasant facts that under his father, King Hussein, not only did Jordan refuse to allow Jews access to their holy sites during Jordan’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967 (including the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount), but it desecrated the ancient Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, ran a road through the cemetery, used many of the gravestones as latrines for the Arab Legion, deliberately destroyed and desecrated scores of ancient synagogues throughout the Old City, and used the Tomb of Simon the Just as a stable. The Jewish inhabitants of the Old City and areas of east Jerusalem, meanwhile, had been driven from their homes and forced to flee to safety in West Jerusalem.
During the nineteen years of illegal Jordanian Arab occupation of the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem (an occupation recognized by only Pakistan and Britain), the United Nations not once protested against the rampant and systematic destruction of the ancient Jewish quarter. Only after the reunification of the city in 1967 and the removal by Israel of the Jordanian pillboxes, barbed wire, and sniper sites was the filth that had piled up over the years along the Via Delarosa (with Christian pilgrims being forced to wade through it) removed and the area cleansed. And only after reunification did the morally challenged United Nations begin its long and hypocritical series of anti-Israel resolutions over Jerusalem.
It is only since Israel was forced by Arab aggression to fight the June 1967 Six Day War and liberate Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation that all religions and faiths are treated with respect and provided free access to their holy places. On June 4, 1967, former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol pleaded with the late King Hussein, via the United Nations, not to follow the genocidal boastings of Egypt’s President Nasser and attack the Jewish state. Eshkol stated that “[w]e shall not initiate any action whatsoever against Jordan. However, should Jordan open hostilities, we shall react with all our might and he (the King) will have to bear the full responsibility for all the consequences.”
The impressionable king, succumbing to Nasser’s boast of Egyptian forces already inside Israel, ordered his artillery to open fire along the entire border between west and east Jerusalem. The Egyptians and elements of the Arab Legion had penetrated the southernmost Jewish suburb of Jerusalem, Ramat Rahel, founded in 1926 upon the same site of a Jewish village from biblical times.
It is instructive to note that King Hussein visited East Jerusalem only once during Jordan’s occupation and chose to keep Amman the capital of Jordan. Indeed, no Muslim holy place is today the capital city of an Arab and Muslim state. In Iran, the capital is Teheran; it is not Qum or Meshed. In Saudi Arabia, neither Mecca nor Medina is the capital city; it is Riyadh.
Only the Jews regard Jerusalem as both their spiritual and temporal capital city, and they have done so for three thousand years. For Christians, Jerusalem is a spiritual, not a temporal, site. Muslims, even while praying in their mosque on the Temple Mount, face Mecca with their backs to Jerusalem.
The Two State Solution, 87 years old, is an ideal explanation of the history of betrayal by Great Britain toward its obligation to create a Jewish National Home in geographical Palestine and how the entire territory east of the River Jordan (present-day Jordan) was torn away, leaving only the narrow sliver of land west of the Jordan River for the reconstituted Jewish state. This tiny piece of land, which includes the very biblical and ancestral heartland of the Jews, is now threatened by yet another Two State Solution, reducing Israel to only nine miles wide at its most populous region. The present Kingdom of Jordan, over which Abdullah II reigns, is the much larger territory east of the River Jordan stretching east to Iraq, south to Saudi Arabia, and north to Syria.
In 1994, Yasser Arafat’s PLO demanded East Jerusalem as the capital city of a new Arab state. All Jews living in such a capital, it declared, will be driven out — or worse. Sound familiar? This demand was first articulated only after the 1967 War and Jerusalem’s reunification. Since then, it has become a staple of Palestinian Arab and all other Arab and Muslim rhetoric.
Now Abdullah II impudently claims that the Israeli Prime Minister’s actions have brought their two nation’s relations to a new low. Again the Alice in Wonderland syndrome is clear for all to see. For Netanyahu has made yet more concessions to bring about peace in the region by agreeing to a freeze on housing for Jews throughout Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). No concessions have been demanded of the Palestinian Arabs, who continue terrorism against Israeli civilians and indoctrinate their children with vile anti-Jewish hatred — all banned under the Oslo Peace Accords. The Jordanian king even stretches credulity by claiming that Jordanian officials call their relations with Israel a cold peace. He went on to say, “People to people exchanges between our two countries are virtually non-existent and cross border business has largely dried up.”
