Posts Tagged ‘Israel’

News Reporting on the Flotilla incident:

  New York Times: “An Assault Cloaked in Peace”

Moriel:  “Moriel Response to Israeli Blockade Action

Honest Reporting: “Flotilla Battle Unleashes Anti-Israel Wave”

News 4 the Masses: “Netanyahu Speaks on Flotilla“

  From CrossTalk: “Dean of White House Press Corps says: Israel should get the H*** out of Palestine (go “home” to Germany)

16-yr old “Daniel” confronts lion’s den to stand for the honor of Israel

Flotilla Choir presents: We Con the World 

LTRP Note: To see why the Jews should not go “home” to Germany, read Trapped in Hitler’s Hell and Things We Couldn’t Say by two women who saw and lived to tell.

by Bill Randles
Believers in Grace Fellowship

I will bless those that bless you and curse those who curse you and in you all the families of the world will be blessed.  Genesis 12:3

Come now therefore, I pray thee, curse me this people; for they are too mighty for me, peradventure I shall prevail, that we may smite them, and that I may drive them out of the land; for I know that he whom thou (Balaam) bless is blest and he whom you curse is cursed. Numbers 22:6

Perhaps the most misunderstood story in the Bible is that of Balaam, the pagan prophet. When it is told, it is usually related as a morality story, merely a caution against greed in ministry.  The love of money indeed is part of the story – as well as the danger of false prophets and corrupt ministers. But lately I have come to realize that there is an eschatological dimension to this story that too often is unappreciated. It is amazing how current and relevant the story of Balaam really is to today’s geo-political situation.

The story takes place at the end of the Exodus; at the time the children of Israel were preparing to possess the land God had given them. Once again the immediate neighbors of Israel take exception to their rights to the land. The ancestors of the modern Arabs, Jordanians and ‘Palestinians’ feared the Israeli occupation of the land, having full knowledge of what God had done to Egypt and through them to Og, one of their chief Kings.

And Balak the son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Amorites. And Moab was sore afraid of the people, because they were many: and Moab was distressed because of the children of Israel.  Numbers 22:2-3

Balak, the king of the Moabites, as it turned out, had nothing to fear from the Israelites, not knowing that God had commanded them not to dispossess the Moabites.

And the LORD said to me, Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with them in battle: for I will not give you of their land for a possession; because I have given Ar to the children of Lot for a possession. Deuteronomy 2:9

This scenario is a current event, for there is nothing the modern state of Israel would welcome more than to live in peace with her hostile neighbors.

Balak, fearing Israel, and knowing he couldn’t prevail militarily with them, set out to hire someone who could “curse” Israel. The word “curse” in this sense is a Hebrew word which means to “hollow” them out, to “drain” them of their confidence.

Is this not the modern situation also? Arab neighbors of Israel, frustrated by their inability to dispossess Israel out of the land, have been using their newly gained petro-wealth, and the power that goes with it, to literally hire people to curse Israel! They have been able to successfully deny the very legitimacy of Israel in the minds of many.  Oil money has successfully lobbied political leaders, educators, the media and a good many of those who are in position to shape the ideas and perspectives of the rest of us, to take a belligerent stance against Israel.

Billions of petro dollars have poured into the coffers of institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Georgetown University, and Fox News, as well as into the campaign chests of numerous western politicians, all in the interest of selling us the story line which delegitimizes Israel, and romanticizes Islam’s version of history. There are many Balaam’s!

Perhaps the last straw is the seduction of leaders of the confessing Christian church into “cursing Israel”.  No less than the Pope himself leads the charge in delegitimizing Israel’s claims to the Holy Land, as here recounted in a Jerusalem Newswire story dated May 17, 2009 entitled,

“Pope to ‘Palestinians’, Israel is Your Forefather’s Land”

“The Biblical land of Israel is actually the “land of YOUR forefathers” Pope Benedict told the Palestinian Arabs in Bethlehem last week. With this statement the pontiff, who has now departed Israel after five days of meddling in the country’s affairs on a “pilgrimage” he called “a mission of peace,” authenticity on the massive deception that is “Palestinian nationhood”.

