More soldiers have donated more money to Ron Paul’s campaign than to that of Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rich Santorum and Rick Perry combined, according to the Federal Election Commission. Ron Paul has also received far more financial contributions from soldiers than President Obama, Hilary Clinton, or any other leading Democrat.

This poses a bit of a dilemma to Paul’s rivals, who accuse him of being soft on war and of advocating military policies that would be dangerous to the nation. It is hard to be too critical when so many of the rank-and-file evidently support Paul.

Yet it is a telling indictment of America today.

As far back as the end of World War ii, Herbert Armstrong said that “the United States has won its last war!” He saw then that the pride in our military power had been broken.

Look at what has happened since Japan’s surrender. North Korea: stalemate. Vietnam: tragic defeat. Bay of Pigs invasion: shameful defeat. Cambodian and Laos civil wars: defeats again.

Then there was the first Gulf War. American troops flew and sailed halfway around the world to defeat Iraq—and then leave Saddam Hussein and all his generals in power to continue to oppose America and kill off the Kurds and others who had helped America attain its “victory.”

A little over a decade later, during the second Gulf War, America finally defeated Hussein. But that too has turned into a humiliating defeat. On January 15, the New York Times reported that the Iraqi government has now started arresting and detaining hundreds of U.S. contractors still working in the country. By taking out Saddam, America removed the one regional force strong enough to oppose Iran. Operation Iraqi Freedom inadvertently became Operation Empower Iran. With all U.S. troops now evacuated from Iraq, the country has become an Iranian proxy. America loses again.

Then there is Afghanistan: the graveyard of empires. It has certainly lived up to its reputation. When powerful America stormed into the small country of 25 million people in 2001, a Taliban victory seemed impossible. Hardly anyone, outside of perhaps Russia, suspected that America, with its vastly superior technology and modern army, could lose that war.

So it is sad to see stories such as “Karzai: Afghanistan, U.S. Negotiating With Taliban” and “Washington Ready to Negotiate With Mullah Omar.” President Obama says a third of our troops will be home by summer, and the rest by 2012. No wonder Hamid Karzai wants to make peace with the Taliban. He doesn’t want to get butchered like the Kurds did in Iraq when America left.

But is it really so surprising that so many of America’s soldiers would support a presidential candidate who wants to immediately end the war in Afghanistan and bring most of America’s foreign-stationed troops home? Why die for a cause that your allies in the field and leaders in Washington don’t even believe in?

How demoralizing to be part of an army so hamstrung by politicians, political correctness and people back home that it can’t defeat a country with a gdp a third of that of North Dakota—even when supposedly half the country is fighting on your side!

Who would want to be a soldier anymore?

When President Obama declared the war in Iraq over and that all our troops would be home for Christmas, where was the national outpouring of thanks for those who risked their lives? New York held a victory parade for the Yankees, but where was the victory parade for America’s warriors?

The pride of America’s power has been broken! Even its soldiers—those whose profession is to wage war—give the most support to a Republican candidate whose platform includes immediately evacuating Afghanistan and bringing troops from around the world home. It is not just a matter of America’s leaders lacking the will to sustain our war against terrorism, but increasingly it is America’s soldiers too. And following defeat after defeat, it is hard to blame them.

It is time to remember that ancient prophecy God declared against a rebellious nation caught up in deepening moral and spiritual decline: “And I will break the pride of your power … And your strength shall be spent in vain … if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me” (Leviticus 26:19-21).

America’s national will to fight is broken. And as Herbert W. Armstrong warned more than 60 years ago, America has won its last war.

The number of U.S. troops stationed in Europe peaked during the Cold War at 277,342. At present, America has around 40,000 soldiers there, and the withdrawal of the two heavy armor brigades will decrease the U.S. presence to 30,000 troops.

Both of the brigades slated to be removed will be pulled out of Germany, which will leave Europe with one cavalry brigade in Germany and one airborne brigade in Italy.

Already, European nations have significant military might. Germany, Italy and France remain among the world’s top 10 defense spenders; the combined number of EU nations’ military personnel exceeds the number in U.S. forces; and EU nations spend more on defense than Russia and China combined.

But two obstacles have prevented Europe’s strategic significance from matching its high-spending figures and troop numbers.

First, Europe has grown accustomed to depending on the U.S. for security. Some analysts viewed last year’s war in Libya as an indication that Europe is beginning to take responsibility for its own environs, but, in fact, the campaign was overwhelmingly reliant on American military, intelligence, and technical power. European Union nations were not even able to supply enough of their own munitions to see the conflict through.

The second obstacle preventing the EU from realizing its military potential has been the reluctance of Europe’s separate nations to pool their military resources together. Individual EU countries tend to use their defense sectors only to boost national industry and employment, and efforts at cooperation among the nations have faltered because of political interference. Back in 2004, the European Union established the European Defense Agency to build military coordination among EU states, but it has had little success because of such interference.

The U.S. drawdown in Europe works toward the removal of both of these obstacles.

Europe will be weaned from its military dependence on the U.S. as Washington’s ability and willingness to defend Europe rapidly erodes. Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the overall message from the U.S.’s decision to withdraw more troops is that “Europe is going to need to start taking more care of its own defense, that they won’t be able to call on the U.S. in the same way as the past.”

Nick Witney, a former head of the European Defense Agency, said, “Europe is going to have to grow up and learn to take responsibility for its own security, without Uncle Sam to prod and cajole.”

The U.S. pullback from Europe is also making the solution to the second obstacle obvious to more and more onlookers.

The U.S. drawdown is telling us that “we have to do our job,” said European Defense Agency Chief Executive Claude-France Arnould. “We should go full speed ahead with pooling and sharing.”

