Posted by
J.P. Farris on Saturday, July 29, 2006 12:25:50 AM
"And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places."
Sound familiar? These words of prophecy were given two thousand years ago by Jesus Christ himself and were written in Matthew 24:3-8.
Do they apply to today? I don’t know. But in light of world events (war in the Middle East involving Palestinian Hamas, Syrian and Iranian backed Hezbollah, and the nation of Israel; war in Iraq; North Korea testing weapons of war; earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia) it gives one reason cause for thought. I would have written an article about it, but someone already has for The Post Chronicle.
{http://www.postchronicle.com/religion/article_21228898.shtml}
There are so many specifics related to the present Middle East tension; that is, specifics already pronounced in Holy Scripture. Biblical prophecy is one of the most alluring studies anyone can explore. All the more so when placing the Bible alongside today's daily newscasts.I have learned not to speculate about human events, however every time I hear tell of a war or an earthquake I remember those verses of Scripture. As I write I am tuned in to CNN where a reporter asked,”Is it Armageddon?” As I said I don’t speculate about human events and haven’t since I heard someone speculate that Bill Clinton was the Antichrist or that Y2K was the end of the world as we know it, or more recently the superstition surrounding June 6 of last month (06/06/06). I don’t give credence to Doomsday prophets. I go straight to the source, the Bible. I read it, believe it, and that is enough.
When my father was 19 years old he went to Israel backing the 1950s when it was still young as a recognized nation. It was a life changing experience, and when he returned he became a preacher and evangelist which is why I became a student of Bible prophecy at an early age and why I pay close attention to any conflict involving Israel and its neighbors.
Hezbollah guerrillas killed at least eight Israeli soldiers in Lebanon yesterday in fighting set to continue after world diplomats meeting in Rome failed to agree on calling for an immediate end to the 15-day-old war. Israel was also under international fire over the killing of four UN peacekeepers Tuesday in what UN chief Kofi Annan charged was an "apparently deliberate" targeting of their post. In separate fighting in the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed 23 Palestinians yesterday. Israel's offensive is by no means over, an Israeli general said. "Given the progress over the last two weeks, I reckon it will continue for several more weeks," Major-General Udi Adam, head of the northern command, told reporters.
In the latest fighting, Lebanese security sources said guerrillas ambushed an Israeli force advancing on the town of Bint Jbeil, four kilometres from the frontier. Hezbollah sources said the Israeli force was cut off and most of its vehicles were destroyed. "Our men can hear the screams of their wounded calling for help," one source said. The Israeli army said eight of its soldiers were killed and 22 wounded. Arabic media had reported that as many as 14 soldiers died in the clash. Several Israeli soldiers were also wounded when Hezbollah guerrillas attacked the nearby border village of Maroun Al-Ras, seized by the Israelis in heavy fighting last week, medics said.{http://www.kuwaittimes.net/Navariednews.asp?dismode=article&artid=737079242}
Israel is planning to deploy anti-missile batteries near Tel Aviv to intercept any longer-range rocket that Hizballah may fire at Israel's second-largest city, state-run radio reported on Friday. The army would not confirm the report.
Israel developed its anti-missile system following the 1991 Gulf War, when it was hit by at least 39 Iraqi Scud missiles. It has not been used against the incoming Hizballah rockets because they fly too low.{http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200607/INT20060728c.html}
Divisions in the international community over the Israeli-Hizballah conflict are widening, as the United States finds itself increasingly under fire for supporting Israel.{http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200607/INT20060728a.html}
I am both saddened and alarmed by the divisions being created and every day I pray for a resolution to the conflict. But I can see no real resolution until the terrorists Hezbollah and Hamas are disarmed. Also disturbing are those that want to make terrorist leader Nasrallah out to be a "Folk Hero".
{http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2006/20060728124856.aspx}
And while the Middle East is under siege where is Nasrallah? Like any terrorist leader he goes into hiding, kind of like Osama bin Laden, while others do the dirty work of murdering people and blowing things up.
