RALEIGH, N.C. – If there had been time, Marie Exley would have liked to start a family. Instead, the 32-year-old Army veteran has less than six months left, which she’ll spend spreading a stark warning: Judgment Day is almost here.

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Editors Note: Well meaning brethren, however, the verse below warns us about such exact predictions.

We do believe this wonderful event “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
—1 Thessalonians 4:17, the Harpazo•Strongs 726: harpazo, har-pad´-zo; from a derivative of 138; to seize (in various applications): — catch (away, up), pluck, pull, take (by force). can happen at any time. We also believe it is the proper spiritual season for this event to take place but stay away from naming the day.

Therefore, we stand with other believers and look up for our redemption is drawing near.

“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
—Matthew 24:36

Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011.
To get the word out, they’re using billboards and bus stop benches, traveling caravans of RVs and volunteers passing out pamphlets on street corners. Cities from Bridgeport, Conn., to Little Rock, Ark., now have billboards with the ominous message, and mission groups are traveling through Latin America and Africa to spread the news outside the U.S.
“A lot of people might think, ‘The end’s coming, let’s go party,’” said Exley, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq. “But we’re commanded by God to warn people. I wish I could just be like everybody else, but it’s so much better to know that when the end comes, you’ll be safe.”
In August, Exley left her home in Colorado Springs, Colo., to work with Oakland, Calif.-based Family Radio Worldwide, the independent Christian ministry whose leader, Harold Camping, has calculated the May 21 date based on his reading of the Bible.
She is organizing traveling columns of RVs carrying the message from city to city, a logistics challenge that her military experience has helped solve. The vehicles are scheduled to be in five North Carolina cities between now and the second week of January, but Exley will shortly be gone: overseas, where she hopes to eventually make it back to Iraq.
“I don’t really have plans to come back,” she said. “Time is short.”
Not everyone who’s heard Camping’s message is taking such a dramatic step. They’re remaining in their day-to-day lives, but helping publicize the prophecy in other ways. Allison Warden, of Raleigh, has been helping organize a campaign using billboards, post cards and other media in cities across the U.S. through a website, We Can Know.
The 29-year-old payroll clerk laughs when asked about reactions to the message, which is plastered all over her car.
“It’s definitely against the grain, I know that,” she said. “We’re hoping people won’t take our word for it, or Harold Camping’s word for it. We’re hoping that people will search the scriptures for themselves.”
Camping, 89, believes the Bible essentially functions as a cosmic calendar explaining exactly when various prophecies will be fulfilled.
The retired civil engineer said all his calculations come from close readings of the Bible, but that external events like the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 are signs confirming the date.
“Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment,” he said.
The doctrine known as the Rapture teaches that believers will be taken up to heaven, while everyone else will remain on earth for a period of torment, concluding with the end of time. Camping believes that will happen in October.
“If May 21 passes and I’m still here, that means I wasn’t saved. Does that mean God’s word is inaccurate or untrue? Not at all,” Warden said.
The belief that Christ will return to earth and bring an end to history has been a basic element of Christian belief since the first century. The Book of Revelation, which comes last in the New Testament, describes this conclusion in vivid language that has inspired Christians for centuries.
But few churches are willing to set a date for the end of the world, heeding Jesus’ words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew that no one can know the day or hour it will happen. Predictions like Camping’s, though, aren’t new. One of the most famous in history was by the Baptist leader William Miller, who predicted the end for Oct. 22, 1844, which came to be known as the Great Disappointment among his followers, some of whom subsequently founded the Seventh Day Adventist church.
“In the U.S., there is still a significant population, mostly Protestant, who look at the Bible as kind of a puzzle, and the puzzle is God’s word and it’s predicting when the end times will come,” said Catherine Wessinger, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who studies millennialism, the belief in pending apocalypse.
“A lot of times these prophecies gain traction when difficulties are happening in society,” she said. “Right now, there’s a lot of insecurity, and this is a promise that says it’s not all random, it’s part of God’s plan.”
Past predictions that failed to come true don’t have any bearing on the current calculation, believers maintain.
“It would be like telling the Wright brothers that every other attempt to fly has failed, so you shouldn’t even try,” said Chris McCann, who works with eBible Fellowship, one of the groups spreading the message.
For believers like McCann, theirs is actually a message of hope and compassion: God’s compassion for people, and the hope that there’s still time to be saved.
That, ultimately, is what spurs on Exley, who said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family. Her hope is that not everyone who hears her message will mock it, and that even people who dismiss her now might still come to believe.
“If you still want to say we’re crazy, go ahead,” she said. “But it doesn’t hurt to look into it.”

Here we go again. As Jews celebrate in their tens of thousands the festival of Booths, Succot, religious extremists like Sheikh Raed Salah incite Palestinian masses to recapture Jerusalem with “blood and fire.” Not to be outdone, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah rushed in to pour fuel on the fire as it protests a “plan by Jews to perform religious rituals” on the Temple Mount,’ and called on the international community to “force Israel to put off its attempts to take over Jerusalem.”

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The Coming Temple

“And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.”
Revelation 11:1

Editors note about the word Temple•This Scripture is believed to have been written in 90 ad. We know the second Temple was destroyed in 70 ad. Therefore, we believe the Apostle John was writing about the third Temple which will be rebuilt in the future. This third Temple will be where the False Prophet will place the image of the AntiChrist, fulfilling Jesus’ prophecy concerning the abomination of desolation in Matthew 24:15

Israel in the Last Days

“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling •Strongs 7478: rah´-al; from 7477; a reeling (from intoxication):—trembling.
•Strongs 7477: raw-al´; a primitive root; to reel, i.e. (figuratively) to brandish:—terribly shake. unto all the people•Strongs 5971: am; from 6004; a people (as a congregated unit); specifically, a tribe (as those of Israel); hence (collectively) troops or attendants; figuratively, a flock:—folk, men, nation, people.
•Strongs 6004: aw-mam´; a primitive root; to associate; by implication, to overshadow (by huddling together):—become dim, hide. round about, when they shall be in the seige•Strongs 4692: matsowr, maw-tsore´; or mDxw…rmatsuwr, maw-tsoor´; from 6696; something hemming in, i.e. (objectively) a mound (of besiegers), (abstractly) a siege, (figuratively) distress; or (subjectively) a fastness:—besieged, bulwark, defence, fenced, fortress, siege, strong (hold), tower.
•Strongs 6696: tsuwr, tsoor; a primitive root; to cramp, i.e. confine (in many applications, literally and figuratively, formative or hostile):—adversary, assault, beset, besiege, bind (up), cast, distress, fashion, fortify, inclose, lay siege, put up in bags. both against Judah and against Jerusalem.”
— Zechariah 12:2

So as Israel struggles to stop the stone throwers’ verbal assaults, and the next spate of resolutions, it’s worth reminding the world that ever since the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem, millions of people have safely streamed to the Western Wall to offer their prayers and insert hand written supplications to the Almighty. While most visitors shedding their tears adjacent to Judaism’s holiest site – the Temple Mount – are Jews, not all pilgrims are. Witness Pope John Paul II inserting his own kvittel (written prayer) within the Wall’s cracks; pilgrims from Africa, tourists from Indonesia, Swamis from India, Evangelicals from the Americas, Buddhists from across Asia – all come and go to the Wall.

The only price of admission: donning a cardboard yarmulke or scarf. Presidents and prime ministers flock to the Western Wall as well, armed with the latest great hope for peace in the Holy Land. From the Oslo Accords to the Quartet Middle East road map for peace, every official, regardless of religious denomination, or lack of one, finds a welcome private moment of silent prayer or reflection at the Western Wall.

AND YET earlier this week, in the midst of the Jewish High Holy Days, French tourists on the Temple Mount were pelted by irate Palestinian worshipers who “mistook” them for Jews. And the stones, and orchestrated crescendo of violence have continued unabated. During this seemingly annual exercise, has any diplomat, foreign minister, religious icon, or political pundit asked himself, or better yet the Palestinians, one simple question – why? Why can we all pray in peace at the Western Wall, but the very notion of a Jew praying on the site of Solomon’s Temple begets only violence, denial and threats?

The centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people was never lost on friend or foe.

Two thousand years ago the Romans, after destroying the Temple, plowed under its remains and banned Jews from returning. Emperor Hadrian tried to bury the very name of City of Peace, renaming Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina. Later, Christians, for theological reasons, extended that painful ban and it was only conquering Muslim leaders who recognized the right of Jews to “return” to live in this small area of land.

Indeed, the Christian patriarchs unsuccessfully lobbied conquering Caliph Omar in the seventh century, and again when Saladin drove out the Crusaders in the twelfth, to prevent Jews from living in or returning to Jerusalem after the Christians had expelled them from the city. Such efforts by Christians were to be repeated and denied by various Muslim authorities for hundreds of years.