At the start, in the middle, and at the end of his visit – which was hosted by the State of Israel at no small expense to the taxpayers and mass disruption of Jerusalemites’ lives – the head of the Roman Catholic Church voiced his strong support for the creation of a Palestinian state on Jewish lands.

His first and last statements to this effect were made unabashedly in front of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who has been trying to sidestep international demands that he surrender Israel’s biblical heartland to the Arabs.

Speaking at PLO Chief and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ palace in Bethlehem, where he went to conduct a large mass, the pontiff spelled it out:

“The Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders,”

The World Council of Churches, the United States Presbyterian Church, and a host of other church groups too numerous to mention have condemned Israel, divested themselves from Israel, in short have “cursed” Israel, in the sense of hollowing out their confidence, sense of legitimacy and validity as a nation. Balaam lives!

The reward has not always been money, however, as was the case with Balaam. These church groups siding with terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, against the only legitimate democracy in the Middle East, imagine that they are “speaking truth to power”, as they “curse Israel”. The image of themselves as guardians of the human rights of the Palestinians is reward enough for these false Christian groups.

Perhaps the most tragic of all is the erosion of the rock solid support which evangelicals have had for Israel.  In the American Thinker article “Splitting the Evangelicals from Israel”, Ed Lasky cites Replacement Theology, the testimony of certain Palestinian Christian leaders, and former US President Jimmy Carter as part of the influence turning many once pro-Israel Christians against Israel. This is a portent that doesn’t bode well, even as the story of Balaam doesn’t end well for anybody but God’s chosen people. Part 2, Part 3 http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/01/splitting_the_evangelicals_fro.html

Posted on The Berean Call

The New York Times Makes It Official: Obama Has Shifted U.S. Policy Against Israel [Excerpts]

The New York Times officially proclaimed the administration’s changed attitude in a front-page story [April 14, 2010] that ought to send chills down the spine of anyone who believed Barack Obama when he pledged in 2008 that he would be a loyal friend of Israel.

In the view of the paper’s Washington correspondents, the moment that signaled what had already been apparent to anyone who was paying attention was the president’s declaration at a Tuesday news conference that resolving the Middle East conflict was “a vital national security interest of the United States.” Mr. Obama went on to state that the conflict is “costing us significantly in terms of blood and treasure,” thus attempting to draw a link between Israel’s attempts to defend itself with the safety of American troops who are fighting Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. By claiming the Arab-Israeli conflict to be a “vital national security interest” that must be resolved, the “frustrated” Obama is making it clear that he will push hard to impose a solution on the parties.

The significance of this false argument is that it not only seeks to wrongly put the onus on Israel for the lack of a peace agreement but that it also now attempts to paint any Israeli refusal to accede to Obama’s demands as a betrayal in which a selfish Israel is stabbing America in the back. The response from Obama to this will be, the Times predicts, “tougher policies toward Israel,” since it is, in this view, ignoring America’s interests and even costing American lives. To continue reading, click here.

Related Information:

The Anti-Israel Revelation

Why the Heathen Rage in a World Gone Amiss

LTRP Note: To read more about former Plymouth Brethren, now emerging church leader, Brian McLaren, and the emerging church’s views on Israel, eschatology, and the return of Jesus Christ, please see our links below this news article. The following article is courtesy Understand the Times from their monthly e-newsletter.

Mark Tooley
FrontPageMag
(out-of-house news source)

“Emergent Church” guru Brian McLaren is a key figure on the Evangelical Left who is trying shift Evangelicals, who are America’s most pro-Israel demographic, into a more neutralist stance. Currently, he is leading a delegation through Israel and “Palestine” to broadcast the sins of Israeli oppression against Palestinians by “listening, learning, thinking, observing, reflecting.”  His blog is providing daily updates of his discoveries, all of which confirm his previously often declared bias against Israel.