Intelligence reports indicate the leader of Hezbollah is hiding in a foreign mission in Beirut, possibly the Iranian Embassy, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
Israeli military and intelligence forces are continuing to hunt for Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's secretary-general, who fled his headquarters in Beirut shortly before Israeli jets bombed the building last week.
"We think he is in an embassy," said one U.S. official with access to the intelligence reports, while Israeli intelligence speculates Sheik Nasrallah is hiding in the Iranian Embassy.{http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060728-123022-5852r.htm}
Aren’t there a few things about which we can all just go ahead and agree? There have to be at least a handful. I would have thought that Hezbollah fitting the definition of a terrorist organization would be one of those things. I guess I would have thought wrong.
This week I read a blogger questioning whether or not Hezbollah meets the definition of a terrorist organization. I am not referring to a fringe anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist crazy either. I am referring to a recent blog entry posted by CNN correspondent, Tom Foreman, on Anderson Cooper’s blog this week.
Foreman pondered the question of how a terrorist should be defined by a news agency.
“What makes a terrorist?
I don't mean why do people starting bombing, and shooting and fighting from the shadows. I mean, for the purposes of news organizations defining terrorism, what should the definition be?
The United States and others clearly call Hezbollah a terrorist group: The source of countless raids, bombings and attacks on Israel; the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, which left 241 people dead; and the architects of all those displays in which young men cover their faces, strap mock bombs to their chests, and parade before the cameras pledging to kill any and all soldiers and civilians alike who oppose their cause.
All this makes Hezbollah, especially for many westerners, the very definition of a terrorist group.
But some people describe another part of Hezbollah. They talk about a group that is beloved in southern Lebanon for running schools, hospitals, social services, even clearing snow in the winter for some communities that the official government of Lebanon does not serve. They say these things make Hezbollah something other than a terrorist group: A quasi-government; a nation within a nation.{http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=the_definition_of_a_terrorist&ns=LorieByrd&dt=07/28/2006&page=full&comments=true}
The infamous gangster Al Capone did good deeds in the community as well. Did that make him anything other than a notorious criminal and a murderer? Hezbollah is the same. They terrorize, torture, and murder, trying to hide their sins and evil tendencies behind a cloak of good deeds.
Does anybody want to ask why America has to get involved? What does Hezbollah have to do with it? What has Hezbollah done to America? Oliver North wrote a column on that very subject.
"Know your enemy" isn't just a hackneyed military slogan -- it's an essential survival tool in this new world disorder of global Islamic terror. Hezbollah is -- and has always been -- America's enemy.
When Lebanon descended into civil war along sectarian and ethnic lines in 1975, nearly a half dozen rival factions with armed militias began a deadly struggle for power -- Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze and Palestinian. Into this chaos, and well before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Ayatollah Khomeini began sending Pasdaran -- Iranian Revolutionary Guards -- to the Lebanese Biqa Valley to organize, train and equip the poorly armed, disparate Shia militias into an effective politico-military force. Hezbollah was the result -- and almost immediately, Americans began to die.
From their bases in the Biqa, Hezbollah terrorists launched a series of spectacular attacks against Americans:
-- April 18, 1983: A suicide bomber driving a pickup truck loaded with explosives rams into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 -- including 17 Americans.
-- Oct. 23, 1983: A suicide bomber detonates a truck full of explosives in the U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen.
-- Dec. 12, 1983: Hezbollah operatives attack the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. Near simultaneous attacks are carried out against the Emir of Kuwait, the French embassy, the airport, a major oil refinery and an American residential compound. In all, six people die; more than 80 are wounded.
-- April 2, 1986 -- a bomb aboard TWA Flight 840, en route from Athens to Rome Rome to Athens kills four members of the Kluge family from Annapolis, MD, an American family that included an infant girl.
-- Feb. 17, 1988: U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins, assigned to the U.N. Peacekeeping Force for Lebanon, is kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
-- June 14, 1985: TWA Flight 847 is hijacked and landed at Beirut International Airport. During the 17 day stand-off, U.S. Navy Seabee Diver Robert Stethem is murdered aboard the aircraft and his body is dumped on the tarmac.
