The Throwaway People

The Throwaway People
Vol: 78 Issue: 31 Monday, March 31, 2008

As of two years ago, the official UN estimate of the death toll in the western Darfur region of Sudan had already exceed two hundred thousand people.

Stop for a second, and allow that number to sink in, to have the impact it should have, were we not already numb to all the violence by its constant repetition.

Two hundred thousand people — men, women, children, the elderly, the infirm, anyone unable to escape the government-backed “janjaweed” or ‘devils on horseback’.

The UN official who made that estimate in 2006 says he believes that number has probably doubled, to just under half-million now.

Jan Egeland says there is no real way to be certain if even that estimate is sufficient.

“You have the figure 200,000 people died in Darfur which has been used continuously since I gave it,” Egeland said. “Please stop using that figure. I gave it. It’s 2 1/2 years old. It’s wrong.”

Egeland believes 400,000 “is a much more correct figure than 200,000.”

Eric Reeves, a Sudan researcher and analyst at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, believes the number of dead could be closer to 500,000 in Darfur and eastern Chad.

The Darfur region of Sudan is primarily populated by black African Christians and animists (pagans).

Eastern Sudan is mainly Muslim Arab, and the government in Khartoum is an Islamic republic.

Since 2003, the Khartoum government has embarked on a systematic campaign of extermination of its western black African population. To the Islamic janjaweed, the black Africans are an inferior people, worthy of only enslavement or death.

To the Islamic Khartoum government, they are a threat because the Darfur region is home to the Christian ‘rebels’ — who are ‘rebels’ in the sense that they organized to fight back against the Islamic-inspired genocide.

The Sudanese government denies backing the janjaweed, but the eyewitness accounts of camel-mounted janjaweed assault teams using Sudanese close air support to ‘soften up’ targets prior to attack have been widely circulated.

The janjaweed are totally autonomous; they are free to loot, kill, rape or enslave with impunity. Janjaweed raiders set to hacking apart their victims with machetes while chanting either ‘Death to slaves” or “Allah u Akkbar.”

Meanwhile, as thousands die, the United Nations’ diplomats continue to dither over whether or not the systematic destruction of an entire segment of a national population constitutes ‘genocide’.

After five years of people being murdered at an average rate of two hundred and eighty-five per DAY, they still aren’t sure. Picture, in your mind, a crowd of two-hundred and eighty-five people — say, at a high school basketball game. Now try and picture that many people hacked to death by machetes. Every single day.

It didn’t take nearly this long to decide that ‘genocide’ was taking place in Serbia in 1999. Or whether or not someone should put a stop to it.

Maybe it was because the victims in that conflict weren’t dirt-poor black Africans?

Assessment:

In 1994, the nation of Rwanda erupted into a genocidal rage that went on until more than a half-million men, women and children were hacked to death. The United Nations spoke great, swelling words of protest, sent in “peacekeepers” to monitor the carnage, but did nothing to stop it.

A decade later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan gave a speech in which he applauded the UN General Assembly’s designation of a ‘moment of silence’ each April 7 as part of the “International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda.”

In announcing the UN’s ‘solution’ to the ‘crucial issues’ surrounding the UN’s inaction in Rwanda, Annan announced,

“Such a minute of silence has the potential to unite the world, however fleetingly, around the idea of global solidarity . . . here today, I would like to urge all people, everywhere, no matter what their station in life, whether in crowded cities or remote rural areas, to set aside whatever they might be doing at noon on that day, and pause to remember the victims. Let us be united in a way we were not 10 years ago. . . etc., etc., ”

Even as Annan droned on about how the UN would be united by a moment of silence, the genocide in Darfur was already mounting.

And after three years of annual moments of silence for the dead in Rwanda, the continued silence over the Darfur crisis allows the Islamic genocide campaign to continue unabated.

I can’t urge you strongly enough to allow what is going on in Darfur penetrate your mind. Don’t become blinded to the horror by the cold statistics — murder is very personal from the perspective of the victim.

Here in the West, a single murder literally brings out teams of investigators and prosecutors. There are ‘cold case’ investigators who are dedicated exclusively to solving the murders that slip through the cracks.

There is virtually no end to the effort undertaken to bring the murderer of a single human being to justice.

We do that because murder is such a horrible crime.

In a single act of murder, he steals from his victim all that he ever was and all he ever will be. He steals a loved one from his family, and he forever steals from his victim any opportunity to make the choices that will seal his eternity.

Imagine the tears in heaven as the angels assess and absorb the full measure of such a tragedy.

Imagine, for a second, as horrible as it is, what the final moments must be like for a murder victim, knowing he is about to die, knowing there is nothing he can do . . . like a horror film coming true.

Josef Stalin once cynically, (but accurately) observed that, “a single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

So when we hear of 400,000 dead we shake our heads and say, ‘what a shame’ — but since we can’t cope with the sheer scope of such a tragedy, it just blends into the white noise of information overload.

Try picturing it this way. What we’re really talking about is the brutal murder of a single human being, with all the attending horror that would be visited on that single murder victim, only repeated 400,000 times. Oftentimes in full view of UN ‘peacekeepers’ powerless to intervene.

Try and imagine the scene from the perspective of heaven, as the angels look down at the powerful, rich, blessed (and primarily Christian) world averts its eyes away from the slaughter of innocents, protesting, as did the first murderer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The UN is getting ready to celebrate its international impotence again next week, with another April 7 “Day of Reflection.”

And you can be sure it will be marked with plenty of flowery phrases about past guilt, and future diligence.

But the UN can’t feel guilty while it is still in the process of letting the victims in Darfur down. And they are too busy being diligent about preventing future genocides to pay attention to the one taking place now.

It doesn’t matter if the Rwandans forgave the world for allowing them to be butchered. The UN just pretended a moment of silence made everything right, and as far as they are concerned, that is that.

And it won’t matter if the Darfurians do, either.

To the rest of the world, they are just more ‘throwaway’ people whose destruction will decrease the pressure of feeding Africa’s surplus population.

(Think Darwinian survival of the fittest — its a jungle out there.)

Like the Rwandans, they aren’t white Europeans, so the West feels no major obligation to save them. Plus, their destruction is taking place under Islamic authority.

And the West has no desire to open another front in its war with Islam.

Its easier, and a lot less trouble, for the world to just let them burn now, and have a moment of silence for them later.

May God forgive us.

The Obamanation

The Obamanation
Vol: 78 Issue: 29 Saturday, March 29, 2008

It was just a matter of time before somebody (actually, as it turned out, a bunch of somebodies) advanced the theory that Barak Obama is the antichrist.

One of our readers emailed me with his theory, and I found some of his points so intriguing I couldn’t help but follow up.

When I Googled “Obama antichrist” I was astonished to get 691,000 hits on the search term. Evidently, the thought has occurred to more than one person.

First, the usual disclaimer(s). The Bible does NOT charge Christians as watchmen for the antichrist. There is no reward for watching for the antichrist or loving his appearing. Knowing who the antichrist actually is would be essentially useless information to a Christian, in any practical sense.

Going around telling people you know who the antichrist is accomplishes little more than to marginalize whatever worthwhile theological information you may be sharing.

If you’re already saved, identifying the antichrist means nothing because when he assumes his mantle of power, you won’t be here.

And anybody you tell isn’t going to believe you — and even if they did, what good would it do them? Nobody gets saved by believing in the antichrist.

There is but one useful purpose in such an exercise, and that is in demonstrating the conditioning process that is already preparing global society for his eventual revelation.

And that is only useful to the Church in the same sense that when the calendar tells us its Thanksgiving, it means Christmas is just around the corner.

If the world is being conditioned to embrace the antichrist and the Bible says the Rapture happens first, seeing shadows of the coming antichrist is meaningful only in that it underscores the lateness of the hour.

Rather than causing Christians to mount a campaign to expose his ‘true’ identity, it should spur them on to campaign with greater urgency to warn of the soon coming of the Lord for His Church.

That can’t be emphasized enough, if one wants to be an effective witness for Christ. The antichrist will provide his own ‘witnesses’.