“I hope you will start questioning what you think you know about the situation here,” McLaren warned on his blog recently, with the assumption that most readers are deceived by pro-Israel partiality. “I’ve been an avid reader on the subject for quite a while, but being here now, I see how many of my most basic assumptions were skewed from a lifetime of half-truths, unfair and imbalanced news, well-planned propaganda, and misinformation.”

McLaren, of course, used to be a more traditional, conservative Evangelical.  So his emergence into the Evangelical Left in recent years, including the requisite negativity towards Israel, is part of an ongoing spiritual rebirth into which he invites his fellow Evangelicals.  Of course, McLaren insists that he is not anti-Israel, and certainly not anti-Jewish.  He simply wants to liberate both Palestinians and Jews from the enslaving mindset of the “occupation” that holds both peoples captive. Click here to continue reading.

Related Information:

Is the Emerging Church Right? – “There is No Second Coming of Jesus Christ!”  by Larry DeBruyn

Brian McLaren Wants End Time Believing Christians Robustly Confronted

Will the Evangelical Church Help Usher in the “Age of Enlightenment” and the Coming False One? by Ray Yungen

Evangelicals and Catholics Together and the Rejection of End-Time, Bible-Believing Christians by Roger Oakland

Why the Heathen Rage in a World Gone Amiss by Bill Randles

LTRP Note: The following is an excerpt from Diet Eman’s autobiography, Things We Couldn’t Say. Diet was in her early 20s when Holland was invaded by Hitler. Soon, she became part of the Christian resistance movement with her fiance and other young people. In this excerpt, Diet crosses paths with Corrie and Betsy ten Boom on a train heading toward the Vught Concentration Camp.

“Barracks No. 4, Vught Concentration Camp”

by Diet Eman (author of Things We Couldn’t Say)

June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy Invasion, came. That  afternoon, all of the prisoners at Scheveningen, sixteen hundred of us, were told to gather all the belongings we had because we were going to be moved right away. We had no belongings, of course, so I was ready in a moment. We were called out, cell by cell, and we had to line up in long rows and be loaded onto those trucks, some of which were covered with canvas. The soldiers were standing all around us, bayonets on their rifles. They moved us first to a railroad station, and then they put us on a train.

Even while they moved us that night, the Germans were very nervous. The invasion had begun, and they were scared. None of us really knew about the invasion, but I suspected it because of what Trix had told me. And I heard the Germans, while they piled us on the buses and the trucks, talking about it themselves.

I knew this area, and I knew that if we left the Scheveningen prison through the side door, as we did, we would be on the street at the very end of the city of The Hague, the van Alkemadelaan. On the left were the dunes, with all those German fortifications that the Allied planes had been bombarding; then there was the coastal strip with its big, expensive hotels. But there was nothing else around the prison—nothing other than the strip of dunes where Hein and I had often biked together, the place I could never forget because the little trees had their peculiar honey smell in the spring—the meidoorn trees. The place was called Meyendel. I had even biked there as a child with my friends Rie and Jet, and played cops and robbers.

When we left the prison, therefore, I thought we would go to the right because the city had two railway stations: one to the south, the Hollandse spoor, and the other to Utrecht and the heart of the country, the Staats spoor. The stations were only twenty minutes from my parents’ house. I told myself that we should be going to the right because there was nothing to the left except the forbidden territory of the dunes.

Instead, the buses took a turn to the left. The only destination to the left would have been Waalsdorp, in the dunes, and everybody was scared stiff of Waalsdorp. It was the place of executions, so I was terribly afraid too. The Hague prisoners all believed that if they were being taken to Waalsdorp, there would be nothing but silence for all of us. At the same time, though we didn’t know where the invasion might have happened, we knew that there was an invasion somewhere. And an invasion represented, for us, the end of all our misery. The Allies had landed. Everyone expected it sometime, of course, like the coming of Christ: we all believed that at some point, somewhere, our Allied friends would come and we’d be free again.