How to explain Muslim attitudes over the centuries? Because the Koran itself recognized Solomon’s Temple as a “Great place of prayer,” and Muslim leaders saw no theological problem with Jews praying adjacent to the Dome of the Rock and the nearby Al Aqsa Mosque. Indeed, in its 1924 guide to Al-Haram Al- Sharif (the Temple Mount) the Supreme Muslim Council wrote “It’s identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute,” adding this quote from the Book of Samuel: “This, too, is the spot according to the universal belief on which David built there an altar unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.” That language would remain until the 1950s.

So why are things so dramatically different in 2009?

Simply put, generations of Palestinians, “educated” by Yasser Arafat and company, have been taught not believe there ever was a Solomon’s Temple. Textbooks and Palestinian media all repeat the self-delusionary canard denying any historic Jewish continuity or legitimacy in the Holy Land. Indeed, president Bill Clinton was reportedly shocked when Arafat called the Western Wall – the Jewish people’s holiest place – “a Muslim shrine” and the Palestinian leader’s chief negotiator at the make-or-break Camp David peace talks denied the ruins of Solomon’s temple lay beneath the Dome of the Rock.

TRAGICALLY, EVER since Israel magnanimously turned over religious control of the Temple Mount to the Muslim Wakf in June 1967, successive generations have been taught that Israelis are Nazi-like invaders, illegitimate neighbors and enemies.

And “friends of peace,” far from urging Palestinians to deal with reality, help feed the delusion of denial. Witness the World Council of Churches, the largest umbrella group of Protestants, which recently launched the so-called Bern Initiative at its “Promised Land” conference in Switzerland. Its answer to Israel’s alleged “apartheid situation” in the Holy Land is to reinterpret the Bible by differentiating between “biblical history and biblical stories . . . as well to distinguish between the Israel of the Bible and the modern State of Israel.”

The current violence and rabble rousing by the Palestinians won’t make it any easier for US President Barack Obama, but the first thing he must do is not stop illegal nursery and bathroom add-ons in east Jerusalem but admonish the Palestinian leadership to stop denying the legitimacy of the Jewish people.

Simply put: There can be no peace in the Holy Land without the Arab and Muslim world acknowledging what their Holy Book and ancestors recognized as the historic link of the Jewish people to its land and its Holy sites. Unless and until that happens, there will be no peace in our time.

Marvin Hier is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Abraham Cooper is the associate dean of the center.

“Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say unto the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in my fury, because ye have borne the shame of the heathen: Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; I have lifted up mine hand, Surely the heathen that are about you, they shall bear their shame. But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel; for they are at hand to come. For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn unto you, and ye shall be tilled and sown:And I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, even all of it: and the cities shall be inhabited, and the wastes shall be builded:
—Eze 36:6-10

Please read Eze 36 and 37. These prophecy’s have come to pass. Afterwards, read Eze 38 for it will also soon come to pass.

Eze 38

Editor

They weren’t. They aren’t anywhere. Their disappearance into the mists of history since their exile from Israel in 722 B.C. is no mystery. It is the norm, the rule for every ancient people defeated, destroyed, scattered and exiled.

With one exception, a miraculous story of redemption and return, after not a century or two, but 2,000 years. Remarkably, that miracle occurred in our time. This week marks its 60th anniversary: the return and restoration of the remaining two tribes of Israel — Judah and Benjamin, later known as the Jews — to their ancient homeland.

Besides restoring Jewish sovereignty, the establishment of the State of Israel embodied many subsidiary miracles, from the creation of the first Jewish army since Roman times to the only recorded instance of the resurrection of a dead language — Hebrew, now the daily tongue of a vibrant nation of 7 million. As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.”

During its early years, Israel was often spoken of in such romantic terms. Today, such talk is considered naive, anachronistic, even insensitive, nothing more than Zionist myth designed to hide the true story, i.e., the Palestinian narrative of dispossession.

Not so. Palestinian suffering is, of course, real and heart-wrenching, but what the Arab narrative deliberately distorts is the cause of its own tragedy: the folly of its own fanatical leadership — from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (Nazi collaborator, who spent World War II in Berlin), to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to Yasser Arafat to Hamas of today — that repeatedly chose war rather than compromise and conciliation.

Palestinian dispossession is a direct result of the Arab rejection, then and now, of a Jewish state of any size on any part of the vast lands the Arabs claim as their exclusive patrimony. That was the cause of the war 60 years ago that, in turn, caused the refugee problem. And it remains the cause of war today.

Six months before Israel’s birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it.

With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq — 650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs.

Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost — not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life.

You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948-49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.

But in 1948, there were no “occupied territories.” Nor in 1967 when Egypt, Syria and Jordan joined together in a second war of annihilation against Israel.

Look at Gaza today. No Israeli occupation, no settlements, not a single Jew left. The Palestinian response? Unremitting rocket fire killing and maiming Israeli civilians. The declared casus belli of the Palestinian government in Gaza behind these rockets? The very existence of a Jewish state.

One constantly hears about the disabling complexity of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Complex it is, but the root cause is not. Israel’s crime is not its policies but its insistence on living. On the day the Arabs — and the Palestinians in particular — make a collective decision to accept the Jewish state, there will be peace, as Israel proved with its treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Until that day, there will be nothing but war. And every “peace process,” however cynical or well meaning, will come to nothing.

“And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God.”
—Amos 9:14-15

Jews had been deprived of their homeland for nearly 2,000 years, ever since the Roman devastation of Judea in the first and second centuries A.D. That upheaval had been cataclysmic. By the time the fighting ended in 135, half of Judea’s population was dead. Of those who survived, hundreds of thousands were sold into slavery or expelled. Not until the Holocaust 18 centuries later would the Jewish people experience a more shattering catastrophe.

Yet through all the generations of dispersion that followed, the Jews never lost their self-awareness as a nation or their connection to the land of Israel. They expressed their longing for it in daily prayer and turned toward it when they worshiped. They collected charity to support the minority of Jews who had never left the land; and over the years others made their way back as well, often in response to Christian or Muslim persecution. By the 1860s, a majority of Jerusalem’s population was Jewish once more. Zionism – an organized movement to renew Jewish independence in the Jewish homeland – was formally launched in 1897. Five decades later, against steep odds and every historical precedent, Israel was reborn.

It was an incredible achievement, made even more incredible by the fact that it occurred in the wake of a genocide that had wiped out one-third of the Jewish people.

Within hours of declaring its independence, the newborn state of Israel, with a population of just 600,000, was invaded by five Arab armies. They were intent, in the words of Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, on waging a “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.” The ovens of Treblinka and Auschwitz had barely cooled, and Jews were again being threatened with annihilation. Yet the fledgling state survived and thrived, a triumph of life and hope over the forces of hatred and death.

It was more than an astonishment; it was a miracle. For many, the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty after the blackness of the Holocaust thrillingly evoked Ezekiel’s vision in the valley of dry bones. “These bones are the whole house of Israel,” God had told the prophet. “They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off.’ ” But before Ezekiel’s eyes, the bones reassembled and the skeletons came back to life – and so, God said, will the vanquished and exiled Jews: “Behold, I will . . . raise you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel.” To millions of Christians and Jews, the creation of modern Israel was nothing less than the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. That is part of the reason that a country so tiny – Israel is smaller than Lake Michigan – seems to loom so large.

Under siege since the day it was born, Israel has never known a day of true peace. It is the only nation in the world whose legitimacy is routinely called into question. It still has enemies who want it wiped off the map. Uniquely, the Jewish state came into being with the imprimatur of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Yet time and again it is told it has no right to exist. Of course that is fatuous; few nations can present a birth certificate as storied as Israel’s. Nonetheless, Israel’s fundamental right to exist doesn’t derive from UN votes, or promises in the Bible, or its own Declaration of Independence.

For the right of statehood ultimately accrues only to those who can fashion and sustain a nation. “The land of Israel belongs to Israelis,” Yale’s David Gelernter wrote in 2002, “for the same reason America belongs to Americans: Because Israelis conceived and built it – and what you create is yours. If you want a homeland, you must create one. You drain swamps, lay out farms, build houses, schools, roads, hospitals . . .

“That’s how America got its homeland. And that is why Israel belongs to the Israelis.”

“And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land: And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all:”
—Eze 37:21-22

“O give thanks unto the LORD; for He is good; for His mercy endureth for ever.”
—1Ch 16:34

Can it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations [1], and the only nation persuaded that it was summoned into history for God’s service, consists of individuals who appear to love life more than any other people? As a simple index of life-preference, I plot the fertility rate versus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries, that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone, positioned in the upper-left-hand-quadrant, or life-loving, portion of the chart [2]. Those who believe in Israel’s divine election might see a special grace reflected in its love of life.

In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, “It’s easy for the Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations.” Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes.