-- In a wave of kidnappings between 1982 and 1988, Hezbollah took more than 30 Westerners hostage in Lebanon, among them, CIA station chief William Buckley, American University of Beirut President David Dodge, AP reporter Terry Anderson, American University of Beirut librarian Peter Kilburn, American University Hospital Administrator David Jacobsen, Father Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic Priest, and Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary. Though most survived captivity -- Anderson was held 2,454 days -- some, like Buckley, were tortured to death.
-- June 25, 1996, the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia is bombed, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel and wounding more than 400.{http://www.townhall.com/columnists/OliverNorth/2006/07/28/terror,_inc}
What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?
What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?
Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.
The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is ``disproportionate," as in the universally decried ``disproportionate Israeli response."{http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2006/07/28/israel:_keep_rolling}
Some in world government, media, and the UN have tried to demonize Israel as the aggressor. But who made the first aggressive move, crossing illegally onto Israeli soil to murder and kidnap Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah uses Lebanese civilians as human shields. Hezbollah has no qualms about targeting Israeli civilians. Just take a look at the type of missiles they use.
It isn’t just Israel the terrorists want. In case the Western world didn’t get the point, al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two, in his statement about Al Qaeda wanting to get involved in the conflict mentioned Spain and “later swore that ‘the tragedy of Al Andalus’ must not be repeated.”
It isn’t just al-Qaeda that wants to force this. Hamas isn’t just interested in Israel. It has “demanded the return of the city of Seville to Islam” and what it calls “the lost paradise of Al Andalus.”
These dreams of “Al Andalus” make Spain a target as the Spanish have already learned the hard way. And Spain isn’t a target because of its policies toward the United States or the Middle East, but because its existence is regarded as a “tragedy” by the jihadists. As former Spanish Prime Minister Aznar put it, the problem with al-Qaeda has been 1,300 years in the making.
{http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ChuckColson/2006/07/27/an_unwelcome_reunion}
I always say that if there is one job I would never want it is that of the President of the United States. He has a tough job.
Throughout American history, presidents have had to deal with crises of enormous magnitude, but seldom in recent times has any president been confronted with so many during his terms in office. Starting with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, followed by the corporate and accounting scandals that rocked our economy, devastating hurricanes from which we are still recovering, and nuclear threats from Iran to North Korea.
"What next, I wonder," a senior White House official remarked to me last month. He got his answer sooner than he expected.
Mounting terrorist attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan were already posing tougher military challenges for the United States. Then Islamist Hezbollah radicals in Southern Lebanon and Hamas Palestinians in the Gaza Strip attacked Israel -- creating two new fronts in the rapidly expanding terrorist war.{http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=war,_terrorism,_the_economy:_bush_cant_catch_a_break&ns=DonaldLambro&dt=07/28/2006&page=1}
I was also disturbed today of the human rights atrocities committed in Iran.
On 15 August, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh was hanged in a public square in the Iranian city of Neka.
Her death sentence was imposed for "crimes against chastity".
The state-run newspaper accused her of adultery and described her as 22 years old.
But she was not married - and she was just 16.
{http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/5217424.stm}
The UN has called them down about their abuses. But has it been affective?
{http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4114621.stm}
{http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3782793.stm}
Iran violates human rights. Iran supports terrorism. Iran was present in North Korea when it ignored the voices of the world community and test-fired its missiles. Today I got a report about Iran’s president getting “chummy” with Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez. Is it possible that the UN should quit trying to condemn Israel for its actions against the terrorists that threaten it and focus more attention on what Iran is up too?
I also talked to a friend who recently returned from Iraq. She said she was ready and willing to go back and finish the job. She told me that there are nice people in Iraq…not just the insurgents. She also said the media makes things out to be worse than they really are. The media sensationalizes things? Really? Okay, I’m being sarcastic. But the troops in Iraq need our prayers and our support, not the demoralization that some people like Cindy Sheehan gives our servicemen and women. She told me how the immediate pullout from the first Gulf War led to the murders and executions of Iraqis that supported America by the Sadam Hussein regime. Would America let that happen again? I hope not.