“It’s always been obvious what needs to be done—taking a more collective approach to Europe’s security,” said Kupchan.

The United States has defined security in Europe for many decades, but it is increasingly urging the nations of the EU to take charge of their own defense. European nations can see that the U.S. is now a bankrupt nation with a broken will, and they are preparing to fill the void Washington is leaving by multiplying their own forces and pooling them together. Bible prophecy reveals that the end result of Europe’s military pooling and multiplying will be a German-led force so powerful it will eclipse the armies of Hitler, Napoleon and even Charlemagne.

Through the Prophet Isaiah, God calls America a “hypocritical nation.” It’s at times like these that it becomes clear why.

Surely you’ve heard by now of the crude homemade video that emerged last week apparently depicting a Marine sniper team in Afghanistan urinating on the corpses of some Taliban fighters. The press jumped on the incident like it was Abu Ghraib all over again, and the highest leaders in the land came out in fire-breathing condemnation.

“Deplorable … reprehensible,” President Obama said through his spokesman. “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” said Leon Panetta, the defense secretary. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.” Civilian and military leaders promised the guilty soldiers would be found out and punished to the full.

Why is everyone so upset? Let’s be honest: The biggest reason is that they are deathly afraid of offending Muslims. U.S. leaders continue to hope, against all evidence, that avoiding offense will solve problems.

Their man in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, called the soldiers’ act “simply inhuman.” Is Karzai an authority on moral and ethical conduct? He said he was “deeply disturbed” and that the incident was “condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” But where is his condemnation for Talibani atrocities far worse than this?

That means he either sympathizes with the Taliban’s extremism or feels he must pander to it.

Clearly the ones in the driver’s seat—dictating to both Afghan and U.S. leaders about what is an appropriate response—are radical Muslims.

For their part, Taliban leaders in Pakistan called the Marines’ conduct “barbaric” and claimed, “No religion that follows a holy text would accept such conduct. This inhuman act reveals their real face to the world.”

Behold: a sermon from the Taliban about what is barbaric and inhuman. They have never condemned the torture, beheading or murder of a single non-Muslim. They have murdered thousands of civilians with roadside bombs. They execute people without trial for crimes like laughing at soldiers. They hang the dead bodies of defectors from lampposts to serve as a public warning. And we are supposed to listen to them condemn these Marines?

Are Hamid Karzai or American leaders “deeply disturbed” by the Taliban’s sanction of polygamous “marriage” that allows old men to rape young girls? What about the Taliban commander ordering that an 18-year-old girl who fled her abusive in-laws be punished by having her nose and ears cut off? Who is condemning these acts “in the strongest possible terms”?

America’s media zealously publicize anytime a U.S. soldier breaches the Geneva Conventions. Why then are they silent over the Taliban operating entirely outside of those laws? Taliban soldiers don’t wear uniforms, a law intended to protect civilians from getting killed. They purposefully use civilian structures like homes and mosques for military purposes—another illegal practice that imperils non-combatants. They exploit children not just as soldiers but as suicide bombers, strapping explosives to them and sending them to their deaths. Why no indignation over those “deplorable” and “reprehensible” practices?

The Taliban deliberately assassinate civilians by the hundreds. They consider anyone who is actively trying to rebuild Afghanistan—doctors, teachers, construction workers—worthy of death. The New York Times has reported that insurgents in Afghanistan kill twice as many civilians as they do uniformed government or coalition forces. Where is the outrage against that? Is that an “atrocity”?

No one is defending what those soldiers did. But to single them out for such damnation is to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

America’s leaders have allowed their moral standard to be skewed out of all proportion by extremists whose goal is to use every ounce of leverage possible to cripple America.

It is political correctness run amok: dismissing Muslim evils as irrelevant—after all, who are we to judge them?—while viewing Western actions through a distorted but harshly exacting moral lens.

We need a reality check. And that can only come from looking at the one true absolute standard of morality, the one supplied by the Being who defines good and evil.

God sees plenty of acts in America that are deplorable and reprehensible, that He views with total dismay and condemns in the strongest possible terms, and that He promises to punish to the full. But guess what? The action of these soldiers hardly registers on His radar screen.

Does it matter to you what God finds abominable? Instead of concocting our own standards of righteousness and appointing ourselves as judge and jury, how about aligning our thoughts with those of the Author of righteousness?

Forget the Geneva Conventions: God is outraged over our breaking the Ten Commandments. Blacklisting Him and worshiping idols. Urinating on His holy Sabbaths. Enslaving ourselves in greed, materialism, covetousness and debt, such that it sabotages the nation’s future. Glorifying violence. Desecrating the family. Turning our children out to pasture. Mass promoting and celebrating rank sexual immorality. Embracing fornication, cohabitation, adultery, divorce, homosexuality and other perversion.

God is “deeply disturbed” by such things. The fact that 40 percent of pregnancies in New York are aborted. That is an “atrocity.” The existence of an abortion butcher like Dr. Kermit Gosnell. That is “barbaric.” The support he received from state abortion lobbyists and clinic inspectors—and the pass he got from an appallingly liberal national media. That “inhuman act reveals their real face to the world.”

Why aren’t monsters such as that “urgently investigated” and given “the most severe punishment”?

Yes, this is a “hypocritical nation”—smug and self-righteous, praising, pardoning and punishing according to whatever standards it chooses. “There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes,” Proverbs 30:12 says, “and yet is not washed from their filthiness.”

America wallows in rivers of moral sewage. It’s a little hard to stomach the sanctimonious moralizing about where a few soldiers chose to pee.