Though Jordan has resisted the Palestinians’ attempt to undermine the peace treaty obligations made earlier between Jordan and Israel in 1994, it has nevertheless been Jordan that is the cause of the cold peace with the Jewish state. Animosity toward Israel and the lack of peaceful interchange between the two peoples has been led by Jordan’s professional and intellectual organizations. These have included journalists, doctors, dentists, business leaders, artists, and musicians. These groups have opposed all and every form of normalization with Israel.
Any Jordanian Arab who reaches out to Israelis is immediately threatened and blacklisted. It is ironic that Jordan’s kinglet allows such a situation to exist while choosing to falsely blame Israel. Could it be that he is afraid of alienating these organizations for fear that the Hashemite control over his kingdom would falter? After all, Jordan’s population is three-fourths Palestinian, and the kinglet’s greatest fear is a Palestinian Arab coup.
In September 1970, the kinglet’s father, King Hussein, fought off a PLO coup d’état led by the arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, who had created a state within a state inside Jordan. Hussein’s Arab Legion killed thousands of PLO terrorists, along with their families, and many fled to Israel for safety — the very same terrorists who had been conducting grisly cross-border raids into Israel. Since then, Israel has several times warned Jordan of attempts to destroy it from the neighboring Syrian regime in Damascus, which considers Jordan as part of southern Syria. Indeed, Israel even intervened once to forestall an imminent Syrian invasion.
In his meeting with President Barack Hussein Obama, the kinglet will take the predictable anti-Israeli line in order to keep his Arab credentials intact and his Hashemite minority from being overthrown. The kinglet’s throne is an uneasy one at best. But what better way to deflect his subjects’ growing Islamic radicalization than to heap blame upon Israel for every problem in the Middle East? And this while secretly relying upon Israel to protect his throne.
According to an earlier Pew Global Attitude Project finding,
A majority of Jordanians now say suicide bombings and other violent actions are justifiable in defense of Islam. According to the Jordan Times’ correspondent, Omar Karmi, because of close geopolitical and familial ties, Hamas has a close relationship with Jordan’s Islamists, and the Jordanian Islamists’ increasing popularity has been given a big boost by Hamas’ victory. Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood is and always has been implacably opposed to the 1994 [Jordan-Israel] peace treaty. Despite the remarkable durability of the Hashemite Kingdom, Jordan’s strategic position and its vulnerability remain a given that cannot be ignored in any Israeli security assessment.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II dares not buck the growing Arab, Muslim, and worldwide pressure piling on Israel, vastly encouraged as it is by the mendacious and unprincipled anti-Israel bias emanating from the White House and State Department. He will no doubt echo the tired old mantra that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict will miraculously solve all world problems and usher in “peace in our time.”
It is no surprise, therefore, that the kinglet and the American president will have a great time together at their upcoming Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. And no doubt U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, and American General James Jones will all join together in the “let’s bash Israel” festivity while the malevolent Cheshire cat, Ahmadinejad, looks on with an ever-widening grin.
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Playing the same old (immoral) game
Apr 9th
by Stan Goodenough, Jerusalem Newswire
Barack Obama can package it anyway he likes. After sabotaging his own – glaringly transparent – “bilateral talks” approach, he can table “another” peace plan; he can call it “new.” He can build it on what American administration officials reportedly see as “past progress achieved” in the peace plans littering the last two decades of history. He can draft it in close conjunction with Israeli traitor Rahm Emanuel and Jewish turncoat Dennis Ross. He can credit – or, if it fails, blame it on – his special board of present and former national security advisors.
No matter what his “new approach,” the truth is that from Madrid to Annapolis, from Oslo to the Road Map, there has all along only been one peace process, one peace formula, one peace plan. And the version Obama’s White House floated via David Ignatius in The Washington Post this past week changes nothing.
Well, there is one little difference, or perhaps not such a little one. This president is stooping to a low reminiscent of the 1991 “linkage” ploy played by Secretary of State James Baker, who tied the granting of loan guarantees desperately needed by Israel for the absorption of a million immigrants from the former USSR, to Jerusalem’s agreeing to participate in the International Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid.
Now, aware of Israel’s enormous concerns about the danger of an Iranian atomic bomb – and nothing troubles Israel today as much as this threat – Obama’s line of attack is to link America’s support against Iran to Israel’s compliance with the White House’s demands on the peace process.
