Posts tagged Netanyahu
Netanyahu and the Daniel 9:27 covenant
Feb 8th
By Bill Koenig
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the leader who agrees to the final biblical pe
The New Pharaoh’s Evil Decree
Dec 8th
By Victor Sharpe
As I write this, the Jewish state is humiliated by a freeze on all and any construction within Yesha. What is Yesha? It is the Hebrew acronym for the biblical and ancestral heartland of the Jewish people. It is Yehuda and Shomron, or Judea and Samaria, but the world prefers to call it by its Arab name, the West Bank.
The humiliation is all the greater because Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and, in particular, his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, are voluntarily enforcing the freeze for a ten month period. This interim arrangement to appease President Barack Hussein Obama, like any new imposition, usually has a life of its own and tends to become permanent.
Thus Jews living within their very heartland are forbidden to even build a porch on their modest homes; this while the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians illegally build at a feverish pace throughout the area with no opposition from any quarter; certainly not from this United States administration.
President Obama, considers the 300,000 Jewish souls living in Yesha to be more of a threat to world peace than the violent and genocidal acts of Hamas in Gaza and the duplicitous machinations of the Palestinian Authority. There are some 1.5 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria, according to Yoram Ettinger, a demographer, former Consul General in Houston with the rank of Ambassador and past Director of Israel’s Government Press Office. This contrasts with the grossly inflated figures of 2.5 million that the Palestinian Authority claims.
Yet President Obama believes that the one million Muslim Arabs living within Israel’s 1967 borders constitute no threat at all to the Jewish state. What strange mathematics! Of course the dirty secret is that if Jews were permitted to remain in their villages and towns within a newly created Arab state called Palestine, (on biblical and ancestral Jewish land in Judea and Samaria), they would be constantly harassed, persecuted and, no doubt, lynched by the followers of the “religion of peace.” So it is obvious that this grotesque and evil decree freezing Jewish life in Yesha is not ever going to placate the voracious and relentless appetite of the Muslim Arabs for they will never accept a non-Muslim state in land that was at one time conquered in the name of Allah. As I have written before, the Muslim Arabs would not even accept Israel if it shrank to one downtown square in Tel Aviv.
As Yoram Ettinger puts it: “… A freeze re-entrenches the misperception of Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as an ‘obstacle to peace.’ It diverts attention and resources from the crucial threat to peace: Abu Mazen’s (Mahmoud Abbas) engineered hate education – the manufacturing line of terrorists – and Arab rejection of the existence, and not just the size, of the Jewish state.”
To sum up: This humiliating and shamefully imposed freeze on Jewish life within its historic homeland is no enhancer of true peace; it is merely a gift of blatant appeasement to the ever hostile and implacable Muslim enemy. At the same time that this Pharaonic decree is foisted upon the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, the Iranian mullahs are ignoring with contempt all the feeble sanctions and words emanating from the U.N., the EU., and from the Obama Administration. The Islamic Republic of Iran is determined to build nuclear weapons, which they have made no secret are aimed at destroying Israel. Despite all agreements Iran has entered into, she has predictably reneged on them all. Not content with the existing number of 500 centrifuges that are spinning their promise of atomic death, the illegitimate Iranian regime has now stuck its finger in the eye of the West by announcing that it intends to build ten times more uranium enrichment plants, making a total of 5,000 centrifuges.
This then is the main threat to Israel’s survival. Iran’s president not only publicly preached Holocaust denial, but plans on inflicting a second holocaust upon the remnant of the Jewish people. At the same time, Iran spends vast sums in providing its Hizballah proxy in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza with huge quantities of advanced weaponry to be used against Israeli civilians. Thousand of deadly rockets are thus aimed at northern Israel from Lebanon and at southern and central Israel from the Gaza Strip.
Anti-Semitism is growing at alarming rates throughout the world, primarily in Europe and Britain because of the growing Muslim presence and influence. However, the Jews are again becoming the eternal scapegoat for the inability and frustration of western societies to prevail against encroaching Islam.