Here is why trying to put a name to the antichrist marginalizes your witness. Your faith is no longer in Christ, or even in the Bible, but rather, in your own ability to correctly forecast the future. And that is what your ‘converts’ put their faith in, as well. Your promise, not the Bible’s.

The Bible doesn’t promise the Church an antichrist, it WARNS of him. It doesn’t say, watch out for Barack Obama, or Javier Solana, it says that when the conditions are right for the antichrist, that we should “sorrow not, as others who have no hope,” because it means that Jesus is about to return for His Church.

It is a fine distinction, but a huge difference. WHO the antichrist is, as a matter of personal identification, is irrelevant for several reasons, the first being the most obvious — we don’t KNOW.

At best, we can make an educated guess that may or may not be wrong. Worse, you can never know if you are right, but you can be proved wrong in an instant.

Your guy simply has to get hit by a bus and your testimony is forever suspect.

After all, if you were so supremely confident of who the antichrist is that you went around telling people who he is, — and you turned out to be wrong on that, — maybe you were wrong about the whole ‘salvation by grace through faith’ thing, too.

On the other hand, the CONDITIONS under which the antichrist WILL rise to power are clearly and carefully outlined in Scripture, and it is those conditions that are relevant to effectively spreading the Gospel, since they are unique to a single generation, somewhere in time.

History is replete with antichrist wannabes that have tried to impose themselves on the people by force. From Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler, the formula has been the same.

Military conquest, followed by occupation, followed by edicts demanding worship. The Bible says the antichrist rises to power, not by conquest, but by acclamation.

The antichrist’s political power is exercised through is control of the global economy, which is so centralized that an individual dissident could be instantly cut off from society to the degree he would not be able to buy or sell without proper credentials.

And instead of being worshipped as a consequence of dictatorial decree, he will be declared a god by the world’s premiere religious authority.

None of these conditions could have been met in any previous generation. No single individual could capture the world-wide attention the Bible describes for the antichrist before the advent of mass communications. No single authority could, (in previous generations) restrict an individual’s ability to buy and sell.

And at no time was there such a universal hunger for a messiah figure to solve the world’s problems. In previous generations, the world’s problems were a lot less important than events in one’s own neighborhood, town or even one’s own country.

What happens today in Caracas, Tehran or Jerusalem determines how much a tank of gas will cost in Des Moines tomorrow. Or whether next winter you’ll have to choose between heating your house or paying for it.

It is the global CONTEXT that dictates the rise of the antichrist.

Satan has tried to launch his career in previous generations, (Hitler immediately comes to mind) but the TIMING was not yet right and his efforts went up in flames.

So what is significant to Bible prophecy is not so much WHO he is individually, but rather, that the timing is right for his appearance.

Assessment:

The fact that there are more than a half-million hits on the query string, “Obama antichrist” is powerful evidence that the timing is right. Whether or not Obama is actually the antichrist is irrelevant.

But he has many of the necessary credentials. He comes as a man of peace, promising to bring peace. (Revelation 6:2) He claims to be a Christian, but there are dark rumors swirling about that he secretly worships “the god of forces”[the religion of the sword]. (Daniel 11:38)

The antichrist is often pictured as either a Muslim or a Jew, since he will initially enjoy the support of both. Obama was born of an African Muslim and white American atheist, making him, in a sense, all things to all people.

Somebody has already traced Obama’s genealogy to Brad Pitt. If and when the time was right, finding a Jewish link in Obama’s family tree would not be that difficult.

While this is an American election, it is largely seen abroad in global terms, with many nations complaining they don’t have a voice. (Global polls show that if they did, it would be Obama in a landslide).

Although Obama claims to follow Jesus, his ties to the Nation of Islam run deep and he has gone on record preaching the gospel of “many ways to salvation”.

“And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1st John 2:18)

So, is Obama really the antichrist? (drum roll, please)

I dunno. Neither does anybody else.

Obama is as good a candidate as Javier Solana — actually, I think he is an even better fit. One can build at least as solid an argument.

The case for Solana is made largely on the strength of EU Resolution #666 which consolidated the power of the WEU and EU under a single office, which Solana now occupies.

But Solana doesn’t have the ethnic credentials, the religious credentials or the necessary power base for the job. A strong case could be made that Obama has all three.

The only problem is that America is not currently subject to a higher sovereign global governing authority.

(But that’s not really that big a problem — a few treaties like Kyoto and it would be. And with Obama in the White House, it certainly could be.)

It would not be the big a step from the White House to the UN, or whatever global authority replaces it.

So why am I making the case?

To show how easy a case it is to make. I could be completely wrong on Obama (and I probably am) but the fact is, it is a believable scenario only because the conditions are right for SOMEBODY to step up to the plate.

(If the real antichrist doesn’t show up soon, we’ll be forced to invent one.)

When asked to describe the times of the signs that would signal His return, Jesus outlined the events of the last days in detail, from the rise of new killer pestilences like AIDS to the fear of global warming.

He spoke of a world torn by wars and rumors of wars, religious persecution, false Christs and false teachers, and outlined in detail the antichrist’s coming reign of terror.

Jesus wasn’t so much outlining specific events as He was giving a general overview of the conditions that will set the stage for the Tribulation Period. It is the CONDITIONS that are relevant.

The name of the antichrist is much less relevant than the conditions that make his ascension to power possible. The Church will never know if they guessed right or not, so such speculation is more an exercise in intellectual arrogance than obedience to the Great Commission.

I don’t know if Barack Obama is the antichrist, and I don’t care. What is important is that it is an issue in the first place.

“For when these things BEGIN to come to pass, then look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh,” Jesus said.

Beginning to come to pass — isn’t that exactly what we are talking about right now?

The Logic of Anti-Semitism

The Logic of Anti-Semitism
Vol: 78 Issue: 28 Friday, March 28, 2008

One of the most enduring mysteries of the ages is, to my mind, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.

It doesn’t follow any logical pattern that could explain it — indeed, taken as a purely social phenomenon, it makes no sense whatever.

Anti-Semitism appears to be universal; it has existed in every generation, among every people, on every continent upon which the Jew has put his foot.

European anti-Semitism dates back to the days of the Roman Empire, but Jews have been the targets of discrimination and pogroms on every continent and virtually every nation on the earth.

There is no nation that can claim to be free of anti-Semitism, and at the same time, there is no nation that can credibly claim it was harmed by its indigenous Jewish population.

Although an infinitesimal fraction of the global population, Jews have been awarded a quarter of all the Nobel Prizes given in the 20th century for chemistry, economics, literature, peace, physics and medicine.

Even the nations of the Arab world could have peace with Israel for the asking. Yet there is no nation on earth more universally despised.

Some anti-Semites (those who admit to themselves that they are) will argue that the Jews are “Christ-killers” invariably citing Matthew 27:25 as their ‘proof text’.

“Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.”

That doesn’t explain anti-Semitism among non-Christians — in fact, it doesn’t even explain anti-Semitism among Christians.

The Jews who happened to be in the crowd self-pronounced the curse, but the entire nation wasn’t there — just the rabble.

In any case, it was Jesus Himself Who lifted that curse as soon as it was pronounced, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

And, finally, it wasn’t Jews that drove the nails through His hands and feet, or thrust a spear through his side. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment, imposed by Roman decree, carried out by Roman executioners, not for crimes against Judaism, but for crimes against the Roman Empire.

If the charge of ‘Christ-killer’ applies to the Jews, logic would dictate it would apply equally to the Italians.

Finally, Christians understand that Jesus was not executed for crimes against the Jews, or for crimes against Rome: those were simply the legal justifications under prevailing law at the time.

There is no nation, tribe or individual human being on this earth that did not play an equal role in His Death — He came to atone for the sins of all mankind.

And for three raging, horrific hours, the cumulative sin of the entire human race was heaped upon Him. Every person who ever sinned shares equal guilt with the Roman soldier who actually drove the spikes in His Body.

No, the “Christ-killer” label is an excuse to explain the existence of anti-Semitism.

It is not a reason for its existence in the first place.

Assessment:

Neither is the current conflict between Israel and the Arabs sufficient reason to explain anti-Semitism. In the first place, it predates modern Israel by 25 centuries.