Nations go extinct, I have argued in the past, because the individuals who comprise these nations choose collectively to die out. Once freedom replaces the fixed habits of traditional society, people who do not like their own lives do not trouble to have children. Not the sword of conquerors, but the indigestible sourdough of everyday life threatens the life of the nations, now dying out at a rate without precedent in recorded history.

Israel is surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves in order to destroy it. “As much as you love life, we love death,” Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders. Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms.

The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an elusive goal in the region. It cannot be attributed to material conditions of life. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 171st on an international quality of life index, below Rwanda. Israel is tied with Singapore on this index, although it should be observed that Israel ranks a runaway first on my life-preference index, whereas Singapore comes in dead last.

Even less can we blame unhappiness on experience, for no nation has suffered more than the Jews in living memory, nor has a better excuse to be miserable. Arabs did not invent suicide attacks, but they have produced a population pool willing to die in order to inflict damage greater than any in history. One cannot help but conclude that Muslim clerics do not exaggerate when they express contempt for life.

Israel’s love of life, moreover, is more than an ethnic characteristic. Those who know Jewish life through the eccentric lens of Jewish-American novelists such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, or the films of Woody Allen, imagine the Jews to be an angst-ridden race of neurotics. Secular Jews in America are no more fertile than their Gentile peers, and by all indications quite as miserable.

For one thing, Israelis are far more religious than American Jews. Two-thirds of Israelis believe in God, although only a quarter observe their religion strictly. Even Israelis averse to religion evince a different kind of secularism than we find in the secular West. They speak the language of the Bible and undergo 12 years of Bible studies in state elementary and secondary schools.

Faith in God’s enduring love for a people that believes it was summoned for his purposes out of a slave rabble must be part of the explanation. The most religious Israelis make the most babies. Ultra-Orthodox families produce nine children on average. That should be no surprise, for people of faith are more fertile than secular people, as I showed in a statistical comparison across countries.

Traditional and modern societies have radically different population profiles, for traditional women have little choice but to spend their lives pregnant in traditional society. In the modern world, where fertility reflects choice rather than compulsion, the choice to raise children expresses love of life. The high birthrate in Arab countries still bound by tradition does not stand comparison to Israeli fertility, by far the highest in the modern world.

The faith of Israelis is unique. Jews sailed to Palestine as an act of faith, to build a state against enormous odds and in the face of hostile encirclement, joking, “You don’t have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps.” In 1903 Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement’s secular founder, secured British support for a Jewish state in Uganda, but his movement shouted him down, for nothing short of the return to Zion of Biblical prophecy would requite it. In place of a modern language the Jewish settlers revived Hebrew, a liturgical language only since the 4th century BC, in a feat of linguistic volition without precedent. It may be that faith burns brighter in Israel because Israel was founded by a leap of faith.

Two old Jewish jokes illustrate the Israeli frame of mind.

Two elderly Jewish ladies are sitting on a park bench in St Petersburg, Florida. “Mrs Levy,” asks the first, “what do you hear from your son Isaac in Detroit?” “It’s just awful,” Mrs Levy replies. “His wife died a year ago and left him with two little girls. Now he’s lost his job as an accountant with an auto-parts company, and his health insurance will lapse in a few weeks. With the real estate market the way it is, he can’t even sell his house. And the baby has come down with leukemia and needs expensive treatment. He’s beside himself, and doesn’t know what to do. But does he write a beautiful Hebrew letter – it’s a pleasure to read.”

There are layers to this joke, but the relevant one here is that bad news is softened if written in the language of the Bible, which to Jews always conveys hope.

The second joke involves the American businessman who emigrated to Israel shortly after its founding. On his arrival, he orders a telephone, and waits for weeks without a response. At length he applies in person to the telephone company, and is shown into the office of an official who explains that there is a two-year waiting list, and no way to jump the queue. “Do you mean there is no hope?,” the American asks. “It is forbidden for a Jew to say there is no hope!,” thunders the official. “No chance, maybe.” Hope transcends probability.

If faith makes the Israelis happy, then why are the Arabs, whose observance of Islam seems so much stricter, so miserable? Islam offers its adherents not love – for Allah does not reveal Himself in love after the fashion of YHWH – but rather success. “The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory, that to ‘come to prayer’ is the same thing as to ‘come to success’. Humiliation – the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it – is beyond its capacity to endure,” I argued in another location. Islam, or “submission”, does not understand faith – trust in a loving God even when His actions appear incomprehensible – in the manner of Jews and Christians. Because the whim of Allah controls every event from the orbit of each electron to the outcome of battles, Muslims know only success or failure at each moment in time.

The military, economic and cultural failures of Islamic societies are intolerable in Muslim eyes; Jewish success is an abomination, for in the view of Muslims it is the due of the faithful, to be coveted and seized from the usurpers at the first opportunity. It is not to much of a stretch to assert that Israel’s love of live, its happiness in faith, is precisely the characteristic that makes a regional peace impossible to achieve. The usurpation of the happiness that Muslims believe is due to them is sufficient cause to kill one’s self in order to take happiness away from the Jewish enemy. If Israel’s opponents fail to ruin Israel’s happiness, there is at least a spark of hope that they may decide to choose happiness for themselves.

Why are none of the Christian nations as happy as Israel? Few of the European nations can be termed “Christian” at all. Poland, the last European country with a high rate of attendance at Mass (at about 45%), nonetheless shows a fertility rate of only 1.27, one of Europe’s lowest, and a suicide rate of 16 per 100,000. Europe’s faith always wavered between adherence to Christianity as a universal religion and ethnic idolatry under a Christian veneer. European nationalism nudged Christianity to the margin during the 19th century, and the disastrous world wars of the past century left Europeans with confidence neither in Christianity nor in their own nationhood.

Only in pockets of the American population does one find birth rates comparable to Israel’s, for example among evangelical Christians. There is no direct way to compare the happiness of American Christians and Israelis, but the tumultuous and Protean character of American religion is not as congenial to personal satisfaction. My suspicion is that Israel’s happiness is entirely unique.

It is fashionable these days to speculate about the end of Israel, and Israel’s strategic position presents scant cause for optimism, as I contended recently. Israel’s future depends on the Israelis. During 2,000 years of exile, Jews remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism because they liked being Jewish. With utmost sincerity, the Jews prayed thrice daily, “It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the greatness of the One who forms all creation, for God did not make us like the nations of other lands, and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. God did not place us in the same situations as others, and our destiny is not the same as anyone else’s.”

If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them. I do not know whether they will succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the world will lose a unique gauge of the human capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot conceive of a sadder event.

Notes

[1] There are many ancient nations, eg, the Basques, but no other that speaks the same language as it did more than 3,000 years ago, occupies more or less the same territory, and, most important, maintains a continuous literary record of its history, which is to say an interrupted national consciousness.

[2] The countries shown in the chart are:

False Prophets

“And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.”
—Rev 13:12

New World Order

“After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.”
—Daniel 7:7

The Vatican Bank’s tax exempt status in Italy has made it possible for her to manipulate many of the largest multi-national corporations This influence is however as nothing when compared with her power in Europe and in the world of politics and religion. A Jesuit priest writing in ‘Inside the Vatican’ stated, “Despite the importance of the papacy for the Catholic church and its prominent role in international affairs, its internal workings are little known to Catholics, to world leaders, or to the world at large.”*

This lack of knowledge is particularly evident when it comes to the role the Vatican is playing in the making of the EU. If the Protestant nations of Europe are to remain free, true believers on both sides of the Atlantic must address the issue of Rome and the EU and take it to our God in prayer. The alternative may well prove to be the return of the Inquisition.

It is the authors’ desire that this study of one of the most powerful institutions in the world today be carefully examined. Our purpose is to sound the alarm and to stimulate others to do so too.

Kindly study and comment on the article. Please forward the article to others, and place on your WebPage. The paper has already published by Christian Watch in the UK. John Robbins of Trinity Foundation is about to publish it in his Trinity Foundation newsletter (www. trinityfoundation.org).

Yours with deep concern for the New Europe as it is being formed,
Richard Bennett and Michael de Semlyen

* Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church, by Thomas J. Reese, Harvard University Press, 1996, 4

Papal Rome and the European Union

Papal Rome is widely respected and admired by the world. She is seen as well organised, successful and influential, as well as dignified and authoritative. The aura of uncritical acclaim around the person of successive popes is unique to the Church of Rome. No other global institution has it. Her pronouncements on moral issues carry great weight. So well regarded is the Papacy today that the acceptance of her extends even to Evangelicals, most of whom have ceased to question her doctrine.

