Israel IS the issue
By Stan Goodenough
Prophezine's Jerusalem Corespondent
A number of developments in the final days of the American presidential campaign have been interesting, to say the least.
Specifically I am thinking of the following:
On October 28 Joe ‘The Plumber’ Wurzelbacher, was filmed on the stump for John McCain answering a provocative question by American Jew, Stan Chapman, who asked whether he agreed that “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel.”
Replied the plumber: “I’ll go ahead and agree with you on that.”
Also on October 28, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin identified yet another shady character associated with Barack Obama, PLO sympathizer and enemy of Israel, Rashid Khalidi
A few days earlier, leftists leaped gleefully on the news that 75,000 Jewish voters had received an email from Pennsylvania Republicans which, they charged, compared the rise of Barak Obama with the rise of Adolf Hitler, and warned American Jews against silently accepting this dangerous development.
Of note on this side of the Atlantic is that the extreme leftist daily Ha’aretz - which has been trumpeting the “news” that Israeli Jews overwhelmingly support Obama - ran this story on its website for at least five full days. It was this newspaper, and not the original report on the New York Times Politics Blog (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/pennsylvania-republicans-send-false-anti-obama-e-mail/) that actually scored the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s “Victory 2008” committee for “likening Obama vote to rise of Hitler.”
All the Republican email actually said was “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008. Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let’s not make a similar one this year!” The main concern expressed by the NYT was that the email had “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud’’ and that Obama was “associated with a known terrorist, William Ayers, who thought the terrorists didn’t do enough on 9/11.”
Hitler’s name was not so much as mentioned in the original.
For Ha’aretz, however, this was the main crime, that Republicans would DARE to infer that Obama was a comparable threat to the perpetrator of the Holocaust. One of the effects - and I strongly suspect that it is the desired effect - of such eruptions of outrage at any suggestion that another genocidal destruction of Jews could be in the offing is that everyone shies almost violently away from drawing any such links.
Wurzelbacher, drilled about his acquiescence with the death of Israel question by Fox News‘ Shepard Smith, said he was simply offering his “personal opinion that I’ve come up with by looking into different facts,” but that “you don’t want my opinion on foreign policy. I know just enough about foreign policy to probably be dangerous.”
Reacting after the interview, Smith said “it just gets frightening sometimes.” The popular Fox anchor stressed that Obama “has said and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States.”
But let’s take a cool-headed approach to this issue. Let me ask the real, reasonable question:
Could the existential threat to Israel increase under a President Barack Obama?
It’s Chapman’s question, just worded differently. And our choice of words is doubtless important. Throw too radical a sentence out there and people recoil; you lose them. Gently float a more cautiously phrased query, and your audience sleeps on, interpreting the calmness of your words to mean that, after all, the threat isn’t all that real; the danger not all that great.
In a world where devout Muslims are defiantly determined to get their hands on nuclear weapons, and where resurgent Russians under a KGB-trained killer is again extending its military reach and its belligerence, the danger could hardly be greater for the Judeo-Christian world (or what’s left of it). And it could hardly be greater for Israel.
Shep Smith’s defense of Obama’s pledges to Israel only add to this threat.
Sensitize your spirit, reader, and you will recognize that the Israel question - and relations between America and the Jewish people - has repeatedly surfaced at this very late stage in the day because it is a major issue. I would say, THE major issue. Is the enemy tipping his hand?
Two days ago I wrote to the American intercessor Dutch Sheets after reading his recent email appeal for prayer for the elections. An excerpt:
“Although a non-American, I very much share your deep concern for your country - so much so that I have made numerous visits to speak to churches and home groups there during the last few years - including a year-long extended speaking tour with my wife and our five children, during which we travelled through 35 states across the country. Over the past two years I have been there five times, and most recently I toured the south eastern United States for three weeks in September.
I also fully share your convictions about the moral ills plaguing your great nation. My personal belief is that the United States was indeed established by God, founded by truly godly men, and heavily invested in by the Almighty in order that it be that “city on a hill” envisaged by John Winthrop and proclaimed by Ronald Reagan.