Greece lives under a permanent military threat from its huge neighbor on the Anatolian peninsula, Turkey. The Turks taunt their smaller neighbor across the crucial Bosporus sea gate, daily violating Greek airspace with their fighter jets. Tensions are made worse by continuing disputes over Greek sovereignty attached to certain islands in the Aegean. To counter Turkey’s aggression, Greece has spent huge amounts on defense budgets—as much as 4.3 percent of gross domestic product, proportionately the highest among the EU nations.

Who has been the greatest beneficiary of this defense expenditure? The major supplier of defense equipment to Greece: the German armaments industry.

How much have EU elites actually manipulated ongoing Greek-Turkish tensions for the advantage of the European Union’s thriving defense industries? As one Greek source observed: “In this volatile game of geopolitics, the bosses of Euro ‘family’ have always been playing the major role in cultivating and manipulating an unguaranteed stability in the area, thus creating market conditions for their influential military industries to flourish. German defense corporations in particular have been major contractors with the Greek (and Turkish) army for more than two decades” (Antibaro.gr, Nov. 29, 2010).

The facts are that Greece’s coffers have been substantially drained into huge profits for German defense industry barons. This includes multibillion-euro contracts for Greece to purchase big-ticket military hardware ranging from tanks to missiles to naval vessels, including submarines.

“All these sum up to hundreds of billions of euros and, under other circumstances, could have been more than enough to balance the Greek budget deficit and even drastically alleviate the external debt,” that same Greek source observed. “One thing is for sure, those billions were added to the profits of German industrialists, bankers and intermediaries.”

Since that report came to light, the Greek economy has been brought to the brink of catastrophe, with the prospect of inevitable default on its debts being very real by the end of the first quarter of the current year.

The saving grace for Greece may well be the degree of influence that German defense industry corporate elites and their bankers have in terms of convincing the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to cough up another tranche of euros in their interests. An unnamed source is quoted by German news source Zeit Online as observing that “If Greece gets paid in March the next tranche of funding (€80 billion is expected), there is a real opportunity to conclude new arms contracts” (January 5).

Zero Hedge reports that, “after the Portuguese (another obviously stressed nation), the Greeks are the largest buyers of German war weapons.” The same source contrasts this huge expenditure by Greece on armaments amid the general state of the Grecian economy, with “the country’s doctors only treating emergencies, bus drivers on strike, and a dire lack of school textbooks and the country teetering on the brink of drachmatization …” (January 9).

When the EU was threatened with the collapse of the Greek economy, German defense industry chiefs held the Greeks’ feet to the fire. Rather than cancel out on existing contracts, permitting the release of funds to support basic services within the ailing Greek economy, the German government defense contractors enforced Greece’s contract obligations.

The effect of this scenario has been that Greece is treating as a priority the payment of its obligations to the German armaments industry using the very bailout funds received to ostensibly revive its dying economy.

Once again, as Spiegel Online points out in its January 10 edition, “Its neighbors may be suffering, but the euro crisis has created conditions that actually benefit the German economy.”

The fact that the European Monetary Union was constructed by certain elites to achieve this very effect has escaped most observers. Yet we have consistently reported on this fact, well before the current euro crisis. A quick check of our voluminous archive of articles on the euro project, its beginnings and its outcome will reveal this undeniable fact.

It’s time that you educated yourself in just what is really happening in Europe today, its sinister beginnings and its rather fearful outcome.

Study our booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire for the facts behind this incredible deceit, its immediate and its long-term future.

It is sometimes hard to ascertain just who are the friends and who are the political enemies from one month to another in Germany. This has a lot to do with certain peculiarities of the German mind.

We have often quoted German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s observations that the German mind has its hidden passageways that make it unpredictable in one sense yet ultimately predictable in others. We have occasionally pointed to Luigi Barzini’s summation of the German people that they can seem to have the demeanor of a lamb one day, and a lion the next.

As “mutable” and “proteus-like” as Barzini indicated the Germans could be, there is one unerring trait they possess: Give them a populist leader at a time of crisis and they will rise with a spirit of startling aggression to vanquish all in their path to impose their will on the world.

Germany is caught in such a crisis today. It’s a crisis that Chancellor Angela Merkel has termed Europe’s worst since World War ii. It is being exacerbated by what Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, baron of the Holy Roman Empire, observed at November’s Halifax International Security Forum that EU leaders were failing to effectively address. Guttenberg stated that Germany’s leaders were ineffective in reaching the hearts and minds of the people, especially in explaining to them how the European Union worked.

There is no doubt that Guttenberg’s observations are correct. The facts are highlighted daily in various polls and news releases. The euro crisis dominates the news, but few truly understand its import—least of all, it often seems, the very leaders responsible for fixing it. As one German student e-mailed our own correspondent in Cyprus recently, “The Germans don’t trust in their politicians anymore.”

This is a time of deepest crisis for postwar Europe. Anticipating the worst, a number of EU member nations—not the least Germany—have plans well advanced to create, or re-create, their own sovereign means of exchange should the euro fail.

Germany, with the greatest hoard of bullion of any EU nation, is best set for such an occurrence. Some of Europe’s most astute observers have in fact stated that a certain few German elites may have orchestrated the whole euro project to reach such a conclusion. Whichever way the ball bounces, on the whole euro project one thing is sure: Germany will come out the winner—be it by shoring up the euro, instituting the euromark, or reinstituting its beloved old deutsche mark with a huge pile of bullion to back it!

Yet, to take full advantage of this great crisis, with its global implications, Germany needs both a populist leader and a binding ideology to not only consolidate and progress its current leadership of Europe, but to propel it to its next natural outcome: imperial expansion and domination by military force.

Concerning the ideology, the Bavarian Pope Benedict has set the scene for a great revival of Roman Catholicism as the binding ideology for the eventual 10 nations that will comprise the main power bloc in Europe (Revelation 17:12-13). That’s the same ideology that bound the Holy Roman Empire together in its past six resurrections.