Why then should we take a position contrary to this avalanche of present-day approval? We do so because we are commanded by the Lord God to proclaim His truth and His warnings. For all is not at all as it seems. We believe that the late great British preacher Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was correct when he proclaimed that “the Roman Catholic Church is a counterfeit and a sham; it represents prostitution of the worst and most diabolical kind…It binds the souls of its people absolutely, just as Communism and Nazism did, and it is itself a totalitarian system.”[1]

Papal Pronouncements on Europe

On August 31st 2003, Pope John Paul II entrusted the future of the new Europe to the Virgin Mary. In the words of the Catholic news agency Zenit,

“He placed Europe in Mary’s hands, so that it would ‘become a symphony of nations committed to building together the civilization of love and peace.’ Last Sunday, the Holy Father urged that the final draft of the European Constitution should recognize explicitly the Christian roots of the continent, as they constitute a ‘guarantee of a future.’”[2]

The official teaching of Rome makes clear that this statement concerning “the Christian roots of the continent” is a facade. When the Pope or his Church use the term “Christian” they mean “Roman Catholic”. A recent official decree of Rome condemns “the tendency to read and to interpret Sacred Scripture outside the Tradition and Magisterium of the Church.”[3] Rome officially proclaims that the Christian Church of Christ is the Catholic Church. In her decree she states,

“Therefore, there exists a single Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.”[4]

Just as the Nazis declared non-Aryans to be non-humans, so now the Church of Rome declares other churches to be non-churches. Her official words are,

“the ecclesial communities which have not preserved the valid Episcopate and the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery, are not Churches in the proper sense.…”[5]

In the same document, Dominus Iesus (September 5th 2000), footnote 51 refers to a decree which states,

“We declare, say, define, and proclaim to every human creature that they by necessity for salvation are entirely subject to the Roman Pontiff.”[6]

The mind of Rome is thus expressed in her official decrees. Once the Protestant nations are committed to the emerging European superstate and its Constitution, the Vatican’s plan to once again “Christianize” the European Union will be implemented. As described by the London Sunday Telegraph, “The Pope is calmly preparing to assume the mantle which he solemnly believes to be his Divine Right – that of new Holy Roman Emperor, reigning from the Urals to the Atlantic.”[7]

The Vatican as a “Unique Contribution” to the EU

The EU already has most of the attributes needed for nationhood. It has a passport, a flag, a single currency and an anthem. It is also drawing up in its constitution the further characteristics of nationhood such as a president, international ambassadors and a foreign secretary. The Vatican carefully gives soul to all of this by claiming that this is “a unique contribution to the building up of a Europe open to the world”. The Pope in his Ecclesia in Europa states,

“One and universal, yet present in the multiplicity of the Particular Churches, the Catholic Church can offer a unique contribution to the building up of a Europe open to the world. The Catholic Church in fact provides a model of essential unity in a diversity of cultural expressions, a consciousness of membership in a universal community which is rooted in but not confined to local communities, and a sense of what unites beyond all that divides.”[8]

“The Particular Churches in Europe are not simple agencies or private organizations. Rather, they carry out their work with a specific institutional dimension that merits legal recognition, in full respect for just systems of civil legislation.”[9]

“Particular Churches in Europe” is simply a pretense. The Vatican views itself as the Particular Church, and officially states,

“The Catholic faithful are required to profess that there is an historical continuity — rooted in the apostolic succession — between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church.”[10]

From the decrees published it is clear that, apart from the Church of Rome establishing herself as the “unique contribution to the building up of a Europe open to the world”, she claims for herself “legal recognition” in accord with her own “civil legislation”. This has been the basis of the Vatican’s political manipulation over the centuries. While Rome carefully prepares her own legal place, she will tolerate no rivals – “the ecclesial communities which have not preserved the valid Episcopate are not Churches in the proper sense.”[11] Most certainly they are not to be included as part of the “unique contribution to the building up of a Europe open to the world”!

As author Adrian Hilton has warned in a recent article in The Spectator,

“the issue of European religious union is one that has been concealed even deeper than the plans for political union, but the ratchet towards a Catholic Europe is just as real. The Pope’s recent demand that ‘God’ be featured in the emerging European constitution has been echoed by many leading Catholic politicians and bishops. While on the surface such a reference may offend only Europe’s atheist and humanist contingent, it must be observed that when the Vatican refers to God, she sees herself as God’s infallible vice-regent upon earth, the leading organ of divine expression; indeed, according to its publication Dominus Iesus [5 September 2000], as the only mediator in the salvation of God’s elect, insisting that all other Churches, including the Church of England, ‘are not Churches in the proper sense’.”[12]

The Real Meaning of the Pope’s message to Europe

The Ecclesia in Europa pronouncement is one of the cleverest produced by Pope John Paul II. It is a masterpiece that purportedly proclaims the Christian message, while in fact it teaches the rites and rituals of the Papacy. For example the concept of the “Gospel of hope” is mentioned forty times in the dissertation. The message however is not one of hope; rather it is an adept counterfeit. For example Paragraph 74 begins by stating, “A prominent place needs to be given to the celebration of the sacraments, as actions of Christ and of the Church ordered to the worship of God, to the sanctification of people and to the building up of the ecclesial community.” The Pope thus presents his physical, symbolic sacraments as the efficacious cause of salvation. In place of the direct obedience to Christ Jesus demanded in the Gospel of faith, the sacraments are purported to be “actions of Christ”. This is where the Vatican’s pretense of “hope” lies. Such sacraments are declared necessary for salvation in the official teaching of Rome,

“The Church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation. ‘Sacramental grace’ is the grace of the Holy Spirit, given by Christ and proper to each sacrament.”[13]

By setting aside the direct work of God in Christ Jesus, the sacraments of Rome are an attempt to steal from Christ His Priesthood and an attempt to rob Him of His power as Mediator. The Roman Church attempts to rob God the Holy Spirit of His peculiar work as the Sanctifier, by attributing His power of giving grace to its own rituals. Thus it attempts to rob God the Father of His prerogatives of justifying and forgiving sinners. This is the reality behind the concept of the “Gospel of hope” that permeates the Pope’s message to Europe. Throughout the centuries, Rome has substituted her sacraments for the Gospel in a consistently degrading insult to the grace of God. Shameful to God and damning to men is the Pope’s memorandum to Europe.

We are at a seminal moment in history, as the Holy Roman Empire re-emerges as a European Superstate. Throughout her history the Papacy has remained self-governing and invincible to every restraining force other than that of the power of God in the Gospel. Bible believers need to be aware of the times in which we live, we need to study the history of the EU in order to see the outworking of the guile of Rome.

A Short History of the EU

After the destruction, ruin and enormous human cost of the Second World War, statesmen and politicians resolved to ensure that it would never happen again. In 1946 Sir Winston Churchill suggested in a famous speech at Zurich in Switzerland that, “we must build a kind of United States of Europe”. This was not, as Euro-enthusiasts have often insisted, a commitment for Britain to participate in the European project. Churchill envisaged a Western Europe of free independent sovereign nations, not an undemocratic federal Superstate. Together the nations would reach for a destiny of unprecedented co-operation and harmony.

In 1950 the Schuman Plan proposed the supra-national pooling of the German and French coal and steel industries in order to lay the basis of European economic unity. The partial merger of the economies of the two traditional enemies would ensure continuing peace between them. French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the agreement, The Treaty of Paris, as co-founders of the Franco-German Coal and Steel Confederation. Like their colleagues Jean Monnet and Paul Henri Spaak, they were both devout Roman Catholics who shared the vision of successive post-war Popes for a re-Catholicized and united Europe. Adenauer and Schuman, along with Alcide de Gasperi, all three “founding fathers”, are in the process of being made into “Saints” by the Vatican as a reward for founding the new Europe “on Roman Catholic principles”.

The European Economic Community (The EEC), established in 1957 by The Treaty of Rome brought in Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg to join France and Germany, removing trade barriers between member states and unifying their economic policies. It made clear to those with sufficient stamina to read the Treaty’s lengthy and turgid document that the aim of the project was always to achieve political unity in economic disguise, “an ever closer union”.[14]

In 1962 the Common Agricultural policy was introduced with a single European market and price fixing, which has consistently favored French farmers. The Northwest Technocrat commented on the developing design of the European project at that time, “Fascism in Europe is about to be reborn in respectable business attire, and the Treaty of Rome will be finally implemented to its fullest extent. The dream of a Holy Roman Empire returning to power to dominate and direct the so-called forces of Christian mankind of the Western world is not dead, but still stalks through the antechambers of every national capital of continental Western Europe, in the determination of the leaders in the Common Market to restore the Holy Roman Empire with all that that means!”[15]

Nearly thirty years later, the London-based Sunday Telegraph was to express the same concern in a major article headed “Now, a Holy European Empire?” It stated,

“The Vatican notoriously thinks in centuries. In Pope John Paul II we have the most political pope of modern times. It is in the movement towards federalism of the Common Market, with the coming membership of Eastern European countries, as well as in the turmoil of the Soviet Union, that the Pope may see the greatest possibility for an increase in Catholic political power since the fall of Napoleon or since the Counter-Reformation. The Common Market itself started under the inspiration of Catholic politicians – such as Adenauer of Germany, Paul Henri Spaak, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman….The EC Social Charter and the socialism of Jacques Delors (President of the European Commission) are imbued with Catholic social doctrine. If European federalism triumphs, the EC will indeed be an empire. It will lack an emperor: but it will have the Pope. It is difficult not to think that Wojtyla realises this.”[16]
In 1967 Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced that Britain would apply to join the European Community (the Common Market). The British people voted to do so in a referendum in the belief that they were joining a closer trading relationship, a kind of club, rather than being bound into an evolving Superstate. Unfortunately no more people had read The Treaty of Rome in the 1960s than had read Mein Kampf in the 1930s. Politicians and opinion formers, who should have known better, accepted assurances that no loss of sovereignty was involved in acceding to the EEC.