But leaving that aside, this is the Modern Age of Enlightenment and Israel was born out the ashes of, if not the first, certainly the most successful effort at destroying the Jewish race in history.

The pitiful survivors of Europe’s madness dragged themselves back to their ancient homeland, where in a single generation, they turned a desert wasteland back into a land flowing with milk and honey.

Of all the nations carved from the empires of history, there is no greater rags-to-riches story than that of Israel.

A truly representative democracy surrounded by a sea of brutal dictatorships, it should shine as a beacon of hope to oppressed peoples everywhere.

Israel should, by all existing standards, be as much a beneficiary of ‘historical guilt’ as are Native Americans or African Americans, or Australian aborigines or any other historically oppressed peoples.

No matter what identifiable, historically oppressed ethnic group one compares to the Jews, there is no common denominator.

In the first place, a Jew is a person of a particular faith but of no particular ethnic background, as well as being a person of a particular background with no particular religious faith.

Moreover, those who explain their anti-Semitism on religious grounds generally don’t believe in the Jewish God anyway.

Jewish anti-Semitism is a fundamental tenet of Islam, and is cited as the principle reason for both the global jihad against the West and for the Islamic world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Despite this undeniable truth, the United Nations accepts every charge laid against Israel by the Islamic world, no matter how spurious.

At the same time, it routinely ignores open acts of war committed against the Jewish state by finding some moral equivalence between Israel’s refusal to commit suicide on demand and Islam’s refusal to recognize its right to exist.

Compare Israel’s ‘human rights violations’ — even the most transparently fictitious ones — to actual human rights violations ongoing in Islamic nations like the Sudan, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Syria’s Assad regime.

There are no mass graves in Israel. Yet more UN resolutions have been passed condemning Israel over the past sixty years than those passed against all the rest of nations of the world combined.

It defies logical explanation.

America has no more faithful or trusted an ally among all the nations of the world than it has in Israel. It is hard to imagine criticism emanating from Israel on a par with the kind of criticism routinely heaped on the US by its other close allies like Britain, France or even Canada.

And America has few enemies more virulent than the Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas.

But the US is basing its entire peace process on creating a terrorist state on Israel’s borders. Never in international history has a nation been created while its people were engaged openly in a war of annihilation with the nation sponsoring its creation.

No other nation on the face the earth would even countenance being put in such a situation, let alone being forced into such a suicidal situation by its closest ally.

This, too, defies logical explanation.

Anti-Semitism cannot be explained by the secular history of the world. It really can’t even be explained by the religious history of the world. If there is an historical instance of Jewish oppression of Christianity to justify it, I can’t find it.

I can’t even find much of a case for the oppression of the Arabs by Jews — not even by modern Israel.

I visited Israel in 1992 just before the Oslo Agreement, including Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Masada and the Dead Sea, now all part of the Palestinian Authority.

Not once did I hear a murmur of discontent. The Palestinians were thriving, tourist dollars were pouring in, roads were being built . . . if I were to visit today, I’d likely not come back alive.

Who or what turned it a war zone?

In 1993, Israel was prepared to turn the Palestinian Authority into the jewel of the Middle East. It would have stood as a testament to Israeli tolerance.

But the Palestinians couldn’t get beyond their blind hatred of the Jews, and as soon as the opportunity presented itself, they attacked. Why?

The rest of the world, particularly in the West, is neither blind nor stupid.

The Western diplomats who scold Israel for retaliating against unprovoked rocket attacks against civilian targets KNOW that they would react with far less restraint were they the ones on the receiving end of the rocket fire.

They KNOW that the war would end the second the Palestinians stopped attacking.

Yet they support the Palestinian right to launch unprovoked random attacks against Israeli targets and condemn Israel for pin-point retaliatory strikes aimed exclusively against the attackers as ‘disproportionate.’ Why?

Why does the world hate the Jews? What have the Jews ever done to the world?

They survived — not as Israelis, but as Jews. The world would have no problem with a secular Israel. Or with a Muslim Israel. What it cannot countenance is a JEWISH Israel. It cannot even explain why.

Both the world’s dominant religions, Christianity and Islam, are rooted in Judaism. Islam claims it descended from the Jewish patriarch, Abraham, and Christianity was founded in Jerusalem by a 1st century Jewish itinerant preacher.

Neither faith would exist without Judaism, and neither faith COULD exist without the continued existence of the Jews. Since both faiths were born out of Judaism, both would crumble without it.

You can’t pull a foundation from under a building and expect the ediface to continue to stand. That is simply logical. If Judaism is rooted in a false theology, so is Islam and Christianity.

Why would Christians or Muslims knowingly fight against their own God?

So global anti-Semitism doesn’t make logical sense politically, economically, socially or religiously. Yet it continues to thrive, despite its self-destructive nature.

There is but one logical explanation for anti-Semitism, and that explanation is spiritual. The Bible says that Satan is the god of this world, and that it is his goal to be worshiped as such.

The existence of Israel is a constant reminder to the god of this world that his days are numbered. His goal is to eradicate all traces of God from the face of the earth.

And standing in his way is the Jewish state of Israel. The Bible also says that the Jews are the Chosen People of God and that they will not only endure as a people to serve as God’s ‘ensign to the nations’ that He exists, but that their existence is evidence of His ability to keep His word.

“Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is His Name: If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me for ever.” (Jeremiah 31:35-36)

For Satan to win, God’s Word must return to Him void. Israel’s destruction would accomplish that goal. That’s why the world hates Israel, even though it cannot explain why. Because by Israel’s very existence it is an offense to the god of this world.

Therefore, the big question, since Israel DOES exist, revolves around its RIGHT to exist.

No other explanation makes logical sense.

Useful Idiots, Five Years Later

Useful Idiots, Five Years Later
Vol: 78 Issue: 27 Thursday, March 27, 2008

Back on September 30, 2002, six months before the US invasion, a group of liberal lawmakers travelled to Baghdad, from which place they angrily denounced their president and their country.

The lawmakers were Representative Jim McDermott [D–Wa] Representative David Bonior [D-Mi] and Representative Mike Thompson [D-Ca].

The reason they made the trip was to oppose the congressional resolution that was still being hammered out that would authorize military force against Iraq.

Congressman Jim McDermott, speaking from the enemy capital city, told ABC’s George Stephanopolis, (a former presidential advisor), that, when it comes to Iraq, the President of the United States would be only too happy to lie to the public.

“I think the president would mislead the American people,” Mr. McDermott said on ABC’s “This Week” about the president’s campaign for support for a military campaign against Iraq.

In the same news cycle, McDermott also told CNN that; “We don’t have to pass a resolution in the Congress or in the Security Council right now. Things are moving forward.”

Appearing on Fox News, McDermott said that America needs to ‘take Iraq at its word’, adding that “[The Bush administration] keeps “saying they want a regime change because they want control of the oil fields.”

(“Regime change” in Iraq was first articulated as official US policy by President William Jefferson Clinton in 1998 during the ‘Operation Desert Fox’ bombing of Baghdad.)

Remember the chant, “No blood for oil?” (Gas prices have jumped three hundred percent since the Bush administration, sensitive to the charge, refused to take control of Iraq’s oil fields.)

“The Iraqis we have talked to,” Representative Bonior chimed in from the enemy capital, “have said basically [inspectors] will have that unrestricted ability to go wherever they want to inspect.”

I won’t go over the mountains of evidence that suggest Saddam DID have a WMD program that he shipped to Syria.

As in the captured Iraqi documents that proved a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the evidence will eventually come to light, and, as in the al-Qaeda connection, nobody will believe the evidence anyway.

Their minds are already made up and are NOT to be confused by facts.

Be that as it may, back in September, 2002, it was obvious, at least to me, that they were serving as Saddam’s Useful Idiot Squad. (That statement back then earned me an avalanche of hate mail.)

Turns out the entire Congressional junket to Baghdad was paid for by Saddam Hussein himself.

Still wondering if Saddam found them useful?

Assessment:

The information came to light as a consequence of the trial of a former Iraqi intelligence agent named Muthanna al-Hanooti, whom the Associated Press described as “a Michigan charity official.”

Except the ‘charity’ was the Iraqi Oil-For-Food program, and al-Hanooti was rewarded for arranging the propaganda junket with two million dollars worth of Iraqi oil vouchers.

