Friday 16 October, 2009

World
Politics
Middle East

Israel’s enemy: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

By Charles Gardner and Alan Brooke

As Israel comes under fresh fire at the United Nations, it has now emerged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – their arch-enemy – has Jewish ancestry!

The hard-line leader, whose shocking speeches have led to walkouts at the United Nations, has repeatedly called for the Jewish nation to be “wiped off the map” and makes no bones about his determination to bring that about.

The recent discovery of a second uranium enrichment plant adding weight to the belief that his country is almost ready to produce a nuclear weapon, and already has missiles capable of reaching Israel, is enough to suggest he is deadly serious.

And yet while denying the Nazi holocaust ever happened, he perversely shows every sign of being a virtual re-incarnation of Hitler as he fans the flames of hatred against Jews.

Though obviously a fundamentalist Muslim, his family apparently changed their name to distance themselves from Jewish forbears “for economic and religious reasons”. And now Mahmoud wants to exterminate a race from which he himself is descended.

One is forced to ask the question: Is he the Anti-Christ? This is because the Anti-Christ, predicted in the Book of Revelation to rise up in the days immediately preceding the Second Coming as a false messiah who would lead the world astray, is described in the Bible as a man who does not follow the God of his fathers!

If the Iranian dictator were merely a lone, though strident, voice opposed to Israel, he might have been silenced before now. The problem is that much of the world – even in the West – is following his lead, though perhaps in more polite and subtle ways.

For the enemies of Israel have succeeded in wooing – and in many cases dominating – the world media with powerful disinformation of events in Israel and the Palestinian territories. So that now there is a distorted perception emerging from the Arab world in which Israel’s authenticity as the people of God with a rightful entitlement to the land of their ancestors, spoken of in the Bible, is being seriously challenged.

Now the UN has endorsed a report accusing both Israel and Hamas of war crimes in the recent Gaza conflict. But as we documented on this site earlier in the year, some of the widely reported allegations of IDF ‘atrocities’ such as deliberately targeting a school have already proved to be grossly wide of the mark.

And Jesus himself is now perceived not as a Jew but a poor, displaced Palestinian hunted, hounded and finally crucified by ‘those hateful Jews’. And the tragedy is that much of the church in the West has bought into this. But it’s time Christians learnt to filter what they hear and read in the news through the lens of the scriptures – “transforming their minds” – rather than blindly following the opinions of the world.

European nations in general are seeking to deflect the anger of their own Muslim populations by distancing themselves from the Jewish state. And of course, because they face almost insurmountable problems at home (not least in the financial realm), they look for demons elsewhere.

The current Arab dispute over Jerusalem is almost as ancient as the hills upon which the city stands for the same attitude obtained in the days of the prophet Nehemiah some five centuries before Christ. During Israel and Judah’s exile in Assyria and Babylon, the Arabs had assumed possession of their land and resented their return.

But Nehemiah made a threefold statement to those who tried to stop his project to rebuild the city wall – that they had neither heritage, right nor a memorial in Jerusalem. It was a “land given as a possession” (a reference back to God’s covenant first given to Abraham), a legal right established by God himself to Abraham and his descendants while the Arabs (either through Ishmael or Esau) have no scriptural confirmation of their claim to ownership of Jerusalem.

Today east Jerusalem is claimed by many as historically Arab territory which should be the capital of a future Palestinian state. But in reality Jews have always lived there and it was only from 1948 to 1967 – during the Jordanian occupation – that it was ‘Arab territory’. All of which renders out of order President Obama’s recent demand that Israel pull the plug on a planned housing development there. He was effectively saying that Jews were not to move into a largely Arab area – that’s rich coming from the first black man to move into the White House, the beneficiary of centuries of campaigning for racial integration now fighting to prevent integration in Jerusalem!

As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes: “The great obstacle to Middle East peace is not that Jews insist on living among Arabs. It is that Arabs insist that Jews not live among them.”

Photo: Presiden Republik Indonesia