In 1973, Prime Minister Edward Heath, who definitely did know better, committed Britain into membership of the EEC. Ireland and Denmark joined the same year. In 1979, the European Parliament was established in Strasbourg with its first direct elections. The word “economic” was carefully dropped from the name of the project that was now to be described as the European Community (EC). Greece joined the EC in 1981, which was the year of the Single European Act – enacting the gradual transfer of executive, legislative and judicial powers from member States to EC “instrumentalities”. Spain and Portugal signed up to the EC in 1986, making a total of twelve member states. In 1990, East Germany joined as part of a united Germany.

In February 1992, The Maastricht Treaty, or Treaty of European Union, was signed at Maastricht in Holland by the foreign and finance ministers of the member states. Its objective was to bind the twelve nations into cooperation or “ever closer union” on a range of issues other than economic and trading. To this end the EC was renamed The European Union. The Maastricht Treaty established economic and monetary union, which would lead ultimately to all member states sharing a single currency. The religious dimension, although not apparent, was the key to what was being formed. Among European leaders who were most influential in furthering the Maastricht agenda were Jacques Delors and Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers (both Jesuit educated) as well as devout Catholics German Chancellor Kohl and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales of Spain. These four leaders were all products of the Roman Catholic Social Movement, which believes that “there is no nobler task than the unifying of our continent” and views the idea of a united Europe as essentially a Catholic concept.

The Amsterdam Treaty followed and was signed in 1997 as a further notch of the ratchet of “ever-closer union”, meaning in fact, ever diminishing sovereignty, following the principle of acquis communautaire (which asserts “that what has been acquired cannot be taken away”). The Amsterdam Treaty gave more powers to the unelected Commission and particularly to its unelected President as the initiator, administrator, mediator, negotiator and guardian of the Treaties. The Treaty of Nice, signed by Prime Minister Tony Blair in December 2000, was the last in the series of treaties, which have progressively drained the UK of its sovereignty. At Nice there was finally and irrevocably established the EU as a sovereign federal state. A new European criminal code, Corpus Juris, will replace the classic, longstanding British criminal code. Vital elements such as Trial by Jury and Habeas Corpus are missing from this new code.[17]

EU Supreme Power

Even before the Treaty of Nice came into force, the EU Constitutional Convention, presided over by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, produced its first draft of a constitution for Europe in October 2002. On 13 June 2003 a final version of the draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, was produced. Quoting from the London Daily Telegraph,

“To the strains of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the Convention on the Future of Europe proclaimed agreement yesterday on a written constitution for a vast European Union of 450 million citizens bringing together East and West. Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the chair of the 105-strong body, held up a text…‘We have sown a seed and I am sure that seed will grow and bring fruit. Europe’s voice will be heard and respected on the international stage. Instead of a half-formed Europe, we have a Europe with a legal identity, with a single currency, common justice, a Europe which is about to have its own defence.’ There was no vote. M Giscard, famed for his autocratic style during 16 months of stormy debates, simply discerned consensus among the MPs, MEPs, and national envoys. Few were willing to spoil the party by crying foul….The Constitution gives the EU full ‘legal personality’ and determines that EU law will have primacy over the law of member states. It prohibits Westminster from legislating in most areas of national life – agriculture, justice, energy, social policy, economic cohesion, transport, the environment, and aspects of public health – unless Brussels chooses to waive its power.”[18]

“If the new constitution is accepted, the EU will no longer be a treaty organization in which member states agree to lend power to Brussels, for certain purposes, on the understanding that they can take it back again. Rather, the EU will itself have become the fount of power, with the ability to sign international treaties in its own right. It will have its own President, foreign minister and foreign policy; its own parliament, supreme court, flag, anthem and currency. It will have become a sovereign state, in fact a federal superstate. The member states whose constitutions will be subject to this higher constitution, will cease to be sovereign. The new order will be irreversible. M Giscard made clear that the national veto is to be abolished in 50 new areas, including immigration and asylum.”[19]

Under the new Constitution’s rules, no nation is to be allowed to secede from the EU except by a two-thirds majority vote of member states in agreement with the secession.

The Same Spirit – of Domination

The EU will acquire competence in “all areas of foreign policy, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy”; though major decisions must be unanimous. The European Court, which acquires vast powers, will ensure that member states “actively and unreservedly support the EU’s common foreign and security policy”. Article 8 of the draft Constitution, which also imposes “an obligation of loyal cooperation vis-à-vis the Union” of member states, reinforces the supremacy of EU law over the laws of member states.[20] An EU attorney-general will be able to prosecute “cross-border crime”, a catch-all term that will allow Brussels the supreme jurisdiction throughout the EU. The Constitution lacks any serious democratic dimension and is clearly designed to strengthen the EU power structure for the benefit of the European elite. Doubtless the intention is to force it through with the minimum of real democratic scrutiny.

This spirit of absolute autocracy that is to govern the EU is frighteningly akin to the spirit that rules in the Vatican, “The First See is judged by no one.”[21] Rome’s stamp upon the pages of history has ever been “no accountability”. Its laws also state, “It is solely the right of the Roman Pontiff himself to judge, in cases mentioned in can. 1401: 1. those who hold the highest civil office in a state.”[22] The same spirit of despotism in both systems loudly proclaims supreme caution.

“The Abandoning of a Thousand years of History”

The Treaty that establishes the new Constitution, due to be agreed by the Intergovernmental conference in 2004 is far more extensive than any previous treaty. Derek Heathcote-Amory, the Conservative Party representative at the Constitutional Convention, rightly described it as “bigger than the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice rolled together.” The implications of such huge changes, “the abandoning of a thousand years of history”, have not been really understood by the majority of the British people. Little by little, treaty by treaty, first the EEC, then the EC, then the EU; people have become used to Europe and bored with it; and with so many scare stories about Brussels, so-called dangers threatening their independence and sovereignty, so many eurosceptics “crying wolf”. It has all being going on as long as they can remember – and, after all, Britain does have the fourth largest economy in the world, and in the main they have prospered. The problem is that the wolf is now at the door!

Many of those who cherish Britain’s independence and who do not want to give away that for which two world wars were fought to retain, realize this. If the move to establish the Constitution for Europe is ratified by the UK parliament, it would be the first time that the United Kingdom has adopted or acceded to a wholly written constitution. How can the UK adopt such a constitution, having never had one before? The answer would seem to be straightforward. The people must give their consent. However if the Labour government has its way there will be no referendum. Tony Blair, who is said to have set his sights on the top job as President of the “United States of Europe”, has made clear that there will be no referendum. He does not want it because he knows he cannot win it. Also a referendum campaign would educate the people in both what is proposed and what has already happened. The Prime Minister agreed to hold a referendum on the Single Currency before he came into office in 1997, but to date he has hesitated to do so, as “the conditions have not been right” – again, meaning that he would have lost it.

The EU’s Power Symbols

The EU Parliament’s main base is Strasbourg in France. The city symbolizes the dream of Franco-German integration that was at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. In December 2000, the European Union opened its new Parliament building there. It is patterned after Dutch artist Pieter Breugel’s famous painting of the Tower of Babel. Breugel’s painting portrays the Tower unfinished, as does the new EU building, which is built to appear unfinished in close resemblance to the painting. Outside the Parliament building is a statue of the goddess, Europa, riding a Bull. Inside, the dome displays a colossal painting of the Woman riding the Beast. The woman riding the beast symbol also appears on some of the “two euro” coins that have been minted.[23]

The same imagery has appeared on EU postage stamps, including the British one issued in 1984 to commemorate the second elections for the European Parliament. The EU’s conscious use of such symbolism creates the impression that it wishes to bring to mind Europe’s desire to rule using all the power it has at its disposal. In Scripture, the Woman riding the Beast is revealed in Revelation 17. The identification with the Church of Rome has long been apparent to Bible believers. This interpretation of Bible prophecy did much to empower the Reformation. Only Papal Rome is a city which is sited on seven hills, a religious system, whose Prelates “are arrayed in purple and scarlet color”, a civil state “with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication”, historically, with hands that are crimson with the blood of Bible believers, “that has been drunken with the blood of the saints and with the martyrs of Jesus.” Papal Rome is the only worldwide religious system that calls itself and its virgin goddess “Mother”.