The ‘charity’ was “The Life For Relief and Development” set up after the first Gulf War to circumvent UN sanctions by funding ‘humanitarian work’ in Iraq. Of course, Bonior, McDermott and Thompson claim they ‘had no clue’ that Saddam was underwriting the trip.

Instead, they said they believed the charity (which was operating under Saddam’s protection, actively working against US Iraq policy, defending the Iraq regime and propagandizing against the US administration), paid for the trip, and therefore they are ‘innocent victims’.

(Is that not another way of admitting to being ‘useful idiots’ of an enemy government propaganda effort?)

If their denials are false, they are guilty of committing paid treason. If their denials are true, they stand convicted of the 2002 charge (laid by me,) accusing them of being Useful Idiots too blinded by partisanship to know the difference between dissent and treason.

They gave aid and comfort to the enemy, attacked their own government’s policies from an enemy capital, and now they claim they were ‘duped’ — as if it were a newly-discovered revelation.

(They could have read the September 30th Omega Letter and learned they were paid dupes of Saddam Hussein five years earlier.)

This revelation came to light, ironically enough, during the same week that a team of Harvard researchers concluded that public statements criticizing the war are responsible for a measurable ’emboldenment effect’ on al-Qaeda terrorists.

“According to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university’s Kennedy School of Government, periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq,” the UPI reported on the study.

“We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases,” says the study, published earlier this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a leading U.S. nonprofit economic research organization.

In Iraqi provinces that were broadly comparable in social and economic terms, attacks increased between 7 percent and 10 percent following what the researchers call “high-mention weeks,” like the two just before the November 2006 election.

The study also found that attacks increased more in parts of Iraq like Anbar province, where there is greater access to international news media, measured by the proportion of households with satellite TV, which its authors say increases the credibility of their findings.

So, what does it mean? It means that the Useful Idiots are, as the term implies, both ‘useful’ and ‘idiots’.

It means that when a Jim McDermott or a David Bonior (or a Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durban, Chuck Hegel etc., etc., ad nauseum) launches a partisan attack against the government, some American soldier serving in Iraq pays for their politics with his life.

Every time Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama promises an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the insurgents, believing they have the US on the ropes, go out and kill as many Americans as possible.

If they can’t get to any Americans, they kill Iraqi civilians.

It is so obvious that your humble correspondent, a person of average intelligence, and limited resources — and living in another country at the time — upon examining the same data, came to the exact same conclusion — five years ago. (Volume 12, Issue 30, Monday, September 30th, 2002)

So it is incomprehensible to me that anybody could credibly claim they were unaware of the US blood they were spilling as a consequence of their lust for power, their denials notwithstanding.

Every politician or media editorial that proclaims the surge a failure, or that the US lied to justify the war, or that the war was camouflage for stealing Iraqi oil, or calls for immediate withdrawal has US blood on his hands.

If they didn’t know when we did (five years ago) they certainly know now. Which is probably why the mainstream media has spiked this report.

I Googled the report’s lead author, Radha Iyengar, and got TWO hits; the UPI story, and one by the liberal advocacy group, NewsHounds (motto: We Watch Fox News So You Don’t Have To) slamming the study as ‘propaganda’.

(Propaganda for whom? America? By elected US representatives? Horrors! Or propaganda for the Bush administration? No similar left-wing criticism has been offered regarding McDermott & Co.)

ABC spiked the story, as did CBS, NBC, etc. The only major cable news mention came from Fox News, who mentioned it in passing during the half-hour news break.

(Am I the only one who wonders why a 24-hour news channel needs a five minute news break every thirty minutes?)

If the major mainstream news outlets DID cover the story, then they would pretty much have to admit that every time they criticized the US or called for an American withdrawal, they were deliberately calling for a new attack against US forces.

So they simply let the report’s conclusions die quietly of neglect.

What does that tell you? Here is what it tells me.

It tells me that the mainstream media and the antiwarrior politicians already KNEW that their coverage was responsible for increasing the US death toll in Iraq.

They KNEW that they were giving aid and comfort to the enemy all along.

If they had honestly just discovered that they had been useful idiots, unaware of their usefulness to the enemy, this report would be front page, above-the-fold news in every newspaper in the country. But it isn’t.

Because the headline would have to read, “US Lawmakers and Media Collude To Defeat United States War Effort.”

“Enemy propaganda report at eleven — stay tuned.”

A Perfect Storm

A Perfect Storm
Vol: 78 Issue: 26 Wednesday, March 26, 2008

If someone had told me a year ago that the Republican Party would retain control of the White House after the ’08 elections, I’d have wondered what they had been smoking.

The conventional wisdom since the mid-terms in ’06 was that the Dems would sweep both Houses of Congress and recapture the White House.

The same conventional wisdom dictated that it would be Hillary Clinton leading the charge.

Hillary’s ambitions have been an open secret since she first began to run for the Senate — so much so that she was forced to pledge to serve out her first term before throwing her hat in the ring. Then, along came that great Democratic messiah, Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama is a liberal’s dream; a black man of mixed race, with a checkered history to forgive, an Islamic heritage that threatens Western civilization; articulate, urbane and erudite . . . the perfect candidate to stick his thumb in the eye of the Republican Establishment.

And the best the GOP could come up with to challenge two history-making candidates is a broken down warhorse, a relic of a war we’d like to forget, whose conservative credentials are so thin that Ann Coulter vowed to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain became the GOP nominee.

Fortunately for America, not everybody is as willing to drive over a cliff rather than countenance a bumpy patch in the road as Ann is.

Assessment:

If Jeremiah Wright had been the pastor of an all-white separatist church with Nazi sympathies, nobody would be debating whether or not his church’s most loyal members might have racist tendencies.

But Jeremiah Wright was the pastor of an all-black separatist church with expressed sympathies for both al-Qaeda, and The Nation of Islam, and therefore, Barack Obama’s twenty-year membership in the Trinity United Church hasn’t proved fatal to his campaign.

His brilliantly crafted speech diverted attention away from the anti-American, pro-African and pro-Islamic nature of Wright’s rantings, convincing America it was all about race, instead. (And if anybody is to blame, it is ‘typical’ whites — like his racist grandmother.)

What makes it about ‘race’ is that racism is introduced as the motive for any criticism of Barack Obama, as is sexism if one criticizes Hillary.

If you criticize Obama, you’re a racist, if you criticize Hillary Clinton, you’re a misogynist, and if you DON’T criticize John McCain, you’re all that and more.

After all, John McCain was endorsed by anti-Catholic pastor John Hagee, say Obama’s supporters. (And George Bush spoke at Bob Jones University — but he’s not running.)

If I am understanding the argument correctly, its ok to be a racist or a liar — just look at the Republicans!

(In case you missed it, the central campaign theme for ’08 is ‘change’).)

The fact is, Obama’s 20 year membership in Wright’s church is NOT an equivalent to John McCain being endorsed by John Hagee, despite Obama’s apologists’ earnest contentions to the contrary.

Hagee endorsed McCain. That is not the same as McCain endorsing Hagee.

Obama attended Wright’s church for twenty years. That is a fairly strong endorsement of Wright’s preaching.

(Last year, Obama put $23,000.00 in Rev. Wright’s collection plate. I doubt McCain is even sure where Hagee’s church is.)

But Obama’s defenders are out there, making that case with a straight face, and hoping that if they talk fast enough, nobody will catch on.

And if they can’t pull it off, then they can always change the subject back to Hillary. . .

Early and often on the campaign trail, Hillary has described her harrowing trip into the heart of war-torn Bosnia as First Lady.

She described the plane corkscrewing in for a landing to avoid sniper fire, and running hunched over from the plane to the safety of their waiting cars. Hillary was accompanied on her Bosnian firefight by their daughter Chelsea.

At one point, she joked, “there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady.”

I’ll bet Bill had a laugh a minute as Hillary told the world that it was her husband’s policy to send his wife and sixteen year-old daughter on diplomatic missions that were too dangerous for him to risk.

But the Clintons stopped laughing when Sinbad started telling it, however. (The comedian was also on Hillary’s plane, together with singer Cheryl Crow.)

