Archive for July, 2010

Rabbi Chaim Richman, director of the Temple Institute of Jerusalem said: “Tisha B’Av was not intended to be a day of perpetual mourning, but rather, a bridge to the future; the yearning and desire which our mourning inspires is designed to motivate us to rebuild, … “we hear many excuses, such as ‘who are we to rebuild the Temple? We are not ready. The time has not yet come. The Temple is a thing of the past.’”… “The renewal of Israel and the building of the Holy Temple is a process that has begun and is now unstoppable … This nation is preparing to ‘rise up like a lion’ (Numbers 23:24). We are moving ever closer to the day on which we can truly say, without jaded cynicism or facetiousness but with true sincerity, that Tisha B’Av is no longer relevant, for it will have turned into a day of gladness.”

God says: “Give careful thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the he house so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored’ I am with you says Yahweh…. So Yahweh stirred up the spirit of the whole remnant of the people. They began to work on the house of Yahweh Almighty.”… “Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way for the day [of the LORD] will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed , the man doomed to destruction. He opposes and exalts himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped and even sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” [Haggai 1:7, 14; II Thessalonians 2:3-4].

The Jerusalem Connection says: There’s good news and bad news. The good news is there is a growing acceptance among Jews, and especially Israelis, for the building of the third Temple in Jerusalem. It is a fact of the prophetic future. It will happen. The Bible says so. And we can rejoice with our Jewish elder brothers that it will happen. Of course for followers of Jesus as Messiah it will never take the place of the substitutionary sacrifice of the Lamb of God for the sins of the world. The bad news is, shortly after it is built, The Man of Sin (the anti-Messiah) will irreparably defile and desecrate the rebuilt Temple so that Messiah, when he comes, will have to totally destroy it. But there’s more good news. When Messiah comes he will set up his Kingdom on earth and there will be no need for a Temple then, “because Yahweh God Almighty and the Lamb are its Temple.”… “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’” [Revelation 21:22; 22:20].

by Victor Sharpe

The Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” are Arabs who are indistinguishable from their fellow Arabs who live in the surrounding artificially created  states such as Iraq and Jordan or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both European powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War 1.

Both powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey’s empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain left a legacy of war and violence, which has bedevilled the region ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine ever since the destruction of Judea in 135 AD by Rome.

But there is no such a thing as a Palestinian people. No such thing as a Palestinian history or a Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history – certainly not an Arab independent state of Palestine.

You will search in vain for Palestinian Arab coinage or Palestinian Arab archaeological artefacts specifically related to any Palestinian Arab king or ancient leader. But what you will find are coins, pottery, ancient scrolls, et cetera, all providing conclusive, empirical and millennial evidence of Jewish civilization dotting the land known correctly as Israel – not Palestine.

The present-day so-called “Palestinians” are an Arab people. They share an Arab culture, ethnicity, and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions.

Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian born arch-terrorist, who imposed himself undemocratically on the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, was fond of creating the absurd myth that Palestinian Arabs were descended from the Canaanites and the Philistines. As we know, the bigger the lie the bigger the number of people will believe it. And so Arafat twisted history in order to disinherit the indigenous native people of the land: the Jews.

Canaanites, without doubt, were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel before the first Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, settled there and before Moses, much later, brought them back during the Exodus to the Promised Land from slavery in Egypt.

Indeed, the correct early geographic name of the Land of Israel is Canaan, not “Palestine.” The Canaanites lived both along the coastal plain and in the mountain regions, which run like a spine down the biblical territory of Samaria and Judea. Their language was similar to Hebrew and their territory stretched north into present day Lebanon and included the present day Golan Heights.

The Canaanites were finally subdued during the reign of King David. Most Canaanites were gradually assimilated into the Jewish tribes, embraced the faith, and were no longer a distinguishable people.

After the 8th century BC, the Canaanites no longer existed and the only people, therefore, who can trace back any lineage to the ancient Canaanites are the Jews: not the Palestinian Arabs. So much for Arafat’s nonsense and for the on- going attempts by today’s Palestinian Arabs to hoodwink the world.

The term “Philistine” provides the source from which the term “Palestine” is derived. The Roman Emperor, Hadrian, recycled the name as an insult to the Jews whose independence he had destroyed. He thus renamed Judea, Philistia, which in time became Palestine. Like the Arabs who gave themselves the concocted name “Palestinian,” the Philistines were alien peoples who entered the land from other regions.

The modern “Palestinian Arabs” flooded British Mandatory Palestine from Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). They were attracted during the early decades of the 20th century by new employment opportunities provided by the Jewish pioneers, whose heroic efforts were turning the desert green again and restoring the centuries of neglect the land had endured under alien conquerors.

The Arabs came from the stagnant surrounding Arab lands. Britain turned a blind eye to the flood of illegal aliens entering, while at the same time often arbitrarily limiting Jewish immigration into their ancient, biblical and ancestral homeland in order to appease Arab extremists.

The Philistines were non-Semitic peoples who had entered the land from their homes throughout the Aegean Islands in general and from Crete in particular. They are therefore often known as the Sea Peoples.

These ancient Cretans arrived in Southern Canaan and were known as “Pelestim and Keretim” by the Hebrew tribes. It appears that their first settlement may have been Gaza. Later they settled in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gat and Ekron: the Pentapolis.

Their territory was primarily along the coastal Mediterranean; interestingly, a territory not dissimilar in size to the present day Gaza Strip. They attempted at different times to invade Judah but they were turned back by the various Jewish heroes we know from the Bible and ultimately defeated by King David. From that time onwards they were diminished as a threat and as a separate people – finally disappearing from history. Any “Palestinian” Arab attempt to claim a lineage with them is as absurd as that of links with the early Canaanites for neither Philistines or Canaanites were Arabs.