The message will be:
Yes, Israel, you DO face an imminently nuclear-wielding Iran. You ARE a tiny country that cannot absorb and survive a nuclear strike. And yes, you ARE without friends (as in national allies) in the world. So listen up, Israel. We have you over a barrel. You NEED the US, and we WILL stand with you on Iran, but ONLY IF you go along with our “new plan for peace.”
All of which boils down to one, ugly, word: “Blackmail.”
But let’s not be sidetracked by even this below-the-belt attack.
What’s absolutely vital is that we keep focus sharply on the essence of the issue: the same old, unaltered plan, now assuredly – despite protestations of denial from Washington – being prepared for presentation as a new one.
Like all the other versions, it will be doomed to fail. For at the very base of its foundation festers the wrong and immoral notion – to mollify Arab-Muslim aggression and warmongering by feeding it pieces of Jewish land.
British Prime Minister Richard Chamberlain’s apologists have tried to excuse his appeasing Hitler with pieces of Czechoslovakian land by arguing that Britain had not yet recovered from the monstrous toll exacted by World War I, and was in no condition to confront the Nazis. “He had no choice.”
Such reasoning may placate the indignation of some, but it cannot and does not expunge the immorality and wickedness of the peace plan known as the Berlin Diktat.
How much more repulsive is prosperous America’s readiness to sell Israel down the river rather than face down Arab threats of oil price hikes and boycotts.
Smelling Jewish blood, the leaders of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey this week denounced Israel as the main threat to peace in the Middle East, and called on President Obama to force the Israeli government to negotiate.
Not just in the Middle East, but around the world, when it comes to apportioning blame for the never-ending Arab-Israeli conflict, there’s a lot of finger pointing going on.
Almost all are pointing at Israel.
Not mine. More than anyone responsible for perpetuating this conflict, I accuse officials in the current and previous governments of the United States.
These include presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
With them are current and former national security advisors, Jim Jones, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sandy Berger, Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci and Robert C. McFarlane.
Also in the dock are secretaries of state Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, Lawrence Eagleburger, James Baker, George Schultz, Alexander Haig, Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger.
When it comes to their behavior towards Israel, all have this in common: They have been, and are, bullies and cowards.
They are bullies because they have been willing to brandish the massive size and influence of the United States over the head of little Israel; trying to coerce Israel into acceding to Arab demands.
And, like all bullies, they are cowards; too yellow-livered to identify denounce and reject the Arab and Islamic world and declare their strong and biased support for the Jewish state that looks to them – albeit in vain – as friend and ally.
As long as American foreign policy in the Middle East is designed and implemented by immoral politicians it will fail.
They must be replaced with men and women of courage and statesmanship who understand, and are willing to act according to, this profoundly simple fact:
Only a plan predicated on truth and justice can – and will – bring peace.
First it’s not ‘Islam,’ now it’s not ‘radical Islam’
Apr 9th
By Stan Goodenough, Jerusalem Newswire
President George W. Bush made the first critical mistake when – in an effort to prevent a backlash against peaceful American Muslims – he moved quickly after 9-11 to stress that the enemy that had perpetrated the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor was not “Islam” but “radical Islam.”
The enemy, the former president insisted – against all the available historical evidence – was not the religion. “Islam is a religion of peace.”
Bush’s effort to walk the politically acceptable walk was picked up and pushed to the limit by the other nations of the world (almost all of them Bush-hating), and especially by the Islamic ones.
But even as they applauded his reluctance to call a spade a Muslim (while despising him for it), the Islamic states – most of which actively and ardently support Islamic terrorist organizations – never imagined that the NEXT American president would let the Islamic world – which is involved in almost every conflict on the globe today – completely off the hook.
But that is what Barack Obama has decided to do – according to widely and wildly circulating press reports Wednesday.
As the Associated Press had it:
“President Barack Obama’s advisers will remove religious terms such as “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining the US national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror…
“The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”
“… rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on US foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.”
Not only are Muslims not the cause/source of most terrorism. Neither, in the view of the Obama administration, are radical Muslims.
Where, then does this leave us – apart from with an even stronger suspicion than we have had up till now that Obama himself prays to Allah in his closet?
For Israel – the hundreds of millions of Muslims who surround this little country and seek its destruction – the enemy has just become nameless.
And those calling America the “great Satan” are no longer Islamic radicals. I guess they are just misguided individuals – errant members of the great global village; the international community of nations.
Their religion – whose founder was himself a terrorist and which demands from every one of its adherents a commitment to jihad – holy war; is really not the issue at all.