“It was too dangerous for the president. So he sent his wife and kid into combat along with a black comedian and a guitar player . . .”

The Clinton campaign slammed Sinbad, (noting he was an Obama supporter,) and staunchly defended Hillary’s version of events. Hillary included the sniper story in a speech as recently as last week.

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

But then CBS dredged up a videotape of the visit. It shows them smiling and waving as they walked at a leisurely pace across the tarmac from a cargo plane, stopping to shake hands with Bosnia s acting president and listen while an 8-year-old girl read them a poem. (Oooops)

It’s been said that the Clinton model is to tell a big lie when a little lie will do, and to tell little lies when the truth would work better. Leaving aside that her husband is a convicted perjurer, Hillary’s list is pretty impressive all by itself.

* During her campaign for Senate she claimed to be a life-long Yankees fan (she’s from Chicago)

* She claimed Palestinian ancestry when addressing Arabs, Jewish ancestry when addressing Jews, and gave Sufi Arafat a big hug following a speech in which Arafat accused Israel of deliberately infecting Palestinians with AIDS.

* She once claimed to have been named for famed mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary. (She was born five years BEFORE Sir Edmund became a household name by climbing Mount Everest)

* She claimed daughter Chelsea was at the Twin Towers on 9/11. (Chelsea was asleep on the other side of town)

* She once claimed to be a soccer star at school. (Her school didn’t have a soccer team)

* And of course, the Big One: “I had no idea that the vote to authorize the war with Saddam Hussein would lead to war.”

Hillary’s much-touted White House experience finally came shining through. Caught red-handed in a bald-faced lie, she coolly told a radio interviewer yesterday that she had merely ‘misspoken’.

You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things millions of words a day so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement, she said.

Later, she repeated her ‘explanation’ saying, “So, made a mistake. I’m human.”

Misspoke? Her recollection of being sent to war zones too dangerous for the president was part of a prepared speech!

Her re-telling of the tale just last Friday came directly from the text of her prepared speech. How does one ‘misspeak’ from a prepared speech? (On three separate occasions?)

It is as ridiculous as Obama’s claim that he didn’t know his pastor of twenty years was a ranting racist. And evidently to their respective supporters, just as acceptable an explanation.

In a democracy, it can be rightly observed that the people get the government that they deserve.

What are the choices, again? Oh yeah. A liar, a racist and a war hero.

Decisions, decisions.

Two Temples, No Jews?

Two Temples, No Jews?
Vol: 78 Issue: 25 Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Jerusalem Post ran a story this week about the long lines of tourists forced to wait in line for an hour or more before being allowed to visit Temple Mount.

“In a scene that has replayed itself over the last couple of weeks, the queue for non-Muslims to enter the site on Sunday morning stretched from the entrance to the compound at the Mughrabi Gate, adjacent to the Western Wall, all the way past the Dung Gate,” the paper reported.

According to Israel, the Temple Mount, currently occupied by the al Aqsa Mosque, is really the site of the threshing floor purchased from Araunah for fifty shekels of silver by King David of Israel.” (2nd Samuel 24:24)

But according to the Arabs, there was never a Jewish presence on Temple Mount prior to the construction of the al Aqsa Mosque by the Umayyads in 710 AD.

The structure has been rebuilt at least five times; it was entirely destroyed at least once by earthquakes. The last major rebuild was in 1035.

When the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, Al-Aqsa became the headquarters of the Templars until it was recaptured in 1187 by Saladin. It remained in Muslim hands from 1187 until the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

When the British captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Faisal al-Husseini, declared the al-Aqsa Mosque the ‘third holiest site in Islam’, claiming that it was ‘the furtherest mosque’ referred to by the Koran as the place where Mohammed ascended into heaven.

According to popular myth, the mosque had always been so regarded, but its very construction argues against it. Among Caliph Omar ib Khattib’s, (who captured Jerusalem in 638) advisors was a converted Jew named Ka’ab El Akhbar.

He proposed the mosque be built on the northern side of the Temple Mount so that worshippers could worship at the mosque while facing both the Mosque and Mecca.

Omar rejected the proposal as an attempt at “Judaizing” Islam and the mosque was subsequently built in the south, where the present-day el Aqsa stands.

Its construction forces worshippers turn their backs to the mosque in order to face Mecca.

In addition, the inside of the al-Aqsa mosque is ringed with verses from the Koran. The one verse NOT found among them is the one about the ‘Night Journey’ where Mohammed ascended into heaven from the furtherest mosque.

Finally, during the thousand-year Islamic occupation of the Holy Land, the city of Jerusalem, allegedly the third holiest city in Islam, languished, forgotten in its little corner of the Ottoman Empire.

In all those centuries, through a succession of Muslim conquerers, not once was Jerusalem ever elevated to the status of even a provincial capital.

It occupies no special place in Islamic history, was given no special status, and, until it was captured by the British, was simply another city in the Ottoman province of Southern Syria.

These three facts combine to provide strong evidence that the Muslims had not associated the al-Aqsa mosque with the ‘furtherest mosque’ until long after its construction in the 7th century.

That is one version of history, and it is the version that existed for about a thousand years.

The other version, the one invented by Faisal al-Husseini in 1917, is the version under which the rest of the world is operating.

According to this version, there was never a significant Jewish presence in what the Arabs call Palestine.

There was never a Jewish Temple within the walls of the city, and Israel’s claim is an historical invention designed to allow the Jews to seize control of Arab lands.

By 1967, the revised version was so ingrained in the public psyche that Moshe Dayan surrendered control back to the Muslim Waqf immediately after capturing it in the Six Days War to preempt UN calls for an Israeli withdrawal from the newly-captured West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights.

In this revised view, Judaism’s holiest site on earth is actually an Islamic holy place under Israeli occupation.

Assessment:

We opened by discussing the long lines of non-Muslim tourists this year waiting for their chance to visit the Temple Mount.

The visitors were, for the most part, Christians.

The Jerusalem Post noted that nearly 240,000 non-Jewish tourists were permitted by the Islamic Waqf to visit the Temple Mount this year — an increase of forty percent over last year.

But only 5,200 Jews have been permitted to visit the Temple Mount — and they live there!

Try and see it from the perspective of an observant Jew.

The Temple Mount, purchased by King David as an eternal possession, the site of both Solomon’s and Herod’s Temples, a place so holy that, in Jesus’ day, non-Jews who entered the sanctuary were put to death.

Today, anyone can tread the same ground upon which David placed the Ark of the Covenant — except Jews.

If the situation was infuriating before, it is even more infuriating in light of recent archeological discoveries.

On February 28, an excavation in Jerusalem’s Old City of David uncovered bits of pottery and several seals dating to the 8th century BC.

The discovery should have been front page news worldwide; here was incontrovertible evidence of a Jewish presence at precisely the time and place recorded by Scripture. But it barely made the back pages.

That shouldn’t have been too surprising, when one thinks about it. The Western Wall of Solomon’s Temple stands in the middle of Jerusalem for all to see.

Despite its commanding presence, the myth of a late Jewish presence in Jerusalem remains the UN’s default political position.

This week, the dig at the City of David, conducted less than a hundred yards west of Temple Mount, uncovered more remains from Solomon’s First Temple period. The dig first revealed the remains of a magnificent colonnaded street from the Late Roman period (2nd century AD).

The Romans had built a road over the older site, which effectively prevented the site from being looted over the millennia.

Under the road, among the artifacts found at the dig was a personal seal inscribed with the name of its owner, “Netanyahu ben Roush.”

Since it was during the Netanyahu administration that Arafat officially claimed there was never a Jewish historical presence on Temple Mount, finding a seal inscribed with Netanyahu’s name is particularly ironic.

In addition to the personal seal, a vast number of pottery vessels were discovered in the dig, including three jar handles that bear stamped impressions.

An inscription in ancient Hebrew script is preserved on one these impressions and it reads: “[belonging] to the king of Hebron.”

The discovery marks the first time in the history of Jerusalem archeological research that building remains from the First Temple period have been exposed so close to the Temple Mount.