The twin devils of political correctness and multiculturalism, imposed by their elites, are the root cause but the Jews, as always, are the targets. In fact, Israel itself is becoming increasingly isolated and demonized. It is being forced to don the same mantle of suffering that the individual Jew endured for millennia. This is, of course, highly irrational but then hatred of the Jews has always been rooted in irrationality. That is why there is even anti-Jewish propaganda in Japan where few if any Jews live.
The appeasement of the Arab and Muslim world will bring the exact opposite of what the appeasers seek. Winston Churchill wrote the following: “Appeasement is like feeding a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last.” The crocodile has no feelings of sympathy, nor does the Muslim Arab whose culture considers any concessions as a form of weakness and will offer no reciprocal concessions but cruelly demand more and more. It reminds me of the ancient saying from the Jewish Ethics of the Fathers: “Whoever is merciful to the cruel will end by being cruel to the merciful.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer on Jewish history and the Islamist-Israel conflict. He has just completed work on a second volume to his highly acclaimed book: Politicide – The attempted murder of the Jewish state. His books are available from his publisher www.lulu.com
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem …
Nov 20th
By Victor Sharpe
White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, was ordered by the Obama apparatchiks to express displeasure at the decision by Israel to build houses in the East Jerusalem suburb of Gilo. But Gibbs failed to disclose that lands on which Gilo was built, as with other suburbs in “disputed” parts of East Jerusalem, were home to many Jews who were driven out in 1948 by the British officered Arab Legion of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
It wasn’t liberated by Israel, or the land restored, until the June, 1967 Six Day War, nineteen years later. King Hussein of Jordan had thrown in his lot with the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was boasting how he was on the verge of destroying the Jewish state. The King believed Nasser’s claims and attacked along the entire Jordanian – Israel front (including Jerusalem) despite pleas by Israel for him to not follow Nasser’s aggression. History might have been very different if Hussein had listened to Israel’s pleas.
In the nineteen years that the Jordanians occupied the territory, they never remotely considered it as anything but Jordanian. Certainly they never thought it belonged to another Arab and primarily Muslim people who later called themselves Palestinians. As it was, Jordan’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem as well as of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) was recognized by only two countries, Britain and Pakistan.
But the Obama White House, and the relentlessly anti-Israel State Department, nevertheless have decided to continue echoing the demands of the Palestinian Authority and call for Israel to stop building homes, not only in Judea and Samaria, but even within Jewish suburbs of Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem; this while Arab settlement building continues unchecked throughout the area at a feverish pace.
It matters not to Obama that Jerusalem, east, west, north and south, has been described as the eternal city of the eternal people.
Let me quote the words from 1918 of the great Rabbi J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, at the thanksgiving service for the liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks by British forces. He spoke of the nearly 4,000 years of history that bound the Jews to their spiritual and physical capital city and of their fate in defending it against its many conquerors:
“Like the Jew, this Holy City of Israel is deathless; fire and sword and all the engines of destruction have been hurled against it in vain. The Babylonians burnt it and deported its population; the Romans slew a million of its inhabitants, razed it to the ground, passed the ploughshare over it and strewed its furors with salt; Hadrian banished its very name from the lips of men, changed it to Aelia Capitolina and forbade any Jew from entering it on pain of death. Persians and Arabs, Barbarians and Crusaders and Turks took it and re-took it, ravaged it and burnt it; and yet, marvelous to relate, it ever rises from its ashes to renewed life and glory.”