From where I stand it is quite apparent to me - as an “outsider” - that a furious war is raging for your national soul. As you have clearly identified them, the battle lines are most clearly drawn on the fields of abortion, the homosexuals’ attack on marriage and other morality erosion, and the freedom to pray in schools and otherwise publicly express the Christian faith.
As comprehensive as your sweep is, however, it has one glaring gap. The issue of Israel.
Dear Brother - the question of Israel and America’s relationship with this land and nation is, I believe, THE PARAMOUNT ISSUE upon which your nation will be judged and, in fact, is being judged even by the threat of an Obama victory next week.
As we read in Joel 3, in these days and at this time when God brings back the captives of Judah and Jerusalem, He will also gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and will enter into judgement with them there NOT ON ACCOUNT OF ABORTION, ‘GAY’ MARRIAGE etc, but “on account of My people, My heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations; they have also divided up My land.”
As I would be happy to share with you at length, I know that America has blessed Israel in some pretty amazing ways over the last 100 years. While all the glory goes to the Lord, He has in a very real way allowed the United States to preserve Israel, even against destruction. There is no question in my mind that God has honored His pledge to “bless those who bless” the seed of Abraham by abundantly blessing America.
At the same time, it is the United States that, for the last at least 20 years, has been spearheading the global effort to force Israel to relinquish its hold over, and claim to, the cradle of Jewish civilization, Israel’s biblical heartland, and to allow the establishment on those lands of a Muslim Arab state called Palestine.
Yesterday morning, before reading your email, I was out for a run and went past the open plot of ground near my home which has been waiting for years for the United States Embassy to be built there. As you likely know, America (along with the rest of the world) rejects Israel’s right to Jerusalem as its exclusive capital and seeks to play “honest broker” in the discredited peace process between Israel (the miraculously-preserved nation so hated by the world) and the Arabs (who desire to destroy the Jewish state).
Despite being positively couched as a “peace process” - this is without a doubt an immoral and unrighteous process; even more criminal than was the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the great Powers in 1936, when Britain and France coerced the Czechs into surrendering The Sudetenland to Hitler in an effort to appease him. To pressure the Jews into giving up for all time their national birthplace in order to appease the always-belligerent Arab world; and this with the full knowledge that with that territory in their hands the Arabs will be that much closer to realizing their goal of destroying all of Israel, is a breathtakingly immoral act.
The Bible tells us that God has a day of vengeance for the controversy of Zion, and that His robes will be stained red in the blood of the nations after He has trampled them out in the winepress of His wrath. I don’t believe we can exaggerate the extent of His fury. He will come to the defense of His people and do battle against all those nations that come up against Jerusalem.
As you sound the alarm, the watchman’s warning, for your nation, please pray about also directing your readers’ attention to the critical issue of Israel. Deep down I know that if the Church in America prays your leadership into doing right by Israel, you will see astounding advances made on all your other battlefronts.
Israel is the front line. America’s relationship with Israel holds the key to America’s continued blessing.
May God bless you, and may He guide you as you seek to guide your countrymen through these next crucial days.
And may God have mercy on the United States!
Barack Obama’s platform, his policy agenda, his world view, his religion, his associations, his immaturity, his carefully-hidden depths - all comprise a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the security of the world.
Conservative Americans - Christians and Jews - are rightly fearful of what an Obama victory November 4 will mean for their great nation.
And I would want to blast it as loudly as I could in the ears of every true American: It’s good that you are afraid. Be very, very afraid. And get everyone you can to get out to vote on November 4.
As Ann Coulter said on the Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor last night. If Obama becomes president on November 4, things will never be the same again. There will be no going back.
Will an Obama win lead to Israel’s destruction? The biblical answer is a resounding “no!”
A more immediately important question for Americans should be: “Will an Obama win lead to the demise of the United States?”
For the answer to that one, see Isaiah 60:12