At last! The historical mystery has been solved. The most controversial question of our time has been put to rest. The Jews did not steal Arab land, they reclaimed their ancestral homeland.

Nobody has ever dug up anything with Arafat’s family name on it, but Netanayahu’s Holy Land heritage dates back to the 8th century before Christ.

As I said earlier, this should be front page news! The truth is revealed, and the truth shall set you free!

But it isn’t. And it didn’t.

It isn’t even back page news. Search Google News for the words “1st Temple Period” and there are exactly TWO news reports on the archeological find — and BOTH of them are from the Jerusalem Post.

Think of it! This discovery completely destroys the working principle behind the peace process, which is that Israel was carved out of an Arab country and given to the Jews.

The entire Arab claim rests on the fact the Jews are ‘occupying’ stolen Arab territory.

The claim is accepted by the UN, the EU, the majority of UN member states, and it is a bedrock article of faith to the Islamic world. If true, then Israel owes the Arabs it displaced.

If not, then the Arab claim collapses.

So instead, the world just looks the other way and pretends it doesn’t know any better.

“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. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.” (Zechariah 12:2-3)

And the conflict rages on.

The Defiance of the Dhimmis

The Defiance of the Dhimmis
Vol: 78 Issue: 24 Monday, March 24, 2008

For what it is worth, I have to admit that Pope Benedict’s mitre seems to be a tad larger than those of previous pontiffs.

As part of his Easter service, the Pope took time to preside over the official conversion of a prominent Italian Muslim to Catholicism, pouring holy water over Magdi Allam’s head to baptize him into the Catholic Church.

The Union of Islamic Communities in Italy — which Allam has frequently criticized as having links to Hamas — was surprisingly uncritical, saying the baptism was his own decision.

“He is an adult, free to make his personal choice,” the Apcom news agency quoted the group’s spokesman, Issedin El Zir, as saying.

For his part, Allam said he never really was a Muslim in the spiritual sense: “I was never practicing,” he told reporters. “I never prayed five times a day, facing Mecca. I never fasted during Ramadan.”

He did admit to making the haj to Mecca in 1991 with his deeply religious mother, but said he did it for her, rather than for himself.

Allam credited his decision to convert to Catholicism to the fact he was under an Islamic death sentence.

The deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, Allam, 55, told the Il Giornale newspaper in a December interview that his criticism of Palestinian suicide bombing generated threats on his life in 2003, prompting the Italian government to provide him with a sizable security detail.His recent book, “Viva Israel” (“Long Live Israel”) was a product of his disgust with Islamic militancy.

“Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life. And I discovered that behind the origin of the ideology of hatred, violence and death is the discrimination against Israel. Everyone has the right to exist except for the Jewish state and its inhabitants,” he said.

“Today, Israel is the paradigm of the right to life.”

Assessment:

As noted earlier, there wasn’t much of an outcry from the Muslim community at Allam’s conversion. Even Egypt’s highest Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa opposed taking retaliatory action against Allam, saying whatever punishment Allam is due for his apostasy would be administered in the afterlife.

There were the usual threats from the usual suspects within the ranks of the jihadis, but for the most part, the loudest expressions of horror came, not from the Islamic world, but from the Western media.

Canada’s National Post lamented the conversion ceremony, saying, “Most observers recognized that something had been lost as well as gained in the spiritual transition of Magdi Allam, deputy editor of Italy’s top newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. As a Catholic . . . whatever moral weight his words may have carried with Muslims before may now be lost.”

However, since there wasn’t much of a current hue and cry about Allam, the Post had to dredge up the case of Salman Rushdie to demonstrate how Muslims are supposed to react to apostates.

“Allam is in danger of having the same rules applied to him,” the Post suggested helpfully, since it was obviously concerned that the Muslim world was missing the opportunity to rise up in righteous anger.

“He understands the risk he is taking. His conversion must be regarded as sincere: he took the new name “Cristiano” along with his first sacraments, and in an open letter to his boss, printed in the Corriere on Sunday, he spoke of “the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ” and of having found “the true and only God, the God of Faith and Reason”.”

“There, Muslims! Take that! Are you angry, yet? (Photographers are standing by!)”

The London Times warned that the move would revive memories of “the fury that greeted Pope Benedict s speech at Regensburg University in 2006 in which he appeared to brand Islam as inherently violent by quoting a Byzantine emperor.”

In case the Islamic world didn’t understand what an insult had been handed them by the Pope, the Times’ quoted some of Allam’s most incendiary statements, including one in which he explained;

“I had to do this. Beyond extremists and Islamist terrorism at the global level, the root of evil is inherent in a physiologically violent and historically conflictual Islam.

Osama bin Laden got the message, even if the rest of the Muslim world did not. He had previously accused the Pope of launching a ‘new Crusade’ against Islam and called on the Muslim faithful to ‘rise up’ against Israeli and American targets in ‘retaliation’ — although the Pope is neither Jewish nor American.

But the ones who were most aghast at the Pope’s audacity weren’t the Muslims, but Western latte liberals and the media elite who, truth to tell, are just as anxious to see the eventual clash between civilizations as Osama is.

To them, Western Christianity is no less an evil than Wahabbi Islam, and the sooner the two sides wipe each other out, the better. Once the smoke clears, they apparently believe that they will be the only ones left standing to pick up the pieces.

So if there is going to be a religious war, then we’d better get on with it and get it out of the way.

It is bizarre. The global press is angry at the Pope for converting a Muslim to Catholicism, anticipating a violent Islamic backlash.

This particular conversion took place at the Vatican, in Rome. The Vatican is an independent city-state populated entirely by officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

None of the reports I read failed to quote Yaha Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, vice-president of the Italian Islamic Religious Community.

“What amazes me is the high profile the Vatican has given this conversion. Why could he have not done this in his local parish?”, he asked to widespread agreement. All agree a secret conversion would have been best.

If Catholics can’t perform a conversion ceremony inside their own Catholic country without fearing an Islamic backlash, then the dhimmitude of the Western media is complete.

All that remains is for the rest of us to catch up — and they are working on it.

Why Call It “Good”?

Why Call It “Good”?
Vol: 78 Issue: 22 Saturday, March 22, 2008

According to Christian tradition, the Friday before Easter is called “Good Friday” because it is the day that Jesus Christ was crucified. GOOD Friday?

I can recall as a kid growing up in a Catholic school thinking it more than a little strange that all those nuns said they loved Jesus, but celebrated the day of His execution as a “Good” day.

Indeed, as a kid, I thought the designation “Good Friday” was evidence that they really didn’t LIKE Him very much, despite their protestations of love. My mother had passed away when I was only ten. I didn’t think that the day that she died was a ‘good’ day for me.

There are lots of possible reasons why the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion is designated “Good” in English. One is that the word ‘good’ was derived from the word “God”.

Our word ‘goodbye’ came from the phrase “God be with you,” so, according to that line of thinking, “Good Friday” would have originated from the phrase “God’s Friday.”

But I think it is less a case of the metamorphosis of language than it is an apt description of the Event that took place on that Friday before Passover two thousand years ago.

The execution of Jesus Christ was an event of incredible evil. He was guilty of no infraction, violated no laws, either Mosaic or Roman civil, and His betrayal was orchestrated, the Bible says, by Satan himself.

“And after the sop Satan entered into him [Judas]. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.” (John 13:27)

But while the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was an act of unspeakable evil, it was a necessary part of God’s Plan for the redemption of our sin debt.

And the manner in which He accomplished was a demonstration of His Power over good and evil, using pure evil to bring about pure good.

“Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1st Corinthians 2:8)

But why was Good Friday necessary? We’ve gone over this before, but not in several years. Good Friday is the perfect day to revisit the topic. Why did Jesus have to die?

The Scripture says God’s Justice demands a sacrifice, but for most Christians contending with the skeptic, that answer is unsatisfactory.

The explanation that only a sinless man was qualified to take on the sins of the world makes sense, but it doesn’t answer the nuts-and-bolts question of why He had to die. Not fully.

The answer to the nuts-and-bolts legalities is found, not in the New Testament, but rather in the Old.

In Genesis Chapter 15, we find Abram questioning God’s promise that his seed will be numbered as the stars of heaven and that they would inherit the land to which God had led him.