Rabbi Hertz was talking on the very day that 2,080 years earlier, Judah Maccabee, the legendary Jewish hero, led his warriors against the Greek-Syrians to liberate the Holy city from its heathen occupiers, entered the Temple, and re-dedicated it to the glory of the One and Only God. Rabbi Hertz ended his speech by proclaiming the prophetic teaching of the Maccabean Festival, we know as Hanukah, in Zechariah, 4:6: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
It is well to dwell on what has been said by both Jews and non-Jews in the past about Jerusalem for there is a government and a Prime Minister in Israel today under ruthless assault by President Obama who demands that Israel abandon parts of eternal Jerusalem and give it away to those who hate the Jewish People and who have set their face against accepting any Jewish independence or sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
Jerusalem and Zion are interchangeable. One can go back through the mists of time and read as far back as the towering words in Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2: “For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem.”
In the Jewish Bible (the Torah and Tanach) the words Jerusalem and Zion appear 821 times with Jerusalem appearing 667 times and Zion appearing 154 times. In the Christian Bible, the name Jerusalem appears 154 times and Zion seven.
In the Muslim Koran, Jerusalem and Zion do not appear at all. Indeed, it was only after the Arabs, under their new banner of Islam, conquered Jerusalem in the year 638 that they invented Islamic history in and around Jerusalem. We are told that Mohammed flew on his magic horse, Barak, to a place called Al Aksa, which means simply the farthest place. Only much later, and for political reasons to do with historic and spiritual Jewish and Christian ties to Jerusalem, Muslims named the holy city as the actual destination.
According to the much loved correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the late Moshe Kohn:
“Jewish sources speak of the seventy names by which Jerusalem is referred to in the classical Jewish sources. These include Ariel/lion of God (Isaiah 29:1); Kirya Neemana/Faithful City (Isaiah 1:25); Ir Ha’emet (City of Truth (Zechariah 8:3); Klilat Yofi/Paragon of Beauty (Lamentations 2:15); Yefay Nof/ Beautiful Panorama (Psalms 48:3); and the ancient commentary of Rabbi Akiva in Sanhedrin 58a on 1 Chronicles 29:11 Hanetza/Eternity.”
But what of now? The modern State of Israel endures a world willing, even anxious, to divide Jerusalem again – even as it celebrates the reunification of Berlin – and to give away ancestral and biblical Jewish lands to an enemy led by a Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas, whose own Fatah organization continues to murder Jews and gleefully claim credit for its crimes.
After taking colossal risks for peace, Israel abandoned parts of Judea including Jericho and Hebron, the ten mile wide security zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip to the Arabs. They, in turn, showed their contempt for peace by not creating a civilized society in Gaza, for example, but by sliding into 7th century barbarism and Islamism. They rained thousands of missiles upon Israeli towns and villages adjacent to the terror infested, Arab occupied territories in southern Lebanon and Gaza and the world stood by in silence. Now that same world demands that a similar fate befall Jerusalem.
That has been the sorry pattern of Israel’s suicidal policy of “land for peace” whereby the Arab aggressors receive land from Israel only to then launch new terrorism against the embattled Jewish state from abandoned territory. In turn, Israel never receives peace.
This failed and tragic policy has been pressed upon Israel by successive American Secretaries of State and Presidents but never more so than by the current American president whose formative years were deeply influenced by Islam.
Israeli leaders have seemed unable to learn any lessons from their futile withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza. If the Obama Administration has its way, the very ancestral Jewish homeland in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) will be lost, not by the ravages of an enemy host but by an Israeli government buckling under Obama’s brutal pressure and thus acquiescing in its own national suicide.
As Frank Gaffney wrote in an article some years ago about the delusional peace process:
“… The entire Annapolis house of cards is built on the fraudulent foundation that the Palestinian faction established by Abbas’ mentor, Yasser Arafat, is a reliable partner for peace. Only a zealot who has altogether lost any sense of reality could make such an assertion.”
Will Prime Minister Netanyahu withstand the brutal pressure from Barack Hussein Obama and not sell out Israel’s ability to remain a viable state with an undivided capital city in eternal Jerusalem? It remains to be seen.
But if Netanyahu falters, Israel may not be able to defend itself after being forced back within the nine mile wide pre-1967 borders, which an Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the “Auschwitz borders.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.