But when those buses turned to the left, the prisoners from The Hague knew what was going to happen. The trucks followed a road where the dunes are high on both sides, an open area full of dry grass called helm, to Waalsdorp, the place of execution in the dunes. Some people on those trucks were so desperate that they were nearly out of their minds with fear. I think that God gave me a very logical mind; sometimes that is good and sometimes not. But in this case I had already thought that there was no point in jumping out of that truck: you couldn’t really run in the sand, and soldiers were all around, so where could you go? Even if you didn’t break your leg or get a concussion jumping off the train or truck, you couldn’t run very fast up steep hills of dry sand in forbidden territory full of land mines.

But some were so desperate that they were jumping out. The buses kept right on going, so I never knew exactly what happened to them; but there were other vehicles full of soldiers right behind us.

At two in the afternoon we came to a tiny railway station that I had never known about. There, all sixteen hundred of us were crammed onto the platform, arranged in blocks, and again surrounded by armed soldiers. We stood there in deadly silence for hours, except for the Germans who were talking to each other. And it was during those silent hours of standing there that Corrie and Betsy ten Boom (whose story was told in The Hiding Place) first saw each other. They hadn’t seen each other for months, and their father had already died in our prison…

As we were standing there, the two sisters started worming their way toward each other, which you could do very slowly without being spotted in that mass of people surrounded by the Germans. Finally they stood beside each other and could whisper a few words when no one was looking. After several hours a train pulled up, and we were herded in. Corrie and Betsy were able to stick together, and once they were on the train they could actually sit next to each other. It was a passenger train with seats, not a cattle train. I happened to end up in the same compartment with them, and that’s when someone who may have been in Betsy’s Scheveningen cell told me the story of Corrie and Betsy. When I saw them sitting there for the first time, they were holding hands, tears streaming down their cheeks from happiness—and sadness too because their father had already died.

As we were being loaded onto the train, the Germans walked up and down very menacingly. For all those months, we had talked only to our cellmates; but here, all of a sudden, were sixteen hundred people on that train. It was maybe six or seven o’ clock by now, and getting dark. Every train at that time was equipped with blackout curtains inside, so that the whole train would appear perfectly dark from the sky—thus the Allied planes could not see them. As the train lurched forward, I was praying that we wouldn’t go to Germany, because I knew that if we crossed that border our chances for survival were not good. I’d been initially overwhelmed by the fear that we would go to Waalsdorp and be executed; now that fear was removed, and the longer we stayed on the train, the more I believed we were going to Germany. …

All of a sudden, the sound of the steel wheels beneath us changed. We couldn’t see outside, and there were guards walking up and down through the aisles the whole time. But when I heard the sound of that train change, I peeked out quickly and saw water. I knew that we had to be at the Moerdijk Bridge, a very long bridge over a long waterway, the Hollandse Diep. Again, I felt a sense of relief. I knew then that we were not heading east toward Germany, but instead probably south to Vught, the big concentration camp in a wooded, sandy, and infertile area near Den Bosch. Actually, I had held out hope that we would go to Vught. Of all the evil places, I believed, it was probably less bad because at least we would stay in the Netherlands. Vught did have a bad name—there were many executions there—but Amersfoort also had a bad name, and every camp had a bad name of its own. I knew it was not going to be any fun.

At one point on that train ride a woman got up to use the bathroom, and she stayed inside so long that I didn’t know what she was up to. But when the train took a little curve, and I saw that she had opened the window in that bathroom, I guessed she was going to try to escape. If the train had been going straight, I wouldn’t have seen that. I thought immediately about how I could help her. I knew she was going to need time, so I tried to make sure that nobody would enter the bathroom right at that moment. Nobody else was in line right then, so I stood there as if waiting for my turn; meanwhile, I could be sure that nobody else would come and force the door open.