Genesis 15:6 says “And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”

But Abram wanted a guarantee, nonetheless.

“And he [Abram] said, LORD God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (15:8)

It was then that God proposed a blood covenant after the manner of the Chaldeans. “And he [God] said unto him, [Abram] Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”

Abram knew what to do next. A Chaldean himself, this was something he was familiar with.

“And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.”

The blood covenant worked this way. The animals were slaughtered and cut up. The pieces were intermingled and then carefully arranged to form a kind of aisle through which the two parties to the covenant would walk together, hands joined.

The principle of a blood covenant, and the symbolism of the rended animal parts was clearly understood to Abram. Whoever broke the covenant would end up like those piles of animals.

A blood covenant was, by common custom, a joining of 2 or more persons, families, clans, tribes, or nations, where the participants agree to do or refrain from doing certain acts. More specifically, God had proposed a patriarchal covenant.

The patriarchal form of covenant is a self-imposed obligation of a superior party, to the benefit of an inferior party. In this form, the terms the parties use to refer to each other are: father and son.

God’s proposal included not only Abram, but extended to Abram’s seed forever.

(Galatians 3:29 makes plain that Christians are also “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”)

To summarize, Abram has just prepared a blood covenant between himself and God in which his seed would forever be bound to God as heirs. To be an heir, under the implied terms of the covenant, also required being faithful to the Father. Abram understood those terms and waited for God to appear.

Consider the picture. Abram waited, driving away the carrion eaters from his grisly creation, waiting for God Himself to come down, join hands with Abram and together, they would swear a blood oath. God would be the Father of Abram and his descendents, who would then be required behave as sons to keep that covenant.

Genesis 15:12 records that, as Abram waited for God, a deep sleep fell upon him. During that deep sleep;

“it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:” (Genesis 15:17-18)

And there’s the key! While the covenant was between Abram and God, by passing through the aisle alone, God signed the contract — alone — for both sides, binding Himself to keeping both parts.

We know that Abram’s seed did NOT remain faithful to the covenant. And violating the blood covenant demanded that somebody had to die. That was what justice required.

The Apostle Paul was, before his conversion on the road to Damascus, a Pharisee, or a religous lawyer, one well qualified to explain the law of covenant oaths.

As Paul explains, “Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. (Galatians 3:9)

Further, that “they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.” (3:9)

And also, “But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, The just shall live by faith.” (3:11)

Of the covenant that God signed on behalf of Abraham, Paul explains; “Though it be but a man’s covenant, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannulleth, or addeth thereto.” (3:15)

The covenant could only be confirmed when the price demanded for its violation was paid in full.

When the Law was given to Moses four centuries later, it was assumed by the Jews that to break it was to break the Abrahamic Covenant, for which the penalty was death. Remember, somebody had to die.

But since it was God Who signed on behalf of Abraham, Paul pointed out the blood penalty required of the covenant was paid in full on Good Friday.

“And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.”

Why did Jesus have to die? Because the covenant demanded satisfactory payment for its violation, and no one who had broken that covenant was qualified to stand in payment except those who signed it. Abram was long dead. And, in any case, it was God Who signed on behalf of Abram (and his seed).

It is for that reason that God stepped out of eternity and into space and time in the Person of Jesus Christ. To keep the provisions of the original covenant and be a true Son of Abraham, as it demanded.

Once having kept its terms on behalf of sinful humanity, it was incumbent upon Him to make payment, as justice demanded, for its violation by those on whose behalf the covenant was signed.

To be torn and rended like the animals that formed the corridor through which God alone passed.

To make restitution on behalf of the seed of Abraham. You. Me. And everyone who ever broke its provision of faithfulness. All of us.

Jesus made that payment on our behalf. On the Cross, as He gave up the ghost, Jesus cried with a loud voice ‘it is finished’ (Tetelestai!) meaning, “paid in full.”

The terms of the violated Covenant were met, its price was paid by its Signer. God’s justice was fulfilled. That is why Jesus took on a human form and allowed Himself to be crucified by His own creation. That is the reason the Blood of Christ is so precious. Why nothing less would do.

Because justice demanded it. And because justice was satisfied, a lost sinner need only accept the Pardon obtained at the Cross as full payment for his sins to obtain eternal life. Because of Good Friday, “Whosoever shall call upon the Name of the Lord SHALL be saved.” (Romans 10:13)

Our sin debt was paid in full on Good Friday. The only thing now separating God from man is human pride. Accepting by faith the pardon obtained for us at the Cross is a humbling experience.

We’ve noted in the past that God’s way is not our way, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. Indeed, God’s way is usually the exact opposite of human thinking. Christians obtain victory by surrendering. We obtain eternal life through the Death of Christ, but to achieve eternal life one has to first die.

“Good” Friday is the day that commemorates the greatest evil ever perpetrated in the history of mankind. But as it turned out, it was the worst day possible for the forces of evil. It marked the first introduction of pure good to this old world since the Fall of Man.

“He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes WE are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5)

Happy Easter season!

The Logic of the Cross

The Logic of the Cross
Vol: 78 Issue: 21 Friday, March 21, 2008

Roughly one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five years ago, a Jewish itinerant preacher was tried, convicted and executed by Roman decree, on charges of sedition against the state.

When He was arrested by the Roman authorities, His friends, fearing arrest themselves, left Him to face the music alone. One of His closest and most loyal friends denied knowing Him on three separate occasions. Once followed by thronging crowds, only His mother and a couple of friends stood by Him to the end.

And thus ends the story of Jesus of Nazareth, just another victim of Roman ‘justice’ like the thousands of other unnamed and forgotten Jewish rebels that shared a similar fate.

Or, at least, that is where is SHOULD have ended.

Historically speaking, at the time of His Death, Jesus Christ was just another rebel in a land teeming with rebels. When He preached of the Kingdom of Heaven, his followers didn’t understand the term the way that we do.

The sages understood the time of the Judges, when Israel was ruled by Heaven through God’s appointed judges, as the Kingdom of Heaven He promised to restore.

Even His disciples didn’t understand what He was talking about until after they received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

“When they therefore were come together, they asked of Him, saying, Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)

They, like the rest, expected an earthly Jewish kingdom ruled by Jews, restored to the glory it had at its peak under King David.

When their dreams of a restored Kingdom of Israel died on a Roman cross, the event was too insignificant to merit the attention of the historians of the time. Only a few, like Tertius or Flavius Josephus mention it, and then, only in passing.

Crucifixion was common enough, but it was a grisly business, difficult to discuss without repulsing the reader. Although Imperial Rome imposed it on hundreds of thousands during its reign, historians recorded few details of the process itself.

By either chance or design, death by crucifixion served to erase the condemned from memory. It wasn’t talked about, so neither were its victims.

On Good Friday, 1975 years ago, it looked like Jesus Christ was on the fast track to historical irrelevance, just another voice of one crying out from the wilderness.

A voice seemingly silenced forever — by a death too gruesome to discuss in polite company.

Assessment:

Now, imagine you are one of His chosen disciples. You have just seen all your hopes and dreams shattered by the Roman executioners. Not only that, but you aren’t that proud of yourself, either.

For three years, you followed the Master. You personally witnessed His miracles, from walking on water to feeding multiplied thousands with a young boy’s lunch to healing the sick and raising the dead.

You heard His wisdom; you felt His Power, witnessed His Transfiguration . . . and when the chips were down and it was time to take a stand, you folded up like a Wal Mart lawn chair.

You ran and hid like a coward, not daring to show your face for fear you’d share His fate.

(And you once had the nerve to ask Him if you could sit at His right Hand!)

He faced His enemies alone, without a friend to speak up for Him — including you, who promised NEVER to forsake Him.

On Good Friday, 1975 years ago, the last thing on any of their minds was writing a detailed record of their own failures. They just wanted to put the entire sordid experience behind them and move on.

He had forsaken everything to teach and prepare them, and when the time came, they not only betrayed Him by deserting Him, they never had a chance to beg His forgiveness afterwards.

To those who loved Him best, Good Friday, 1975 years ago, was anything BUT ‘good’.

And it was the LAST story in the world they wanted to spread throughout the land.