Is it?
One that calls for a response
Apr 8th
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter said if Israel tried to attack Iranian nuclear sites, the U.S. should shoot down the Israeli planes rather than allow them to fly over U.S. airspace in Iraq. “We are not exactly impotent little babies,” Brzezinski said. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? … We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not.”
God says: “Have you not noticed that these people are saying, ‘Yahweh has rejected the two kingdoms he chose’? So they despise my people and longer regard them as a nation.” … “But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds, declares Yahweh, because you are called an outcast, Zion for whom no one cares. … So you will be my people and I will be your God. See, the storm of Yahweh will burst out in wrath, a driving wind swirling down on the heads of the wicked. The fierce anger of Yahweh will not turn back until he fully accomplishes the purpose of his heart. In days to come you will understand this.” (Jeremiah 33:24; 30:17, 22-24.)
The Jerusalem Connection says: Zbigniew Brzezinski is the poster boy for acceptable, politically correct anti-Semitism. Whether “anti-Israel” or “anti-Zionist” it means the same thing, we’re against the Jews. The scandalous dimension of this effort is that Christians, like the World Council of Churches and Churches for Middle East Peace and sadly even some leftist evangelicals have bought into this “kinder and gentler” anti-Semitism. So, we can expect to see Christians who support Israel increasingly in the crosshairs of those who politically and theologically oppose Israel. An example of this is the new anti-Israel so-called “evangelical” film that targets Pro-Israel Christians. Check it out at our web site www.thejerusalemconnection.us For every Zbigniew Brzezinski God will raise up an Oscar Schindler and a Corrie Ten Boom to stand in the gap. Will you be among them?
Obadiah’s Vision
Apr 6th
By Shelley Neese, The Jerusalem Connection
Then those of the Negev will possess the mountain of Esau, and those of the Shephelah the Philistine plain; also, possess the territory of Ephraim and the territory of Samaria, and Benjamin will possess Gilead. And the exiles of this host of the sons of Israel, Who are among the Canaanites as far as Zarephath, and the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad [Spain] will possess the cities of the Negev. The deliverers will ascend Mount Zion. To judge the mountain of Esau, and the kingdom will be the LORD’S”. (Obadiah 1:19-21)
Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Obadiah are just three of the biblical prophets who received divine revelations about a future war between the reunited Houses of Joseph and Jacob and the House of Esau. The prophets foretold an ultimate victory over Israel’s enemies, recovery of the land that was promised, and a final ingathering of the children of Abraham. The prophet Obadiah, however, is given a very specific vision providing remarkable detail about where exactly in Israel one specific group of exiles will assemble. Obadiah’s vision reveals the return of exiles from Spain, the Sephardim, to take possession of the Negev, Israel’s southern desert. This short sentence—“the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad will possess the cities of the Negev”—may be easily overlooked by the passive reader but the alert believer immediately recognizes a prophecy that is being fulfilled at this very hour.
Sephardim, persecuted for nearly two millennia and dispersed for half a century, are returning to the Negev. Hundreds of thousands from the Middle East and North Africa returned with the foundation of Israel. Now, the Bnai Anusim, the lost Sephardic Jews in Latin and South America, are—five hundred years after their ancestors were forcefully converted to Catholicism—discovering their Jewish identities and Hebraic roots for the first time. As they awaken to their heritage, many of these Bnai Anusim are being called to the Negev. God, in all his mystery, is transforming a land without a people into the eternal possession of a people without a land.
Over the preceding centuries, Obadiah’s vision would have seemed more like a curse than a blessing for the Sephardim since the Negev was no prize to be won. After centuries of neglect under the Ottoman Empire, the Negev was completely desolate and sparsely populated. When the British Mandatory Authorities explored the region after WWI, they marked it as uninhabitable, dismissing the idea of Jewish resettlement. The land was just as Deuteronomy 29:23 said it would be after centuries of exile: “a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it.”
Making something out of nothing, however, is where Zionism excels. With the establishment of the state of Israel, the ingenuity of Israeli pioneers turned previously desolate wasteland into a success story of the Zionist movement. Israeli engineers developed the world’s greatest systems of water desalination, drip irrigation, and desert preservation. The Negev bloomed into an economically productive desert with thriving agricultural settlements, fish farms, floral hothouses, and desert research centers. Only after this miraculous transformation was the harshness of the desert conquered and the Negev ready to be populated.