History also Unveils what is Now Happening

A brief review of European history helps with this identification of the Papacy with Scripture. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Papacy continually sought to establish the same dominance as had the Caesars (in fact successive Popes used the same name – Pontifex Maximus). They did so by weaving together both temporal and spiritual jurisdictions and blasphemously assumed to themselves the office of “the Vicar of Christ”. In that spurious role, in the course of a few centuries, they were able to subjugate the kings of Europe who became their vice regents.[24] Thus century-by-century the “Mother Church” succeeded in extending her power, usurping that of civil governments. Under the guise of religion she planted her own hierarchical system of government, with its exhaustive financial requirements, in each of Europe’s kingdoms. The blending of things civil and sacred was the Vatican’s hard to resist method of operation in those dark ages. Unhappily this is still so today, and will be so again, once power and control have been consolidated in the new “United States of Europe”. “Semper eadem”, Rome never changes.

The duplicity of the Papacy’s perpetual mixing of political and spiritual powers could surely not be better portrayed than in God’s Word in Revelation 17. The Apostle John beheld the ten-horned beast, representing the Roman Empire, carrying a woman dressed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold, precious stones and pearls. She is a harlot, and the mother of harlots and abominations, the paramour of kings, the pitiless persecutor intoxicated with the blood of the saints and of the martyrs of Christ Jesus. The angel told John, “The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sitteth.” To explain this singular fact and to avoid guesswork, he adds, “the woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” (v 7) The city is indisputably Rome. The name upon the harlot’s brow is “mystery”. The city cannot be pagan Rome, about which there was no mystery. In contrast, Papal Rome was mysterious and continues to be elusive. Babylon, in the book of Revelation, is a city and an harlot. Jerusalem, in the same book, is a city and a bride. Babylon is the deceptive lover of earthly kings; Jerusalem the chaste bride of the King of Kings. The contrast is between Church and Church, the faithful Church and the Apostate Church.

The Flag – Another EU Spiritual Symbol

The flag of the European Union, blue with a design of twelve stars in a circle derives from the twelve stars that in Catholic tradition are the halo around the head of the Virgin Mary.[25] The stars stem from the belief that twelve is the symbol of perfection and of what is unchangeable. The political purposes behind all of these symbols are much debated; the Biblical significance, however, is revealing.[26] According to the European Union publication Europe’s Star Choice: “The flag has its roots in Romanism, takes its symbolism from Romanism, and represents the Roman Catholic ideal.” The design with its halo of stars was inspired by many pictures of the Virgin Mary, the most prominent of which is on the Council of Europe stained glass window in Strasbourg Cathedral.

The EU’s “single market”, “social chapter” and “subsidiarity” are concepts of Roman Catholic social teaching, originating with Pope Pius XI in the 1930s, and adopted by Hitler’s Vatican-backed Third Reich. Nazi Finance Minister Walther Funk, styled as the architect of Hitler’s “New Europe”, issued a compendium of papers in 1942 which contained detailed plans for a Europe bearing close resemblance to the Europe now emerging. Funk’s papers described:-”The European Economic Community”, “The Common European Currency”, “Harmonisation of European Rates of Exchange”, A Common Labour Policy and a European Regional Principle. The last has now become known as the Europe of Regions Policy – England is to be replaced by seven regions, which with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will total ten regions in all. Together they are to replace the United Kingdom!

TheThird Reich to be followed by the Fourth

The Third Reich, like the EU, was an attempt to revive the Roman Empire. The higher strategy of the Vatican and the acquiescence of the Catholic Central Party had brought Hitler to power. Instrumental in this strategy were Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen and Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. Von Papen goes down in history as the man who obtained Hitler his two-thirds majority, signed the law which made him Head of State and was also responsible for the enormously important Concordat with the Church of Rome in 1933. He declared, “the Third Reich is the first power in the world to put into practice the lofty principles of the Papacy.”[27] Incredibly, given his responsibility for Nazi atrocities, he was acquitted at Nuremberg and later became Papal Chamberlain to Pope John XXIII. Pacelli, as Pope Pius XII, became notorious for his silence with regard to the Holocaust and the other appalling crimes committed by the Fascists in Europe. The Vatican’s attempts to canonise him have proved highly controversial.

The Nazi leadership was mainly Roman Catholic. Hitler and Himmler were greatly influenced by the Jesuits, as was Mussolini whose Father Confessor was a Jesuit. Hitler said of Himmler, “in Himmler I see our Ignatius de Loyola.”[28] Joseph Goebbels was also Jesuit-educated, as was Walter Schellenberg who led the SD or Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS, and before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, stated that, “the SS organisation has been constituted by Himmler according to the principles of the Jesuit Order. Their regulations and the spiritual exercises prescribed by Ignatius of Loyola were the model Himmler tried to copy exactly”.[29]

The lesson and warning of history is that undemocratic regimes whose leaders owe allegiance to the Pope or practise “the lofty principles of the Papacy” pose a threat to individual liberty, and carry out religious persecution. For example, the inquisition was alive and well in the Balkans in the 1940s. “Convert or die” was the choice on offer to 900,000 Orthodox Serbs in the new state of Croatia, run by Nazi puppet Anton Pavelich and Roman Catholic Primate, Archbishop Alois Stepinac. 200,000 were “converted”; 700,000 who preferred to die, were tortured, shot, burned or buried alive. This appalling persecution, carried out mainly by Ustashi priests and friars “for the triumph of Christ and Croatia”, included many of the worst atrocities of the War; certainly the mutilations were horrific, the savagery terrible. [30]

Few people know what took place in Croatia during the Second World War: news of it has been simply suppressed. Nor do they understand what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s. The re-establishing of Croatia as an independent state, during the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, is instructive. The European Union, led by Germany ignored the protest of Britain and many other nations in pressing for this to happen. The Vatican was the first to recognise the reborn Croatia. Writing in September 1991 in the Sunday Telegraph historian Andrew Roberts expressed surprise that

“almost the entire Western media have chosen to champion the Croats. … how are the Serbs expected to react to the decision to adopt the Ustashi’s chequered symbol as the Croatian national flag? In Krajina it takes longer than the attention span of today’s CNN broadcaster to forget the way Franciscan friars participated in the slaughter of Serbs in Croatian Bosnia. Orthodox Serbs were promised protection if they converted to Catholicism and were then killed, after they entered the churches, as the priests looked on.”[31]

None of this is surprising if we know the history of Roman Catholicism. “From the birth of Popery in 600, to the present time, it has been estimated by careful and credible historians, that more than FIFTY MILLIONS of the human family have been slaughtered for ‘the crime’ of heresy by popish persecutors, an average of more than forty thousand religious murders for every year of the existence of Popery.”[32] The Scripture speaks propetically of her lust for power and blood; history has recorded many of the gruesome details.

The Papacy has been predominant throughout the whole history of Europe. It has left its mark and record on most of the major nations. In times past it has proven itself to be totally dominant in its control of Kings and Princes. The whole history of the Western world over fourteen centuries has been plagued by the intrigues and machinations of the Church of Rome in unceasing pursuit of her global designs. In the words of the historian J.A. Wylie,

“….as regards the influence of Popery on government, it were easy to demonstrate, that the Papacy delayed the advent of representative and constitutional government for thirteen centuries. Superstition is the mother of despotism; Christianity is the parent of liberty. There is no truth which the past history of the world more abundantly establishes than this. It was through Christianity that the democratic element first came into the world.…The papal government is the very antipodes of constitutional government: it centres all power in one man: it does so on the ground of divine right; and is therefore essentially and eternally antagonistic to the constitutional element. Its long dominancy in Europe formed the grand barrier to the progress of the popular element in society, and to the erection of constitutional government in the world.”[33]

Our Hope and Prayer for Europe

Once again we have come to a defining moment in history. Once more the Vatican is engaged in placing its hallmark and its rituals on the face of Europe to further its familiar agenda. It does so in a number of different ways directed from the highest levels of command in the Vatican. Firstly, it operates directly through its civil ambassadors in each European nation. According to the Catholic Almanac “Papal representatives ‘receive from the Roman Pontiff the charge of representing him in a fixed way in the various nations or regions of the world.’”[34] Secondly, the Roman Church also deals directly and legally with individual nations through its many legal concordats. Less directly it operates through its representation and influence in most of the governmental agencies of Europe. This involvement, especially in the area of finance and business, is documented in her Almanac under the heading of “Governmental Organisations”. These include the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Organisation of American States, the International Organisation for the Unification of Private Law and the International Council on Grain, among others. Rome has her observers and delegates in all of these many listed organisations.[35] Finally, she operates through her own people in Europe whose allegiance is first and foremost to the Roman Catholic Church. Many of her people have access to positions in the ruling structure of their nation. As Roman Catholics, they are enjoined by the Vatican to use both influence and position to bring that nation into line with papal policy on any particular issue.