The so-called “Palestinians” who claim Jerusalem do not want it because it is truly theirs; they want merely to take it away from the Jews for whom Jerusalem, known also as Zion, is the eternal, 3,000 year old Jewish capital.

Perhaps what links the modern day Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” with the ancient Philistines is that both are invaders. The Philistines wanted to take from the Israelites the Holy Ark of the Covenant, while today’s so-called “Palestinian Arabs” want to take the Holy City of the Covenant.  So let me close with the words of a Christian Arab, Joseph Farah, who knows of what he writes.

“There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of one per cent of the landmass. But that’s too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today… No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough”.
- Joseph Farah, “Myths of the Middle East” -

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.

by Victor Sharpe, Family Security Matters
 
“Our faith was born there, as was our language, our nationhood, our pride. It is incumbent upon us to defend —– even if we all die.”
 
Those words were uttered by Serbian Deputy Prime Minister, Draskovitch, some twelve years ago while referring to Kosovo. Though his statement may be historically, spiritually and culturally in doubt, there is no denying the immense passion his words evoke.
 
The Serbs lost their ancestral heartland of Kosovo to the Muslim Turks a little over 600 years ago at the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds. Serbs never stop dreaming of lost Kosovo; it is now part of their national yearning for its eventual return, though the present occupation of Kosovo by the Albanian Muslims casts a giant shadow over any hope for its redemption. Still it is the hoped for return that unites most Serbs just as Jerusalem’s reunification and restoration to the Jewish people unites most Jews.
 
Six hundred years is a long time for a people to weep over its still lost heartland. Jews themselves wept over the loss of their Jerusalem for a far, far longer period – almost 1,800 years during the long exile before Jerusalem’s liberation from alien occupation and reunification in that momentous and miraculous summer of 1967.
 
Draskovitch was reflecting upon the unbearable pressure the U.S. Clinton Administration, through NATO, exerted upon the Serbian people even to the extent of a high-level bombing campaign, which destroyed all the bridges in Belgrade and took the lives of hundreds of Serbian civilians.
 
According to an article written by Elyakim Haetzni for Arutz Sheva Israel National Radio, a reporter asked Draskovitch if he “did not want his country to become a part of the West and to share in its wealth?” The Deputy Prime Minister replied: “Not if the price is Kosovo.”
 
Like Israel today, the Serbs were the target of a hostile media. Muslim atrocities against the Christian Serbs were played down almost to exclusion while Serbian massacres of Muslims were banner headlines. As far as the media was concerned, the Serbs were: “Guilty until proven guilty.” That is how Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu recently described much of the international media’s present day attitude towards Israel’s attempt at self-defense in the face of a premeditated campaign of anti-Israel demonization and de-legitimization.
 
John Cleese, the wonderfully funny British comedian who was part of the earlier Monty Python Flying Circus and who played the part of the memorable manic proprietor of the British seaside hotel, Fawlty Towers, said on a recent You Tube video that, “now that  I am sixty six years old, I can see that the world is completely mad.” And he was referring to a far darker and more sinister madness that exists today than his comical portrayal of the world some three to four decades ago.
 
The current occupant of the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, acting as the chief appeaser of international rogues and redistributor of Americans’ wealth, speaks about foreign tyrants but pounds his desk with a feather when it comes to reining in the aggressive nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.
 
In that Temple to Hypocrisy, the United Nations, the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose president is Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and whose members include the most barbaric and repressive regimes imaginable, spend their time ignoring their own human rights abuses and target only one tiny nation: Israel. Dozens of breathtakingly biased resolutions have been cast against the Jewish state without once ever referring to the appalling history of Palestinian Arab terror that Israel has, and is, forced to endure.
 
The mad world denies human rights to the Tibetans whose land has been swallowed up by the Communist Chinese. It denies human rights and self- determination to the Kurdish people who endure great suffering at the hands of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. It denies justice to the Greek Cypriots whose island is 33% occupied in the north by Turkey. 
 
And where is any meaningful UN intervention in Sudan in which the Arab Muslim north has already slaughtered millions of black Christians, Muslims and animists? Yet all the time, a massive flow of US and European Union tax payer money pours down a veritable black hole in the deluded hope that it will bring freedom and democracy into Arab-Muslim lands. 
 
Billions of dollars have already been syphoned off into hidden tax havens, be they by despotic and corrupt leaders in the Palestinian Territories, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or throughout the Middle East and south Asia.
 
According to Matthew Rosenberg, writing in the June 28, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal, “more than $3 billion in cash has openly been flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years. Most of the funds are being moved by often secretive outfits called ‘hawalas’ – money transfers with roots in the Muslim world stretching back centuries.”
 
But in this mad world, western politicians and leaders seem devoid of understanding the simple fact that Islam will never embrace democracy for Islam means submission to the will of Allah; not – as democracy teaches – submission to the will of the people.
 
Seeing the West in its present day descent towards a new dark gulf, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s lament of Britain’s similar descent in the 1930s. Replace his mention of the British nation six months before Munich with that of America today and his words ring uncannily true as we endure the trillions of dollars of debt piled up by President Obama and the Democrat party while witnessing the ever rising peril of Islamic triumphalism.
 
Churchill said: “I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, down the path which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends.
 
“A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet … if mortal catastrophe should overtake the British nation, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs.
 
“They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered itself to be brought low, and to cast away all that had been gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind!”
 
FamilySecurityMatters.orgContributor Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer, contributing editor, and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.