“He made big promises, we made big promises, then He died and we all ran away and hid.”

If you were hiding somewhere in Jerusalem on Good Friday, 1975 years ago, that was your story. Not a very inspiring story, if that was where it ended.

Every Easter, we are bombarded by secular apologists telling us that is where the story really DID end.

Jesus was dead; His followers were all in hiding, but while they were in hiding for their lives (and after seeing what happened to Jesus,) instead of fading quietly into the countryside, they entered into a conspiracy to perpetuate the same ‘myth’ that put Jesus on the Cross in the first place.

They made up the whole Resurrection story to keep the movement alive, and then legend took over, the argument goes.

If the story really DID end at Golgotha, would YOU want to face the same risk that you had just abandoned your best Friend to His Death in order to avoid? Well, would you?

Would anybody?

IF it ended at Golgotha, then what changed every single one of the cowards who fled Jesus on that day to later face death unflinchingly rather than deny Him a second time?

Moreover, what made these guys, who were so self-centered they used to argue over who would sit at His right Hand in some misty, undefined future kingdom, choose to disclose the details of their greatest moment of personal failure, weaving those unflattering self-revelatory details into the fabric of what they already KNEW a monstrous lie?

Since most of it was a lie anyway, why be so brutally hard on themselves?

The Archbishop of Canterbury is on record as doubting the Resurrection as an actual historical event. This defies logic. If the Resurrection wasn’t an historical event, then it ended at Golgotha — and the Apostles knew it.

Every single event from the Cross forward was a lie, and the New Testament record of their zeal to propagate that lie is equally unreliable. THIS is the argument put forth every Easter by the secularists as the epitome of ‘rational thought.’

No logical alternative explanation for why the Apostles chose death over denial of what they KNEW, by definition, was a myth. To plug THAT hole, critics say the story was ‘harmonized’ later as the Bible was being assembled by the Nicean Council.

But nobody ever goes back to Good Friday, 1975 years ago, where they claim it all ended, to explain with any degree of credibility, why it didn’t. Because if Jesus was not raised on the first day of the week, where He subsequently appeared to more than five hundred witnesses (1st Corinthians 15:6) then it SHOULD have.

Christianity SHOULD have died with Jesus, and on Good Friday 1975 years ago, to all intents and purposes, it did.

And it would have STAYED dead, but Christianity was raised with Jesus Christ on the third day, and today, it is real enough to have the secularists jumping through logical hoops every Easter season trying to prove its all a myth.

For those who demand empirical evidence of the Resurrection, the existence of the question is all the evidence logic demands.

Had it really ended on Good Friday, 1975 years ago at the Cross, nobody would be asking the question in the first place.

When Jesus appeared to John on the Island of Patmos, He identified himself as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning AND the end.

The logic of Christianity is that it began where it ended — without the Cross, there could be no Resurrection. And without the Resurrection, there is no reason to remember the Cross.

To the secularist, this is an unacceptable conundrum, despite the fact his best alternative explanation leaves him with no reason for Christianity to exist for him to question.

It is a logical circle from which he can’t escape, because he can’t see he’s inside the circle.

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” 1st Corinthians 2:14)

As foolish as his argument is, he can’t see it for the foolishness of his own wisdom.

“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.” (1st Corinthians 3:19)

So every year, the annual bombardment of articles questioning the ‘truth’ of the Resurrection continues without their ever seeing the answer is contained inside the very question they are so focused on.

It is as baffling to the natural mind as is the reason we Christians call this day “Good Friday”.

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.” (1st Corinthians 1:18)

Lukewarm Christianity

Lukewarm Christianity
Vol: 78 Issue: 20 Thursday, March 20, 2008

According to a survey carried out by the British theological think-tank, “Theos” one person in three between the ages of 18 and 24 did NOT know where Jesus Christ was born.

One in ten respondents to the survey thought that Jesus was born in Nazareth.

One in four didn’t know that an angel told Mary she would give birth to the Son of God. (Those respondents thought she had been informed by the shepherds)

In all, “Theos” asked a total of four questions of a representative group of 1015 people across Britain in a telephone survey.

Here are the questions, as asked of respondents in the survey:

1) According to the story in the Christian Bible, where was Jesus born? (One in four didn’t know)

2) Who told Mary she would give birth to a Son? (One in three didn’t know)

3) Who was Jesus cousin? (Half did not know)

4) Where did Joseph, Mary and Jesus go to escape from King Herod when Jesus was a young child? (77% didn’t know)

For the record . . . Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Mary was informed by an angel, John the Baptist was first cousin to Jesus and the family fled into Egypt to escape Herod.

Only SEVEN PERCENT of Britons between the ages of 18-24 aced the questionnaire. The most knowledgeable demographic was the group aged between 55-64.

And among the most knowledgeable Britons, a mere EIGHTEEN PERCENT — less than one in five — answered all four questions correctly.

Or, put another way, EIGHTY-TWO percent of British adults between the ages of 55 and 64 COULDN’T answer all four questions correctly.

Commenting on the results of the survey, Paul Wooley, director of Theos, was unsurprised.

“No-one seriously thinks that being a Christian or a member of the established Church is the same thing as being British today. But, at the same time, if we are serious about social cohesion we can’t afford to ignore the stories that have bound us together as a culture for a thousand years.”

Assessment:

It is difficult to reconcile the survey results with the nation that gave the English-speaking world the King James Bible.

America was founded by British Christians in pursuit of religious freedom.

Until the dawn of the 20th century, Britain led the world in bringing Christ to the nations.

Indeed, until early days of the 20th century, the word ‘missionary’ without the word ‘British’ preceding it was only half a word.

The London Missionary Society was an extensive Anglican and Nonconformist missionary society formed in England in 1795 with missions in the islands of the South Pacific and Africa.

The Anglican Missionary Society spread throughout the 18th and 19th century, establishing the world-wide Anglican communion, once second only to the Catholic Church in its universality.

English Christian culture reached its peak during the Victorian Era, during which time, blasphemy against God, Christ, Christianity or the Bible was a punishable crime.

(It is worth noting that, at the same time, the British Empire reached its zenith, giving rise to the saying, “the sun never sets on the British flag.”)

A century later, the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury made headlines when he questioned the Divinity of Christ and the veracity of the Resurrection story.

(And today, the sun sets on the British flag every day at the same time it sets over London. Make of that what you will, but facts are facts.)

Many Bible scholars over the centuries have noted a correlation between the descriptions contained in the Seven Letters to the Seven Churches and seven identifiable periods (or epochs) within the Church.

1) Ephesus corresponded to the Apostolic Church of the 1st century (33-100).

2) The Church at Smyrna was the Persecuted Church under the Caesars (100-312)

3) The Church at Pergamos corresponds with the early Roman Church founded by Constantine (312-590)

4) The Church at Thyatira (The “Dark Ages”) corresponded with the period when the Vatican kept the Bible under lock and key and persecuted non-Catholic Christians as ‘heretics’ (590-1517)

5) The Church at Sardis corresponds to the Reformation Era (1517-1750)

6) The Church at Philadelphia (the ‘missionary Church) corresponds to the Great Revival period during which the Gospel was introduced around the world (1750-1925)

7) The Church of Laodicea (the apostate Church) corresponds to the rise of the Christian ‘ecumenical movement’ the first ‘Ecumenical Council’ the Federal Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, etc. (1925-the Rapture)

The spirit of the Church at Philadelphia is embodied by the historical phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” reportedly utter by Charles Stanley, when, at long last, he ended his search for missing British missionary David Livingstone.

(It is indicative of the British Christian missionary zeal of the 19th century that Dr. Livingstone had no desire to be ‘rescued’, and subsequently died in Africa.)

A hundred or so years later, one in four of his countrymen can’t name the birthplace of Christ.

Of the final epoch of the Church Age, Jesus says, “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16)

But take heart, Christian! Although Christ had zero words of commendation for the overall Church of the Last Days, He did not abandon us.

“As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” (Revelation 3:20)

There can be little doubt that we are deep into the Laodicean era. How deep is a matter of conjecture, but the Times of the Signs suggest we are in its waning hours.

“For when these things BEGIN to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” (Luke 21:28)