We need to pray that Europe will not be taken back to the state that it was in, spiritually and politically, during the Middle Ages. Roman Catholicism though outwardly and politically strong is inwardly and spiritually feeble. By her laws and ceremonies, her Bishops, Priests and laity are obliged to accept the system that recognizes the Pope as the universal “Sovereign Father” while denying the true Father and the Son. From its traditions, history, and crises, it is evident that it is an institution lacking the Gospel of grace in Christ, one that walks in darkness and in the shadow of death.

In contrast, the true Christian faith may outwardly look small and weak; but inwardly, and in essence, it is the strongest power on earth. That same power liberated most of Europe at the time of the Reformation. It is the power that is in Christ Jesus the Lord, and inseparable from Him. In the words of the Apostle Peter, “blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”[36] The reason for our confidence is our relationship to the risen Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ. He is Lord, the universal King and Sovereign, the Priest and Saviour. Christ Jesus our Lord is a Prophet, anointed with the Spirit and furnished with all gifts necessary for the instruction, guidance, and salvation of His people through His written Word, the Holy Scriptures. He and His Gospel of grace are our hope for the future of Europe. Our inheritance is reserved in heaven, on earth however we “are kept by the power of God through faith…”[37]

We remember that the greatest power of God has often been experienced in times of the greatest declension, such as the time of the 18th century Revival and that of the Reformation itself. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”[38] God in His sovereignty and in His divine timing can bring a people to the Bible, to His truth of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. When He pleases He is able with one word of His grace, to renew Europe by an act of His power, and make His enemies the footstool of Christ. We pray that He will give us the faith of the Reformers and of all those in the history of Europe who have given their lives for Biblical Truth. For the European Union we pray the words of the prophet of the Lord, ‘”Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.”[39] God can send forth His Spirit when He pleases. He did so at the time of the Reformation; we pray that He will do so again now! We remember the words of John Owen at another tuning point of history. He spoke of his own nation, England, at a time of social disintegration yet looking for revival. We now need that same faith and confidence for Britain and for the future of all the EU,

“When God will do this I know not: but I believe God can do this: He is able to do it – able to renew all his churches, by sending out supplies of the Spirit, whose fullness is with Him, to recover them in the due and appointed time. And more; I believe truly, that when God hath accomplished some ends upon us, and hath stained the glory of all flesh, He will renew the power and glory of religion among us again, even in this nation.”[40]

Watch and Pray; Sound an Alarm in Zion

The Church of Rome is one of the major players in the “creeping totalitarianism” of the New World Order. Her designs on the EU are a major part of the unfolding global strategy. We need to watch and pray as the “Fourth Reich” emerges out of its embryo. A watchman of old was expected to guard against robbers and disturbers of the peace. We are all commanded to be watchmen, “to watch and pray”. There has been a dreadful apathy that has afflicted the household of God, an indifference to the clear threat to our ancient liberties and Protestant identity from both the EU and the Church of Rome. As watchmen of the Lord today we are to guard against false teachers and false religion. We are to watch and discern the actions and words of the one who would seek to supplant the Gospel with apostasy and tyranny. Our task under God is to sound an alarm, “blow ye the trumpet in Zion…let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand.”[41] Now even more than in the days of old the commands of the Lord are to be obeyed, “son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.”[42] As we make our stand, so also we pray expecting to see the power of God at work in Europe, “they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”[43] We owe the liberty that we yet enjoy to Jesus Christ the Lord. By His faithfulness and perfect sacrifice He has satisfied the demands of the broken law of the All Holy God. It is He, the Son of God, who has made us free. “If the Son of God shall set you free you will be free indeed.”

There is genuine unity of all true believers throughout the world. There is but one faith. All true believers are converted by the same Holy Spirit, and receive the same work of grace, which places them in the Beloved. In Christ Jesus we are spiritually one and called to stand fast in this liberty, and stand firm in His truth. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be ye not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”[44]

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Endnotes

[1] Bible League Quarterly (20 Thistlebarrow Road, Salisbury SP1 3RT, England) Oct-Dec 1981
[2] Date: 2003-08-31 Code: ZE03083104 http://www.zenit.org/english/ 9/3/03
[3] DOMINUS IESUS September 5th 2000 Para 4 www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html
[4] Ibid., Para. 17
[5] Ibid., Para. 17
[6] Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, Tr. by Roy J Deferrari from Enchiridion Symbolorum, 13th ed (B. Herder Book Co., 1957), #469.
[7] Sunday Telegraph, July 21st 1991
[8] Eccelsia in Europa, Para. 116 www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_20030628_ecclesia-in-europa_en.html 9/23/03
[9] Ibid., Para. 20, 7/15/03 Bolding in any quotation indicates emphasis added in this paper unless otherwise noted.
[10] DOMINUS IESUS, Para. 16
[11] Ibid., Para 17
[12] Adrian Hilton, “Render unto the Pope”, The Spectator, 30 August, 2003, http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-11-15&id=3450&searchText= 11/17/2003
[13] Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 1994) Para. 1129
[14] Vid Treaty of Rome, Articles 164-188
[15] The Northwest Technocrat, 1962
[16] Sunday Telegraph, 25 August 1991
[17] See Frederick Forsyth “The Abolition of Habeas Corpus” and Lord Stoddart on Corpus Juris, www.bullen.demon.co.uk 11/18/03
[18] Ambrose Evans-Prtichard, “Few willing to spoil the party for Giscard” in www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/14/weu14.xml 6/17/03
[19] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard worldwatchdaily.org/index.cfm/ fuseaction/home.sa/a/9699 7/7/03 See also Noel Malcolm Daily Telegraph 28/7/03 ‘A Federal Constitution with the Heart of a Manifesto’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fopinion%2F2003%2F07%2F28%2Fdo2801.xml 11/17/03
[20] www.euroscep.dircon.co.uk/corpus4.htm 11/18/03
[21] Code of Canon Law, Latin-English ed., New English Tr. (Wash. DC: Canon Law Society of America, 1983) Can. 1404 All canons are taken from this source unless otherwise stated.
[22] Canon 1405, Sec.1 Can. 1401:1 states, “By proper and exclusive right the Church adjudicates: 1. cases which regard spiritual matters or those connected to spiritual matters.”
[23] These EU figure-symbols can wee see on the Internet: www.pointsoftruth.com/beastarises.html 7/7/03; http://fp.thebeers.f9.co.uk/europe.htm 7/7/03; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PatriotSaints/message/270 7/7/03; www.ianpaisley.org/article.asp?ArtKey=eu4 7/7/03

[24] For fuller treatment, see J. A. Wylie, The History of Protestantism (Rapidan, VA 22733: Hartland Publications, 2002) Orig. publ. 1878. Four vols, particularly Vol. I, Ch. 3 “Development of the Papacy from the Time of Constantine to Hildebrand”.
[25] For further detail, see Adrian Hilton, The Principality and Power of Europe: Britain and the emerging Holy European Empire (Box 67, Ricksmanworth, Herts WD3 5SJ, U.K.: Dorchester House, 2000) p. 55.
[26] Documentation on these EU symbols are found on the following WebPages: www.pointsoftruth.com/beastarises.html 7/7/03;
http://fp.thebeers.f9.co.uk/europe.htm 7/7/03; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PatriotSaints/message/270 7/7/03;

www.ianpaisley.org/article.asp?ArtKey=eu4 7/7/03

[27] Robert d’Harcourt, “Franz von Papen l’homme a` tout faire…” (L’Aube, 3 Oct. 1946) in The Vatican Against Europe by Edmond Paris, Tr. from French by A. Robson, First English Ed 1961 (184 Fleet Street, London, EC4: The Wickliffe Press, 1961) p. 271.
[28] Libres Propos, Flammarion, Paris 1952
[29] Edmond Paris, The Vatican Against Europe (London: Wycliffe Press, 1961)
[30] The Vatican’s Holocaust (Springfield, MO: Ozark Books, 1986)
[31] Sunday Telegraph, 15 September 1991
[32] “No computation can reach the numbers who have been put to death, in different ways, on account of their maintaining the profession of the Gospel, and opposing the corruptions of the Church of Rome. A MILLION poor Waldenses perished in France; NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND orthodox Christians were slain in less than thirty years after the institution of the order of the Jesuits. The Duke of Alva boasted of having put to death in the Netherlands, THIRTY-SIX THOUSAND by the hand of the common executioner during the space of a few years. The Inquisition destroyed, by various tortures, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND within thirty years. These are a few specimens, and but a few, of those which history has recorded; but the total amount will never be known till the earth shall disclose her blood, and no more cover her slain” John Dowling, History of Rome in Scott’s Church History, Book 8
[33] J.A. Wylie, The Papacy, Book III. Chapter III, “Influence of Popery on Government”
www.wayoflife.org/papacy/03-03.htm 9/25/03

