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American Freedom Defense Initiative, Institute on Religion and Democracy, IRD Blog, Islam, Mark Tooley, Methodist, United Methodist Women
By Mark Tooley
Responding to controversial New York subway ads denouncing “jihad,” the United Methodist Women’s organization is placing counter ads against “hate speech.”
The ad from the American Freedom Defense Initiative declares: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Its organizer, Pamela Geller, insists the ad targets violent extreme Islamists, not Muslims. The critics insist it’s…
Read more here.
I wonder what the Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals will do when Israel eventually disappears. As the preachers will tell you in private: “This return of the nation of Israel thing is one of the greatest tools of evangelism that has ever been. Fulfillment of prophecy or not, we need to keep Israel alive and in place to keep up our altar call response statistics that we report to denomination headquarters.”
Just a few points:
1) I have always been and continue to be a supporter of Israel because I like the Jewish people.
2) The leaders of western Europe will tell you that they support Israel too because its establishment solved their age-old “Jewish Problem” (however wrongly conceived that was) by getting them out of Europe and keeping them out.
3) The associate pastor at our United Methodist Church is very interested in the Holy Land and makes frequent trips there. One of the things he specializes in doing is “sneaking into” the the almost wholly Palestinian portions of israel that are cordoned off from outsiders. The Israeli government fairly much insists that tourists from outside of Israel be steered clear of these places, and they warn that tourists must not go in because they will almost surely be killed on the streets by outraged Palestinians. But like I said. He has found ways to sneak in around Israeli guards on various occasions. He reports back to our church that the Israeli government is lying to the world about what goes on behind those high walls. He has never been threatened or attacked by any Palestinian. In fact, ordinary Paletsinians that he does not even know invite him into their homes for dinner, drink, and an evening of friendly conversation. Based on his adventures behind the walls, he has come back to our church to teach evening seminars on what is REALLY going on in Israel. The bottom line is that the Israeli government is treating peaceful and innocent Palestinian families in much the same way that the Nazis treated the Jews in Germany before massive filling of the concentration camps. He has explained all of these things in detail (along with slides) that the Israeli government would never want Americans to see. So, the truth of the matter is that the Israeli government and conservative religous Jews hate the Palestinians and want them all to leave the borders of Israel so it can be an exclusively Jewish state with no goyim except occasional permitted visitors. The Palestinian government hates them for reasons we all know about. Relatively innocent populations of both Palestinians and Israelis get killed and persecuted in this complex crossfire between the two hate/persecution factions.
4) One thing we learned, which really surprised me, is that most Jewish people in New York City do not believe in the idea that God gave the land to the Israeli people (through Abraham) forever, and they are not supporters of the state of Israel like Jews are in other places. This partcularly includes the Hassidic Jews in New York City.
5) Although no one knows for sure, although I am sure some of you think that you do, it is not clear to me that Israel will continue to exist as a nation in the Middle East. Jesus said that their house “would be left to them desolate,” and i see no clear evidence that that judgement has been permanently repealed. It very well could be that the existence of the Jewish state is just a brief “blip” on the radar screen of history that is for a moment within God’s permissive will but not in his positive, mindful, intentional, long-term will.
6) I do not subscribe to the Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye views of the last book in the Bible, and I very much doubt that these are the end times. Many Christians around the world do not and never have. However, I suspect that most of you here do not think that those people are “true” Christians because they do not think and believe exactly the way you do. You know. “I believe…….and all the rest of you are hopeless sinners outside in the cold with your warm, steamy noses pressed up against our plate glass windows.”
7) However, if at all possible and in the will of God, I hope that Israel will continue to exist and that the assorted Palestinian/Jewish lions and lambs will eventually find a way to lie down together in peace.
8) I read an article last night by a well-placed and informed man who believes that the Israelis will attack the Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday afternoon (tomorrow) between about noon and 3:00 p.m. USA time. He cited unusual troop movements in Israel that have been occurring for about two weeks and that are not associated with any planned exercises. In addition, large numbers of soldiers (much larger than usual) have been showing up in groups to pray at the Wailing Wall this week—a pattern that almost never shows itself except in times of war in Israel.
Here is the way I see it going down. The Israelis now have enough Boeing 707 tanker planes to do air refueling for a large force, the last one needed being delivered this last summer. The key problem is that they do not have bunker-busting weapons that can go to the depths needed to take out the Iranian facilites, and they would probably not destroy them completely enough to prevent rapid repair and restart. The Israelis know this and so do the Americans. Therefore, Plan A will consist of an attempt to do the following:
A) Take out the Iranian air defense system.
B) Destroy Iranian bases and as many iranian troops on the ground as possible so they cannot get to the nuclear facilities to defend them.
C) Coordinated missile strikes, bombing, and commando assasination units will hit the ground simultaneously to kill the Iranian President, Cabinet, Parliament members, military command structure, and the entire religious leadership (assorted Ayatollahs). It will be the largest and best-coordinated mass assassination attempt in human history. This will be done to ensure that there will be no Iranian leadership to coordinate defense of the nuclear facilities.
D) I work in the American nuclear industry, so i know a little bit about this sort of thing. The Israelis have no intention of bunker-busting nuclear facilities with fighter bombers. The plan is to drop elite commando units on the ground at each targeted nuclear facility. These units will be charged with gainig access on the ground, supported by explosives and intelligence on how to breach the facilities in that way. Each commando unit will be carrying a set of tactical nuclear weapons comparable to the Hiroshima uranium bomb. Once the facilities are breached, these nuclear weapons with delayed timers will be hand-carried to strategic locations within the underground nuclear facilities and set to explode.
The United States did several underground nuclear test explosions in drilled holes in the 1950s and 1960s—one of them was in Mississippi of all places. Hardly anyone knows about these special tests, which were very different from the typical underground nuclear tests done for so many years at the Nevada Test Site. The purpose of these special tests was to determine the feasibilty of using nuclear weapons to mine for minerals. What they discovered is that one of these special test weapons would hollow out (read that as vaporize) an underground area of solid rock that was about 300 ft in diameter and spherical in shape. We are talking total obliteration here with no chance of salvaging anything at all. In addition, the radiation left behind underground was so bad that no one can safely go into one of these holes 50-60 years later, meaning now. However, most pleasantly, they also learned that the radiation stayed largely underground and did not pose any major threats to people on the ground surface. People can safely visit the ground surface areas above the test chambers even today.
I think you see my point now. These tactical nuclear weapons would vaporize the Iranian atomic facilities completely underground and prevent the Iranians from entering them for 60+ years—essentially making them forever worthless. Literally nothing would survive underground—erase them completely like a pencil mark on paper. No one would be harmed by radiation on the ground surface, and no radiation threat to nations that border Iran would