The pope’s crusade, termed the “new evangelization,” currently under way, teamed with his announced “Year of Faith” being launched in October, are the twin platforms on which his great crusade to revive Roman Catholicism is based.

Concerning the populist leadership, the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (csu)—Germany’s most Catholic political party—is now not only setting the scene for the return of Baron Guttenberg to active politics, but also mulling the return of elder statesman Edmund Stoiber.

Over the past week, csu party president Horst Seehoffer; the party’s parliamentary leader, Gerda Hasselfeldt; csu parliamentary secretary Stefan Müller; plus Bavaria’s district administrator and csu district chairman of Upper Franconia, Christian Meissner; have all indicated support for Guttenberg’s return.

Not only this, Seehoffer gave a broad hint that the return to active politics of Bavaria’s elder statesman Edmund Stoiber was also discussed at the closed-door regional csu meeting last week. He stated that following Stoiber’s forced resignation, the csu had “gone downhill” ever since. He referred to Stoiber’s disempowerment as being wrong, with the result being that the csu had lost a very successful political personality (Suddeutsche, January 6).

Should the csu succeed in these endeavors to win back Guttenberg and/or Stoiber to active politics, and should one or both of these men gain high office at the 2013 elections, Germany would, for the first time since that grand old Bavarian statesman Franz Josef Strauss led the party, be in a prime position to bring to final fruition his “Grand Design” for Germany and Europe.

One does not have to be an overly astute analyst to add the current events together in Europe and deduce that a repetition of history is looming.

Consider the facts:

Europe is in deep and worsening crisis. Germany is by far the most dominant nation in Europe. German politics are in disarray, the nation’s chancellor and her party having lost much ground during the most recent state elections. The United States is about to effect a massive drawdown of its remaining presence in Europe and the crucial Middle East oil triangle, leaving a huge military vacuum behind it. Germany’s most conservative and most Roman Catholic political party is calling for the return to active politics of its two most populist personalities. A German pope is launching a great crusade of new evangelism to revive the only force that has ever united Europe in the past, its Roman Catholic religion.

Considering all the above factors, together with an election year looming in Germany in 2013, it would seem that the time is fast ripening for Germany to welcome a populist leadership to rally the people to a great crusading cause with the same enthusiasm that it did in the 1930s.

This time, however, Germany will not rally to the sign of the swastika. It will be to the sign of the cross of Rome. The clarity of biblical prophecy, which millennia ago forecast in detail all that is now happening before our eyes, is breathtaking.

Keep watching this website for the real news, even before it breaks, on just what will be the outcome of these earthshaking events in Europe.

The world was also jolted by mass uprisings and revolts in 2011, as hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world—from Tunis to Cairo, to Rome and Manhattan—took to the streets in violent protest against various political and/or economic injustices. In the United States, the belligerent “Occupiers” who were supposed to benefit the average American worker ended up costing U.S. taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. In the UK, a small, seemingly peaceful protest quickly morphed into a barbaric rampage of widespread looting, vandalism and arson that ended with sections of London and other British cities going up in flames. In the Middle East, mass demonstrations that were supposed to remove repressive authoritarianism and usher in a new era of freedom and democracy instead cleared the way for fundamentalist Islam to expand its reach across the region.

Iran, of course, stands to benefit most from the region’s biggest upheaval in decades. With Egypt now on the fast track to becoming a radical Islamist state and America now gone from Iraq, Iran’s position as regional king has been strengthened mightily.

Germany’s conquest of Europe in 2011 is another earthshaking development the Trumpet has been following closely. Millions of lives were lost during Germany’s quest for world dominion during two world wars. Today, however, Germany has all but conquered Europe—and without ever firing a shot. That’s how historian Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the past century of German history. Der Spiegel adds that the Germanization of Europe can now be seen all over the continent. This remarkable ascendency, as numerous news outlets have reported over the past year, has many European nations trembling with fear. Within the Fatherland itself, reports German-Foreign-Policy.com, German leaders are now urging commentators to tone down their celebratory language about German domination so as to not seem too triumphant.

Germany’s rise, of course, has rapidly accelerated over the past four years because of the global financial crisis, which showed no signs of recovery in 2011. Government debt levels are still skyrocketing. Oil prices remain high. And small investors are leaving the markets. In the United States, after Washington borrowed trillions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy, gdp growth remains frustratingly slow and unemployment continues to hover around 9 percent.

Despite these grim realities, many Americans believe there are brighter days ahead in 2012. According to a recent survey, while nearly 70 percent of Americans say 2011 was a painful year they’d like to forget, 62 percent remain positively optimistic about the road ahead.

“2012 is going to be a better year. It has to be,” said one New Year’s reveler at Times Square last week. Because it was so bad in 2011, many believe, there’s surely nowhere to go but up!

One conservative commentator even promised his audience that everything would change for the better in 2012. As bad as he knows it is right now, he firmly believes we’re really close to a dramatic turnaround for America.

“2012 is going to be an incredible journey,” he said.

Humanly, it’s hard to fault someone for being optimistic about the future. God, after all, is a positive thinker. But He also says we are under a curse if we put our trust in man to solve the problems of this world (Jeremiah 17:5). And many people still believe that man’s system of democratic rule, or man’s Western-style system of education, or the traditional Christian religion, with its hundreds of divided denominations, will somehow bring widespread peace and prosperity to this troubled world—and soon!

But what does your Bible say about the days leading up to the prophesied return of Jesus Christ? Didn’t the Apostle Paul tell us that when men say “peace and safety,” sudden destruction will follow? Didn’t Jesus Himself say in Matthew 24 that the last days would be noted for worldwide fighting and unprecedented weather-related disasters?