[34] Our Sunday Visitor’s Catholic Almanac 1998 (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1997) p.168
[35] The Catholic Almanac 1998, p171
[36] I Peter 1:3
[37] I Peter 1:5
[38] Isaiah 9:2
[39] Lamentations 5:21
[40] John Owen, The Works of John Owen (Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-53; Reprinted by The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh EH12 6EL, 1976) Vol. 9, p 514
[41] Joel 2:1
[42] Ezekiel 3:17
[43] Isaiah 40:31
[44] Galatians 5:1

Distress of Nations

“And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal:”
—Ezekiel 38:3

Jacob’s Trouble

Please read Eze 36 and 37. These prophecy’s have come to pass. Now, read Eze 38 for it will also soon come to pass. click here for chapter 38
—Editor

Also during his visit to the Saudi capital, Putin stunned the world with an offer to sell Saudi Arabia “peaceful” nuclear reactors. In addition, he offered 150 T-90 tanks and other weapons. During his Middle East tour, the Russian president indicated Russia’s willingness to sell helicopters, build rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) factories, provide sophisticated anti-aircraft systems (the Carapace (Pantsyr), TOR M1, and Strelets), and sell the Saudis expanded satellite launches and an opportunity to join the Russian satellite navigation system, GLONASS.

During his visit to Qatar, the third largest natural gas producer in the world, Putin said that Iran’s proposal to form an OPEC-style cartel of gas producers was “an interesting idea” —after his minister had dismissed it out of hand—and invited Saudi banks to open wholly-owned subsidiaries in Russia.

Putin summed up Russia’s new foreign policy and Middle East policy as follows:

From the point of view of stability in this or that region or in the world in general, the balance of power is the main achievement of these past decades and indeed of the whole history of humanity. It is one of the most important conditions for maintaining global stability and security….

I do not understand why some of our partners [Europe and the U.S.]…see themselves as cleverer and more civilized and think that they have the right to impose their standards on others. The thing to remember is that standards that are imposed from the outside, including in the Middle East, rather than being a product of a society’s natural internal development, lead to tragic consequences, and the best example of this is Iraq.

This Realpolitik was praised in Arab capitals, where the old Soviet anti-Western and anti-Israel stance is still remembered fondly. King Abdullah I of Saudi Arabia bestowed the King Faisal Award on Putin, calling him “a statesman, a man of peace, a man of justice” —quite a turnaround from the jihad against the Soviets funded by the Saudis 20 years ago during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It is also worth noting that Saudi Arabia officially decries the 100,000 killed and 500,000 displaced Muslims in Chechnya, while private groups based in the Gulf support terrorists there.

At Odds with the West

A number of factors drive Putin’s recent rhetoric and actions in the Middle East. First, by embracing Middle Eastern monarchies and Islamist authoritarianism in Iran, he signals Russia’s ongoing movement away from Western norms of internal political behavior. This has important implications, as 2007 and 2008 are election years in Russia. Putin is loudly rejecting the American approach of democracy and human rights, which has stumbled and sputtered in the Middle East.

Second, Russia is following the Soviet model of opposing first the British and then the U.S. presence in the Middle East by playing to anti-Western sentiment in the “street” and among the elites. Putin’s Munich speech, his Al-Jazeera interview, and his press conferences in Jordan and Qatar solidified the Kremlin’s public diplomacy message, emphasizing its differences with Washington.

Third, the Russian leadership is concerned about high Muslim birthrates in Russia, especially as the Slavic Orthodox population is declining. Russia is facing an increasingly radicalized Muslim population along its southern “soft underbelly,” particularly in the North Caucasus, where two Chechen rebellions, even though they were effectively crushed, led to the spread of Salafi Islam. Many young Russian Muslims view themselves more as members of the global Islamic Ummah (community) than as citizens of Mother Russia. Keeping Muslim powers such as Saudi Arabia and Iran at bay, preventing them from supporting insurgencies in Eurasia, and toning down radicalization are unspoken but important items on the Kremlin’s agenda.

Finally, Russia is a high cost oil producer, the largest oil producer in the world, the largest oil exporter outside of OPEC, and the largest gas producer. As such, it seeks to maintain high energy prices—usually generated by tensions and conflicts in the Middle East. Russia is perfectly willing to sell weapons to both sides of the growing Sunni-Shia divide. This was evidenced when it offered the same nuclear reactors and the same anti-aircraft systems to both Iran and to the Arab Gulf states, which are increasingly nervous about Iran’ s growing military power and nuclear ambitions. Аs one Russian observer put it, weapons sales create allies. Russia is using weapons and nuclear reactors the way imperial Germany used railroads—to bolster influence and to undermine the dominant power in the Middle East.

What Can Washington Do?

Clearly, the new Middle East—in which U.S. power and prestige are threatened in Iraq and where Moscow is challenging America’s superpower status—will be a more competitive and challenging environment. Today’s Middle East needs to be viewed with the realism and toughness that its history and culture require.

The U.S., as a status quo power in the Middle East, should bolster its relations with pro-Western regimes in the Gulf. While some weapons sales and business projects will inevitably take place, only by maintaining a security umbrella in the Gulf can the U.S. maintain more clout in the region than Russia.

The U.S. should continue dialogue with Moscow on issues of mutual concern, such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and destabilizing weapons sales. But more importantly, it should provide military assurances to Gulf countries against Iranian encroachment, which Russia is incapable of giving. It should expand cooperation in the fight against terrorism, which threatens the Middle Eastern monarchies. And it should be competitive in proposing cutting-edge economic ventures, an area in which Russia lacks expertise, while granting access to U.S. capital markets for development projects.

After a 20-year hiatus, Russia is forcing its way back through an open Middle East door. Washington decisionmakers had better take note.

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.

“Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say unto the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in my fury, because ye have borne the shame of the heathen: Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; I have lifted up mine hand, Surely the heathen that are about you, they shall bear their shame. But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel; for they are at hand to come. For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn unto you, and ye shall be tilled and sown:And I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, even all of it: and the cities shall be inhabited, and the wastes shall be builded:
—Eze 36:6-10

Please read Eze 36 and 37. These prophecy’s have come to pass. Afterwards, read Eze 38 for it will also soon come to pass.
— The Editor

Israel Beiteinu is the political vehicle of Avigdor Lieberman, who advocates annexing West Bank settlements and reassigning Arab Israeli citizens to a rump Palestinian state. Mr. Lieberman, who is set to become a deputy prime minister, has criticized other right-wing leaders, like Ariel Sharon, for evicting settlers from occupied regions.

American and European diplomats have been arguing that the one positive result of the Lebanon war could be new momentum toward a wider Middle East peace. The idea was that a new awareness of the limits of Israeli military power and growing Arab fears of Shiite radicalism would push both sides toward the necessary compromises.

That now seems less likely than ever. The chief Palestinian party, Hamas, refuses to take the most minimal steps required for diplomatic credibility — a clear rejection of terrorism, acceptance of prior agreements and acknowledgment of Israel’s legitimacy. Efforts by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to bring Hamas around have not gotten as much support as they should from Israel. With Israel Beiteinu joining Mr. Olmert’s coalition, they are likely to get even less.

Creating new obstacles to peace with the Palestinians is the last thing Israel needs after the Lebanon fiasco.

“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.”
— Zec 12:2

“Fear not: for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; Even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”
—Isa 43: 5-7

Please read Eze 36 and 37. These prophecy’s have come to pass. Now, read Eze 38 for it will also soon come to pass.
click here to read Eze 38
—Editor

While 54 percent said they supported the establishment of a Palestinian state, only 38 percent said Israel and the Arabs could solve the conflict peacefully. Another 56 percent said they believed the conflict could not be resolved.

According to the survey, a slim majority of American Jews do not believe that the United States should act militarily to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Fifty-four percent opposed such action and 38 percent supported it. However, 57 percent said Israel would be justified in taking military action against Iran, while 35 percent were opposed
to Israel’s taking such action.

The polls’s 958 respondents were asked about the recent war in Lebanon, both its justification and its management. Fifty-five percent of those polled said Israel acted correctly in going to war, and 35 percent said it did not. Only 24 percent believe Israel won the war against Hezbollah, while 15 percent believe Hezbollah won. Nearly half, 49 percent, said neither side could be considered the winner.

A little over half of those polled, 54 percent, identified themselves as Democrats and only 15 percent as Republican. Conservative and Reform Jews dominated the poll, comprising 33 and 31 percent of respondents respectively, with 8 percent identifying themselves as Orthodox.

Seventy-four percent responded that “caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew.”