What More Sacrifice?

----"This is the worst, the most intense, the most global that it's been in most of our memories. And the effort to get the good people to stand up is not easy,"----

What is being spoken of here? It is a kind of racial prejudice. For the last two thousand years it has shown its ugliness in appearances again and again in many places all over the world. Not very long ago, it escalated to a horrible point, and many hoped in their hearts that such ugliness would be gone forever. The reality is, it has never left us.

Abraham Foxman, U.S. head of the Anti-Defamation League, spoke those words just two days ago in Palm Beach, Florida. He says that Israel's military offensive against Hamas in Gaza has seen responses of outright hatred and attacks against Jews "from Austria to Zimbabwe." Information collected by the Anti-Defamation League includes reports of two Israeli men being shot by a man of Palestinian descent in Denmark. There have been large protests against Israel here in the United States, Great Britain and in other countries as well. Synagogues have been damaged or desecrated in Greece and in Chicago here in the U.S. as well. Two cars loaded with fire bombs were involved in an attack on a synagogue in Toulouse, France a month ago. An Israeli basketball team was chased off of the court by Turkish citizens who yelled after them, calling them"killers". There, as well as in France, Italy and South Africa Jewish owned businesses have been threatened with boycotts.

This last week at least two rockets have been fired by Hamas led militants into the southern city of Ashkelon. The rockets were poorly aimed, and only some minor injuries and property destruction resulted, but negotiations for a new cease-fire were being firmed up when the last one was launched. I honestly don't know why Israel keeps trying with these terrorists, because their spoken pledge is to wipe Israel out.

Mr. Foxman said, "We need to insist that the civilized world stand up and say 'No' in every single country in the international arena to condemn this vicious, hideous violence," He's right of course, but even now, here in the U.S., we have a another in a series of Presidents who evidently espouses a misguided notion of how peace should be achieved. President Obama gave his first televised White House interview to al-Aribya, an Arab television news organization. When speaking to them, he said the following:

"But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace,’ He also said, ‘They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side." I am afraid that this is precisely the type of future U.S. policy attitude that we can expect. The question is, what sort of sacrifice does President Obama expect Israel to make? I don't mean to be disrespectful, but does he have any sort of grasp on Israel's history, especially its more recent history?

For some reason, people seem to act as though there was no anti-Semitism before the Holocaust during WWII. It's as if they think the Holocaust happened and then the Jewish people appeared in the Middle East on a bunch of boats and mistreated those poor 'Palestinian' people. The President and other international leaders need to recognize that Israel has already made geographical sacrifices for the sake of peace to the point where it has almost returned to an area that resembles the pre-1967 sequester. Yet, our President thinks they need to make even more sacrifice. This is ludicrous thinking.

It should not come as a surprise though because in that same interview he said that he would like to see us sharing "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago" That is a very naive statement for a President to make. Islamic terrorism neither desires peace nor partnership. Their desire is to wipe out Israel and ultimately to coerce the world into their belief system. The following statement from an article by David Horowitz sums up what has been Islam's attitude not only for the last thirty years, but for many years before.

“The unspoken truth about the fighting in Gaza, which began on December 19, 2008, when Hamas rockets broke a voluntary truce, is that this is the frontline of a much larger war. This war began 30 years ago with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and is now global in scope. Its agenda is the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of the West. The Islamic terrorist organization Hamas makes no secret of this agenda. Its Egyptian founders and Palestinian inspirers were active followers of Adolf Hitler and enthusiasts of the Nazi Holocaust. The founding charter of Hamas, which promises that ‘Islam will obliterate Israel,’ memorialize the Egyptian admirer of Hitler, Hassan al-Banna, as ‘the martyr…of blessed memory.’ The same document contains the genocidal incitement of the Prophet Mohammed to ‘kill the Jews,’ to hunt them down ‘until they hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and trees cry out “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him”" (David Horowitz, "The War Against the Jews," FrontPageMagazine.com,1/9/09).

As believers in Christ, we ought to speak out against the atrocities of Islamic terrorism against the Jews and their nation as readily as we do when we ourselves are attacked. Israel is still the nation chosen by God through whom His Son would be revealed. He is not done with her yet. Psalm 48 refers to Jerusalem as the city of the great King. That's Jesus. Zechariah 14:4 states: "And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south."

That prophecy has not been fulfilled yet. It will be. King Jesus will one day reign from there on earth for a thousand years whether people believe that or not. Our President should not be calling upon Israel to sacrifice land for peace. He should be standing up for their right to exist without being attacked.