Then I saw her jump off the train. That woman must have known that territory like I knew the area around Barneveld—like the inside of my pocket. She knew there was going to be a sharp curve where the train had to really slow down. It was dark already, and I was keeping my eye on a little split in the door. And when I saw her jump, I said a prayer: Lord, protect her.

The rails there are situated mostly on the dike. German soldiers were sitting on the roof of the train with machine guns, but it was very late on the 6^th or early on the morning of the 7^th of June and quite dark. She knew that curve was coming, knew where there would be woods and shrubs, and she jumped at the right spot.

That escape gave me an indescribable feeling. There!—one got out. Thank you God! I said to myself.…

We arrived at Vught in the darkness of early morning, and there was roll call immediately. About eight had disappeared. So, apart from the woman I had seen jump, there were other escapees. I was very happy that eight had gotten away during the train trip alone. I heard that report because the guards often spoke to each other as if we weren’t even there; to them, we were just like cattle. Sometimes that was a good thing because when they discussed what was happening in the war, those of us who could understand German picked up a lot of information. When your life is at stake, your ears are like radar. Whenever I heard them discussing anything—such as how many had escaped—I listened very closely.

When the train stopped and we got out, we were in the middle of the woods. The step off the train seemed very high—we had to jump down—and all around us were woods. No paths really, just woods. Many German soldiers were stationed all around, still with their bayonets mounted, holding Doberman Pinschers on leashes. We were told to form rows and march into the darkness because the train couldn’t carry us any closer to the camp. If some fell—if they stepped in a hole in the pitch darkness, say—there was screaming and pushing and a couple of whacks. But people quickly got up and marched again on the uneven ground. After a while, we came to the front gate of Vught.

At the camp, we were all put in an enormous reception hall: it had no windows, except maybe a few very high up, and it was still quite dark. There was no place for us yet in that camp, and for a while they didn’t know where to put us. Suddenly and unexpectedly the officials at Vught had received sixteen hundred people from Scheveningen—and perhaps from other prisons as well. The leadership did a lot of running around there, and the Germans left us standing in that hall with no beds, no blankets, nothing. But I had a rain coat, and I put it over my head and got down on the concrete floor. I felt blessed: at least I had something. I was very tired, and I slept.

In the morning, someone high up said that the prisoners all had to undress—the men gave us the order—and so we stood there naked. If you tried to keep your bra and your panty on, they got mad and yelled, “Undress! Undress!” There we stood, while those officers were passing by, when suddenly a whole bunch of male soldiers came into that hall. I was scared, standing there naked. Those soldiers started walking back and forth, laughing and making remarks about what they saw. So many young women, and all of them undressed in front of those guards and the other officers walking back and forth. There were female guards too, so it was not as if we were at the total mercy of those men; but I’ll never forget the way they walked past and stared.

It was a very short time that we were absolutely naked because one woman guard came along and said, “Hey, get those people their prison dresses.” Our own clothes were bundled up, except our underwear, and we all got prison gowns. We still didn’t know what was going to happen to us. We finally got our underwear back, put it on again, and got into our prison gowns. They were the kind of gowns that could be opened a long way in the front: no buttons—only hooks and eyes, and very large pockets; no sizes, of course, just large and small; thick cotton, as heavy as denim, and gray with dark blue stripes. For a very long time after the war, I would never wear stripes—never….

When we came to our barracks, we found a big “4” painted on it. Around that group of barracks stood a tall barbed-wire fence, and outside lay a large open space, then another very high barbed-wire fence, just like you see in pictures of all the concentration camps. That fence was hot with electrical current. On the corners stood towers, and in the towers were guards with machine guns.

Right away they made a big announcement: “There is another fence with barbed wire, and there are mine fields between, and we have trained dogs. So don’t ever try to escape. You will be shot, or killed by the current, or ripped to pieces by the dogs, or else you’ll step on a mine.”

Nakedness in front of those soldiers, the prison gown, and that warning—that was our introduction to the concentration camp at Vught. (from chapter 13, Things We Couldn’t Say)