I was chatting online a couple of days ago with a young woman my wife and I've become acquainted with over the last several years. She's Lebanese and has been attending school and grad school here in the U.S. for a number of years now. Her family of course still resides in Lebanon, but I'm not sure where.

She interrupted our chat to speak with her father, which by cell phone has become increasingly difficult. I spoke with her for a while in private and told her that I would pray for the safety of her family and friends for which she was very grateful. I told her that I imagined that it has to hard for her to be here and really hard for her parents, because as much as they might want her to be close to them that they were surely glad for her to be here. She acknowledged this and said that she herself, having been through this before, was indeed glad to be here and safe.

It's a difficult thing to grasp that having a terrorist infiltrating element dispersed throughout your suburbs, in your neighborhoods and among families where innocent bystanders live could bring bombs, bullets and destruction down on your head at any given moment. This is something the terrorist mindset, which is basically cowardly, banks on.

The army of Hezbollah is just that, an army. They are well funded and they have a lot of anger and in their minds, all the time in the world. It's easy for them to lob rockets at random all over Israel, and I have a feeling that if they did and that Israel did nothing about it, that would be just fine with many of the world's governments. Face it, the world has been after Israel for years to give land to the Palestinians in exchange for peace. That strategy doesn't seem to have worked out all that well.

I can remember thinking sarcastically before the death of Yasser Arafat that, "Golly, wouldn't it be just great for the PLO and their cronies to have a legal egress to transport their ordnance into Israeli territory? That'll just make everything worse." Boy was I wrong about that. It hasn't made a bit of difference and it just doesn't seem to matter what Israel does, most of the world's press seems to think they are always in the wrong.

I listened to the opinion of an anti-Zionist orthodox Rabbi today who has joined Pro-Palestinians in New York City. He said that because the Jews are in disobedience to God that there should be no Zionist state of Israel because Torah forbids it. When asked where he thought the Hebrew people should be he answered that the people Israel should be dispersed throughout all the other nations of the world. When I hear such things, I'm not sure what to make of it and I wonder what a learned man like this does with the history of his people.

My wife's grandparents were living in the pale in Russia and moved to the United States after pogroms began there in 1891 and thousands of Jews were deported from the country, many in chains. Her grandparents got the picture and left the country in 1903, when the Kishenev pogrom broke out and forty-five Jews were killed and 1,300 homes and shops were destroyed or looted. They were blessed to get out alive.

Let's face the facts. It's time to realize that most of the world doesn't want the Jews living in their countries. Sad but true. The reason the Jews had to fight for a state of their own was because they were getting slaughtered by many of the nations they had dispersed into.

If the people of Israel were to do the unthinkable and disband, turning their land in its entirety over to a Palestinian sovereignty, they would just be weakened and the worldwide slaughter would begin anew, because the largely Islamic Arabic nations would require it. If you've ever read the numerous passages in the Koran that express hatred and a demand for the extermination of the Jewish people you should have no doubt of that.

Do you think perhaps that this was a huge sign and a possible motivation for the repatriation of the Jewish nation of Israel? Do you think this may have been one step of many toward the reconciliation of the people Israel eventually to God through Christ Jesus?

It's a fact. The state of Israel exists, and nobody in her right mind would expect Israel to just give it up. It amazes me that the world's press thinks that Israel should just lay down for the constant terrorist attacks and demands on their country that have been made since the country's repatriation.

If the British had not left this country after their defeat, but had instead started strapping on powder kegs and blowing up city squares and other gathering places in the colonies, we would have kept right on fighting them, screaming out our independence at the same time for as long as it took. How can we expect Israel to do any less?

Have you taken a look at an updated map lately? A globe might be better. Take a look at the size of Israel and a long look comparatively at the size of its antagonistic and aggressive neighbors. The majority of world governments aren't apparently ready to stand up to terrorism and seriously oppose it. Neither was the world at large ready to stand up to Hitler or Mao or Stalin.

Israel is standing up and needs help from this country, but I'm not just talking about the tax dollars that go there in the billions. I'm talking about prayer. We need to be praying for the "peace of Jerusalem" as the Psalmist says.

My heart goes out to those Israeli and Lebanese citizens whose family members have died or been injured and who have suffered in the horrors of this conflict. It will continue and it will get worse before it's resolved.