Indeed, Sephardim were the first large group to inhabit the region. Soon after Israel’s birth, the world witnessed the partial fulfillment of Obadiah’s vision as hundreds of thousands of Sephardim from all over the Middle East and North Africa returned to the Jewish homeland to reclaim the land marked as their spiritual inheritance. In the 1950’s and 60s, 600,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Egypt, Iraq and other parts of the Arab world. The Government of Israel was intent on using this massive immigration to settle the unpopulated parts of the land. They placed the vast majority of these Sephardic immigrants in absorption camps and development towns in the southern half of Israel. The heavy Sephardic influence and large numbers of Sephardim in the Negev’s cities and towns is still felt today.
The Negev, however, has yet to reach its full potential. God’s plans for the region are not complete. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, said “the Negev holds the key to Israel’s path and its future.” His belief and vision are still relevant today.
The Negev accounts for over sixty percent of the land of Israel but has only ten percent of the population. In contrast, the narrow coastal land in the center of the country accounts for 50% of Israel’s total population, one of the most densely populated areas in the developed world. As the center of the country reaches its maximum capacity, the Negev is the most obvious solution for relieving population pressures. Five years ago, the Israeli government declared Negev development as one of Israel’s primary national missions. The Jewish National Fund’s Blueprint Negev and the Government of Israel’s National Master Plan 35 have created planning policies for the next twenty years to focus on developing the Negev in a few key areas: establishing new settlements, doubling the population of Beer Sheva, reinforcing desert infrastructure, relocating industries to the Negev, and encouraging small business development.
While the government’s business and infrastructure plans are moving forward and meeting their targets, the biggest challenge for Negev developers has been the recruitment of large communities to populate new areas of the desert. The high temperatures, little rainfall, and more rustic lifestyle of the desert towns are significant obstacles to overcome in luring Israelis away from the cafes and malls of Tel Aviv. Despite recruitment efforts of the Jewish Agency, the majority of new immigrants are settling in Jerusalem and the center of the country. If Israel’s goals for the Negev are to come to fruition, there needs to surface a large group of people divinely led to the desert.
Obadiah’s vision already identifies the individuals God has hand-selected to possess the Negev. This prophecy was partially fulfilled with the first wave of Sephardim from the Middle East and North Africa, but it will not be fully fulfilled until the Sephardim from the opposite side of the ocean have claimed their part of the spiritual inheritance. There are thousands—some suspect millions—of Sephardim currently living in Mexico, South America, and the southwestern United States. As their ancestors’ identities were hidden because of persecution, the Bnai Anusim’s knowledge of their Jewishness was buried over time. Only now, in the last twenty years, are the Bnai Anusim awakening to their calling in larger numbers, returning to the Jewish community, and making Aliya. The Negev, now conquered and cultivated, is prepared to absorb thousands of these new immigrants. In some mysterious way, this land has been saving itself for the return Obadiah prophesied. As settlement of the Negev grows in importance for the future of the country, all that awaits the desert is a massive Aliya—the ingathering of the lost Sephardim.
Shelley Neese is Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Connection.
Jesus the Messiah
Apr 1st
By Shelley Neese
For an observant Jew, one of the most important events anticipated in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) is the arrival of the Messiah to redeem His chosen and rule over them during the Messianic age. Without this Messianic hope, Judaism would be stripped of its fundamental purpose and spiritual drive.
For the observant Christian, who reads the Tanakh in light of the New Testament, the most important events detailed in the Tanakh are the Messianic prophecies that point towards Jesus’ coming. Without the fulfillment of these Old Testament prophecies Jesus may have claimed to be the Messiah but He would not have demonstrated it.
To make sense of the Christian proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah, it is important to show which Messianic prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection. There are approximately sixty major Messianic prophecies with more than 300 references in the Old Testament. This is a conservative estimate using only those scriptures that have traditionally been viewed as describing some attribute or act related to the Messiah. The Messianic prophecies cover the whole period of the Old Testament—the first found in Genesis and the last in Malachi. These predictions were told through God’s prophets in advance so Israel might recognize the true Messiah when He appeared.
The Messiah was to be a descendant of Abraham (Gen. 12:3), come from the tribe of Judah (Gen. 49:10), and be heir to the throne of David (Isa. 9:7). He was to be born the seed of a woman (Gen. 3:15) while Isaiah foreshadowed the virgin birth (Isa. 7:14). Micah called Bethlehem the Messiah’s birthplace (Mic. 5:2). The Messiah was to be both a prophet (Deut. 18:15) and priest after the order of Melchizedek (Ps. 110:4).