Read Revelation 11:15-19. Why, after the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord, does it say the nations—plural—will be angry? It’s amazing, isn’t it, to think about how the nations of this world actually respond to the soon-coming establishment of God’s government on Earth.

Angry nations of this Earth, it says in Revelation 19:19, will assemble their armies together to make war against Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God! The Bible says this climactic battle of the ages will occur at a place called Jehoshaphat—a deep ravine that flanks the eastern border of Jerusalem.

It is here that the armies of man will fight against the armies of God for control of the entire world—Jerusalem, the future capital of the world, being the grand prize! The Bible graphically describes this nightmarish struggle—truly, the war to end all wars—in Joel 3:12-14, Zechariah 14:9-13, Revelation 14:19-20 and all of chapters 16 and 19.

The nations will be filled with white-hot rage, these passages reveal. But Jesus Christ responds to their hate-filled wrath with His own righteous display of corrective anger. Revelation 11:18 says He will “destroy them which destroy the earth.” This is what Christ must do to spare this Earth from man-made, total destruction.

Several of these biblical passages describe God’s fierce wrath as a great “winepress” that squeezes the juice from a cluster of grapes, which represents the stubborn nature of a rebellious mankind that rejected God’s government in the Garden of Eden.

It is this same government that the kings of this Earth will vainly attempt to overthrow at the return of God’s anointed. As is clearly revealed in Psalm 2, man’s problem has always been with God’s government and His rule of law. This is why the nations will fight against Christ—because they refuse to submit to God’s law, summed up by the Ten Commandments!

Now study Jeremiah 25:30-34, and keep in mind that what the prophet describes in this passage never happened during the last days of Judah’s existence, before it went into Babylonian captivity. This prophetic passage is for our time today. In it, God says He has a controversy with the nations—plural—not just Iran, or Germany, or any other one nation specifically. God, it says, is coming with a sword to plead with “all flesh.” That means all of mankind!

By this point in the affairs of men, the “rod of iron” is the only language a sinful mankind could ever understand. And the level of destruction that follows in the wake of this spectacular clash is unfathomable and immeasurable. “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth. And the slain of the Lord shall be at that day [the time now ahead of us] from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth …” (verses 32-33).

It’s difficult to imagine the size and scope of this kind of devastation and ruin. But one thing this passage clearly reveals, along with the many other scriptures cited above, is that before it ever gets better on this Earth—before a peaceful and prosperous utopia can ever be established—the Bible says it will get much, much worse than it ever was in 2011.

That is the plain truth. And no amount of false hope could ever change that.

Man’s only sure and lasting hope for survival rests in the divine power of Almighty God and His merciful and forceful intervention in the affairs of mankind!

But Adam wasn’t just physically created from dirt; he was created to have a special connection to the land. You can study the account for yourself in the first two chapters of Genesis. The Earth was re-created for the purpose of sustaining human life. Prior to Adam’s creation on the sixth day, God spent a full five days perfecting the conditions and materials that to this day make our globe the only successful incubator for physical life. The land was created by God for man.

But notice Genesis 2:15: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.” God vested Adam and his progeny with the responsibility to “dress” and “keep” the land—in other words, to work the land and then to protect and preserve it. Put bluntly, man was created to have a relationship with the land. There is a remarkable reason for this, which we’ll come back to later.

First, consider how divorced mankind is today from the land, the weather and our physical environment in general. Half the world’s 7 billion people live in cities. This has never before been the case in history. In the world’s most developed regions—Europe, North America and Oceania—far more than half the people live in cities.

Cities have been around since the time of Cain, but the West’s cultural infatuation with urbanization, and the mass trek from the land to the city, began in the 18th century with the Industrial Revolution. The pilgrimage thrived as demand for factory workers rose and a new bourgeoisie class of merchants, bankers and white-collar workers blossomed. The faster nations developed, the more cities became hubs of activity, the center points of trade, commerce, culture, education and recreation—and an appealing alternative to life on the land.

Across the Western world, cities have thrived, while those living on the land have struggled to avoid being swallowed by wealthy commercial farming operations, rising costs of production, fierce competition and increasing occurrences of devastating natural and weather-related disasters.

This isn’t even addressing the cultural and psychological impact that abandoning the land has had on the Western mindset. You’ve probably heard about inner-city children not knowing milk comes from cows, or seen the reality shows where trendy city-slickers head to the farm to educate their naive, living-life-behind-the-eight-ball counterparts. Often farmers are seen as simpletons living a primitive lifestyle.

Today’s Western societies are almost wholly disconnected from the agricultural lifestyle, the land, the weather and the environment. Most of us ignore and underestimate the dominating influence of agriculture and the environment over our lives. Still, the majority, riding blindly on the man-made global-warming bandwagon, believe they value the land and have a connection with it. But their devotion—manifested in touting an unproven theory—is shallow, vain and baseless.

The reality is, English-speaking societies have severed their contact with nature, the land, the environment and the weather. We have become a city-centric, materially focused people with little appreciation for the natural world we live in. The land and weather are for farmers, we reason. They have no bearing on our lives.

We couldn’t be more wrong!

Mankind was created by God and put into a carefully crafted ecosystem that depends on laws, including agricultural, environmental and atmospheric laws. If you study the Bible openly and honestly, you will see that God created this Earth—with its systems of flora and fauna sustained by weather patterns—expressly for mankind’s individual and collective physical, mental and spiritual development. Read Genesis 2:15 again: This is the one responsibility God brings out in this account. Adam was given the responsibility to dress and keep the Garden of Eden. He was called to be a farmer; he was called to have a connection with the land, the environment and the weather.

Why would God give Adam this responsibility? God didn’t instruct Adam to build cities, or develop complex systems of government or finance. He told him to “dress” and “keep” the land. Why?

Because God knew that working the land would keep Adam focused on Him!

The Bible is filled with evidence that God’s presence is revealed in His creation. Take the weather, for example. Throughout the Bible God says that He pulls the levers governing our planet’s weather patterns (e.g. Job 38). God obviously created the weather as a means of sustaining human life, but He also created it as a means of interacting with mankind.

Righteous men such as Abraham and Joseph understood this. These men were obedient, and then relied and called upon God to bless the weather that governed their agricultural success, which ultimately made them incredibly wealthy men. Both were farmers, and their relationship and dependence on the land helped keep them in close contact with God.

God uses the weather as a means of revealing both His love and His anger toward mankind! Few chapters in the Bible explain this as well as Leviticus 26, known as the blessings and curses chapter. In the first 13 verses of the chapter, God outlines the blessings—one of which is rain in due season—that come when mankind obeys His laws.

Beginning in verse 14, God outlines the curses for disobedience. Notice verse 20: “And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.” God says He will curse the land. In Deuteronomy 28, the counterpart to Leviticus 26, God talks about weather curses even more specifically: “And the heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron” (verse 23).

Weather is a measure of God’s happiness with mankind! Tragically, mankind today, blind to God’s presence in the land and weather, is ignorant of the correction God is delivering through the land and weather—thereby forcing God to intensify the curses!

Vanity has caused us to bury the amazing truth about God’s purpose for the creation under millions of tons of concrete and steel. We think city life is the height of progression.

In truth, the further man has gotten from the land, the further he has gotten from God!

The rejected reality is that the land and the farming lifestyle as it was created by God is a spectacular teaching tool, a means of educating us, strengthening our relationship with our Creator and establishing God’s presence at the center of our lives.

This isn’t to suggest we should all quit our jobs and become farmers. We can, however, personally guard against participating in the cultural divorce from the land. Make it a personal goal to forge—through study, prayer and even practical experience—a deeper respect, appreciation and love for the physical creation. As we do that in a right spirit, we will better see our Creator!

On Monday Iran finished off 10 days of naval exercises in international waters near the Strait of Hormuz. In the midst of those war games, Iran’s political and military leaders threatened to retaliate against sanctions by shutting down the strait. It also came to light that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards plan to sow Hormuz with mines.

Hormuz ships over a third of the globe’s seaborne oil. It’s the world’s most crucial oil transit channel. In a world that needs oil to survive, this is no small provocation.

“If the world wants to make the region insecure, we will make the world insecure,” one Iranian lawmaker said. Another followed up, “America should know that the world’s energy gullet, that is to say, the Strait of Hormuz, is in our hands.”

(Click to enlarge) Map of the Middle East and the area of Iran’s naval exercises in late December 2011.The U.S. responded gamely: by sending an aircraft carrier and its strike group from the Persian Gulf, through the strait and into the Gulf of Oman, the area of Iran’s maneuvers. It said, though, that the movement was pre-planned.

Iran struck back by actually closing Hormuz—for five hours.

This past Saturday morning, Iran’s state agencies “reported” that the naval drills would include some long-range missile tests, and Iran closed its territorial waters. “For five hours Saturday, not a single warship, merchant vessel or oil tanker ventured into the 30-mile-wide Hormuz Strait, waiting to hear from Tehran that the test was over,” debkafile wrote. Later that morning Iran’s navy said it hadn’t fired any missiles after all. “Tehran had demonstrated by this ruse that it could close the vital waterway for hours or days at any moment” (ibid).

If that wasn’t confrontational enough, yesterday Iran upped the ante. The head of the armed forces said Iran would take action if America’s aircraft carrier returned back to its Persian Gulf base. “I advise, recommend and warn them (the Americans) over the return of this carrier to the Persian Gulf because we are not in the habit of warning more than once,” Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi said.

The U.S. said it would ignore the threat and intends to stay in the Gulf. It essentially brushed aside Iran’s action, as if they are of no consequence. When asked if it would send more ships to reinforce the area, the Pentagon said, “No one in this government seeks confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz. It’s important to lower the temperature.”

Iran clearly disagrees. It seeks confrontation, and it keeps raising the temperature.

But “lower the temperature” has long been America’s approach to Iran’s pushiness. Downplay the danger. Let Iran sow mines in Hormuz—we can clean them out within 48 hours, Washington says. This threat against our aircraft carrier proves that our economic pressure is working. That’s how the White House sees it. The Iranians “are feeling increasingly isolated and they are trying to divert the attention of their own public from the difficulties inside Iran, including the economic difficulties as a result of sanctions,” the State Department said yesterday.

No matter the provocation, essentially this is America’s response. It shrugs its shoulders when a drone crashes in Iran and the mullahs keep it. It ignores Iran’s presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing American soldiers. It disregards Iran’s terrorist ties to al Qaeda, and even its complicity behind 9/11. It pretends the nuclear threat is years off. Iran is all talk. All rhetoric. All bluster.

Granted, there is some truth in that. Iran is a classic study in what Hans Morgenthau called the policy of bluff, trumpeting and exaggerating what power it has in order to punch above its weight.

However, to simply dismiss Iran is a gross error. Three points must be mentioned.

One: Exaggerated though its own claims may be, Iran’s power is real, substantial, and growing. It continues to make strides in its armaments, including nuclear technology. Its web of terrorist activities throughout the region and beyond is strong and getting stronger. America’s withdrawal gives it freer course in Iraq. The rise of radical Islamist forces throughout the Middle East bolsters its position.