Just as Isaiah prophesied, most of Messiah’s ministry was in the Galilee where He taught and performed miracles so they “may see a great light” (Isa. 9:1, 2). As it was foretold, Jesus was rejected by many of His own people (Isa. 53:1, 3). When it was time to go down to Jerusalem at Passover, towards the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, He rode in on the back of a donkey (Zech. 9:9).
Prophecies of the Messiah’s suffering are remarkable in their detail, surrounding every event in the Passion. He would be betrayed by a friend (Ps. 41:9) for thirty pieces of silver (Zech. 11:13), the money to be returned for a potter’s field (Zech. 11:13). The Messiah would be spit upon and beaten (Isa. 50:6). David foreshadowed that Messiah’s garments would be divided and that His persecutors would gamble for His clothing (Ps. 22:18). They would give him gall and vinegar for His thirst (Ps. 69:21). Zechariah knew His side would be pierced (Zech. 12:10). No bones were to be broken (Ps. 34:20). Yet He would remain silent to the accusations hurled against him (Isa. 53:7).
Though Jesus fulfilled many of the Messianic prophecies during His first advent, had He not conquered death through resurrection there would be no continuing hope. Because He arose on the third day (Hos. 6:2) and ascended into Heaven (Ps. 68:18), His followers now anxiously await His return when the remaining Messianic prophecies will be fulfilled.
To the believer, Jesus perfectly matches the profile of the anticipated Jewish Messiah. But of course the veil is not lifted for all, and there are a few common objections raised in relation to Jesus and the prophecies.
One of the most common objections is that it’s pure coincidence or luck that Jesus fits the Messianic profile. Yes, it is feasible that a normal man happened to fulfill a few of the prophecies, like being born in Bethlehem and from the tribe of Judah. However, the mathematical probability that one person could fulfill all sixty major prophecies is astronomical. George Heron, a French mathematician, calculated that the odds of one man fulfilling even forty of the Messianic prophecies are 1 in 10 to the power of 157. The science of probability seems to rule out the possibility of coincidence.
Another theory is that the whole thing was a giant fabrication. Followers of Jesus supposedly manipulated the Old Testament and inserted false prophecies relating to Jesus after the fact. This theory fell apart with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly The Great Isaiah Scroll which has been carbon dated to somewhere between 335 BC and 107 BC. To the dismay of Liberal scholars, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which predate the Christian era, are remarkably accurate when compared to the text of the standard Hebrew Bible we have today. For example, of the 166 Hebrew words used in Isaiah 53 there is only a seventeen letter difference between the standard Hebrew Bible and the ancient scroll. All seventeen are spelling or stylistic changes. No Christian conspiracy stands out there.
Other objectors take the reverse approach and claim that Jesus deliberately attempted to fulfill the prophecies. The book, The Passover Plot, is one source that advocates the idea that Jesus even faked his own death. There is no doubt that Jesus knew the prophecies intimately and in some instances did purposefully fulfill them. This was not done deceptively, however. When Jesus appeared to the disciples after the third day, he said to them: “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). Even still, there is only so much about his life that Jesus could orchestrate if He was merely a man. A normal man could not control His place and date of birth or His lineage. He could not make Judas betray Him or His tormentors mock and beat Him. He could not arrange the order for His crucifixion or the people’s reaction to His death. Indeed, most of the prophecies are beyond the power of a man to fulfill deliberately, and if Jesus was only seeking His own glory, pretending to be the Messiah, then why would He have chosen to suffer and die rather than declare Himself the kind of King Messiah that the Jews of His day were expecting.
One may laboriously detail every prophecy fulfilled in Jesus and effectively argue against the objectors, but ultimately accepting Jesus as the Messiah is an act of faith. Faith is required to accept one’s need for a Savior, and faith is required to see the world’s need for a redeemer. Jesus, the Anointed One, fulfilled the prophecies according to the intent of God, not the expectation of men. He came once to suffer and to die so that by His wounds we could be healed (Isa. 53:4-5) and He will return again to gather those who recognized Him as Messiah.
“And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
(2 Peter 1:19-21)
Shelley Neese is managing editor for the The Jerusalem Connection Report.