It’s not without reason that Iran is tightening its grip on Hormuz right now. With Islamist governments gaining control of Egypt and Libya, not to mention Eritrea and Yemen, Iran’s influence over the north and south entrances of the Red Sea is increasing. Its emerging ability to control oil flow through these choke points could cripple the economically fragile West.

Two: Iran’s bravado has exposed America’s broken will. Iran’s provocations have been far more than rhetoric. It has been at war with America, actively, for over a decade. In dramatic fashion before the whole world, it has defied the U.S. and flaunted America’s weakness.

Three, and most important: This pushiness is leading to war. The weakness in the West’s response has given Iran room to push harder and harder. Sanctions will not do the job. Nothing will stop Iran short of war!

As longtime Trumpet readers are well aware, the pushiness in Iran’s foreign policy was specifically prophesied in Scripture.

One end-time biblical prophecy the Trumpet has pointed to consistently over the past two decades speaks of an Iranian-led radical Islamic power, “the king of the south.” What will it do? “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him ….”

Way back in one of the earliest Trumpet editions—September/October 1990—editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote about this verse: “The Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament says the word push means ‘to strike—used of horned animals,’ or, ‘to push with the horn.’ It is ‘used figuratively of a victor who prostrates the nations before him.’ It also means, ‘to wage war with anyone.’ Push is a violent word!”

That is the verb prophecy uses to define the power we currently see threatening oil routes, openly confronting the world’s most powerful navy, launching missiles and building nukes.

Iran’s prophesied push has already started. America isn’t going to stop it. Just watch. It’s going to keep getting more provocative, more aggressive, more volatile and violent.

Until it ends in war.

“Most media have chosen to focus on Beijing’s vague aspirations towards deep-space and manned exploration,” writes formal Royal Navy officer and author on military matters Lewis Page in the Register, “but in fact the concrete details given all point toward a primary emphasis on strategic advantage for China here on Earth.”

The talk of peace is just a distraction. China’s space program is run by the military.

In the past, China’s bombastic approach to its space program has upset governments around the world and spurred talk of a new space race, or even a space arms race, between the United States and China. This report is more diplomatic.

China does not want a new space race. It would lose, by a mile. America is already far out in front. It doesn’t want America to start racing. It wants America to keep standing still, or even stumbling backward in its space program, while it quietly catches up.

Hence its new five-year plan—a military plan for space, but a quiet one.

“If China’s space plans come to fruition—and its track record over the last decade puts the odds in its favor—it will possess one of the world’s most robust and diverse space systems, many with military applications,” writes Matt Durnin in the Wall Street Journal.

“The technologies mentioned are only discussed in a civilian context,” he writes, “but several of these new capabilities have important consequences on the battlefield as well.”

Durnin and Page detail how each element of China’s plans can be used for the military.

The Long March 5 rocket more than doubles the weight of satellite that China can carry into low Earth orbit. “More launch horsepower means that, among other things, China can build larger, higher-resolution reconnaissance satellites,” writes Durnin.

The Long March 6 and 7 are designed to take satellites into a sun-synchronous orbit, which is “a type of orbit preferred for spacecraft whose primary mission is looking down on the planet beneath,” writes Page.

“Sometimes this is for wholly scientific purposes, but generally such satellites can be very useful for espionage and military tasks—even if they are ostensibly scientific or commercial in nature, and are genuinely used as such much of the time,” he continues.

China announced that it would develop a “high-resolution Earth observation system” with radar and other types of satellites for “environment and disaster monitoring”—i.e. surveillance. It wants to dramatically expand its network of spy satellites, but is trying to make it sound friendly.

Finally, as the Trumpet has previously covered, it announced it plans to complete its Beidou satellite navigation system by 2020. It should be operational in the Asia-Pacific region “before 2012,” it said. Page explains why owning a satellite navigation system is essential for a modern military:

Using unassisted astro and inertial guidance an icbm warhead can strike with enough precision to destroy a city: but aided by gps it can hit close enough to its target coordinates to take out a deeply buried, hardened missile silo. … Nowadays satellite navigation is of broader military significance: It is vital to the functioning of smart bombs and other conventional precision weapons of all kinds, not to mention general navigation and operations by ships, aircraft, vehicles and even foot soldiers. And outside the military sphere, many governments around the world look with disquiet on the growing dependence of their civilian shipping, aviation, even in time road and rail transport, on assets controlled by a foreign defense department.

Only America owns its own satellite navigation system, but Russia, China and the EU are all building one.

While America’s space program flounders, the rest of the world is intent on catching up.

America may have a big lead, but it’s squandering it, while other nations are doggedly catching up. “nasa’s direction tends to shift with every change of presidency,” write Edward Wong and Kenneth Chang in the New York Times. “President George W. Bush called on nasa to return to the moon by 2020. President Obama cancelled that program and now wants the agency to send astronauts to an asteroid.”

How different to nasa’s long-term planning toward one objective that meant it reached the moon in 1969. Today’s vacillating means nasa wastes billions while China produces dedicated and consistent five-year plans, and then follows through on those plans.

America’s lead in space is being eroded, which means it is losing its military edge over other powers.

Chinese Satellite Navigation Office Director Ran Chengqi has said the new Beidou system will increase the tracking ability of the People’s Liberation Army by 100 to 1,000 times. Such tracking ability, when combined with recent advances in Chinese missile technology, could allow Beijing to deny or hinder U.S. naval access to the waters around its shores. This development could be a game changer if Washington ever tries to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan.

Arthur Ding, a professor of international relations at National Chengchi University, stated that China’s homegrown satellite system does represent a long-term threat to Taiwan and advises that the Taipei government should develop counterattack technology that can disrupt the Beidou system.

Despite such warnings, however, there really is nothing Taiwan can do on its own to defend itself from mainland advances. And since the United States has not really been sticking up for it lately, it is likely the Taipei government will continue its current policy of appeasement toward Beijing.

Beijing, which has threatened Taiwan with invasion if the self-ruled island ever declares de jure independence, is zealously taking advantage of the pro-Chinese policies of current Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou in an attempt to draw the island as close as possible to the mainland. Overt military moves by China such as cross-Strait missile buildups and military satellite installations serve to remind Taiwan of the consequences it will suffer if it turns away from its current pro-China stance.

In this light, the current tensions between Taiwan and China are just another step along the path to a coming annexation of Taiwan by Communist China.

For more information, read “Taiwan’s New Direction” and “Taiwan Betrayal.”

“Forget the terrible news you’ve read,” said a sign. “Your mind’s at ease in an ostrich head.”

Today, the liberal media are selling ostrich heads. Egypt has demonstrated this perhaps more quickly than anywhere else.

They trotted out a host of experts to assure us that the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic parties were not a threat. Their thoughts got most of the space and the last word in the discussion.

Men like former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei were considered the foremost experts on the subject.

“For years the West has bought Mr. Mubarak’s demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood lock, stock and barrel, the idea that the only alternative here are these demons called the Muslim Brotherhood who are the equivalent of al Qaeda,” he told the New York Times (January 27). “I am pretty sure that any freely and fairly elected government in Egypt will be a moderate one ….”

As Hosni Mubarak was falling, McClatchy Newspapers informed its readers that “Political analysts say the [Muslim Brotherhood’s] support and influence is greatly exaggerated”—the line continually repeated by liberal media.

On February 3, a New York Times article with the title “Egypt’s Bumbling Brotherhood” assured readers that “The street, however, manifests little support for the Brotherhood.”

“There is little reason for the United States to fear a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood,” it said, arguing that the poor people who received charity from the Brotherhood would not bother to vote for it.

It even had a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s guidance council, Essam El-Errian, write an op-ed for it, where he assured the world that “We do not intend to take a dominant role in the forthcoming political transition.”

Even as recently as December 11, Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in the Times: “Our fears often reflect our own mental hobgoblins. For a generation, we were terrified of secular Arab nationalists, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt in the ’60s. The fears of the secularists proved overblown, and I think the same is true of anxieties about Islamic parties in Egypt today.”

Even the usually solid Foreign Policy magazine got it wrong. “The main rationale for delaying elections comes from those who fear an Islamist-dominated transitional parliament, the government body in charge of pushing forward constitutional amendments for Egypt’s new political order,” wrote Dalia Mogahed in one of its features (November 28). “This view, however, shared by many in the West, is likely exaggerated. While the Muslim Brotherhood enjoy support from a significant segment of Egyptian society, more Egyptians see a parliament in which the group holds a strong, influential position as bad for the country.”

The less solid Huffington Post published an interview with former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. “[T]he power of the Muslim Brotherhood has been exaggerated,” he said. “It’s a European obsession more than an Arab reality.”

The overall message was Don’t worry about the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s not really that popular.

Now the results are in, it turns out that all of the above had their heads in the sand. Hardline Islamist parties have won nearly 70 percent of all available seats in the first two rounds of Egypt’s elections, according to results announced by the head of the election commission, Abdel-Moez Ibrahim, December 24.

The Muslim Brotherhood said it had won 47 percent of the seats in the second round of voting, based on Ibrahim’s announcement. The even more hard-line Salifist Islamist Al-Nour Party said it had won 20 percent.

The main alliance of secular parties won fewer than 10 percent of the seats.

Because of the complicated voting system, the exact number of seats won by each party will not be announced until all three rounds of voting. The Associated Press reports that the next round of voting “is not expected to alter the result and could strengthen the Islamists’ hand.”

Proved utterly wrong, the liberal media are looking for another way to bury their heads in the sand.

The new strategy is to argue that the Islamist parties aren’t so bad after all. Reporting on the elections, cnn wrote: “The relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won more than 4 million votes in the runoff for the second round of a three-part process.”

So no mention of the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is the parent party of Hamas. The article never mentions sharia law. The Anti-Defamation League says the Muslim Brotherhood “has influenced many terrorist leaders—including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri—and many of its members have engaged in terrorist activities.” But to cnn, it is “relatively moderate.”

Al-Nour is described as “conservative.” So it’s an Egyptian version of the Republicans? Not exactly. It calls for sharia and strict punishments, including flogging and amputation. A member of its supreme committee, Shaaban Darwish, said: “We must obliterate the liberalism that was introduced by Sadat and Mubarak and reinstate the rule of Islam.” The party is new, so there are few fruits to judge by. But most of the newswires refer to al-Nour as “ultraconservative.”

The New York Times wrote, “Most races pit Islamists against Islamists, with the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood competing against the ultraconservatives known as Salafis.”

The Muslim Brotherhood is mainstream? Technically it is correct. In a nation rife with anti-Semitism, the Brotherhood’s views on Israel are mainstream.

But according to this new myth, the Muslim Brotherhood will get on fine with Israel. “Egyptian Islamists OK with Israeli peace treaty” was one headline on cbs News, as the media reported that al-Nour said it wouldn’t end Egypt’s historic treaty with Israel.

“The prevailing optimism in media reports concerning the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist party’s readiness to adhere to the peace treaty with Israel is based on general statements made by senior officials in both parties,” wrote Lt. Col. Jonathan D. Halevi (Ret.) for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a think tank led by former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dr. Dore Gold. “These statements maintain that Egypt must honor the international treaties that it signed.”

“Yet a more rigorous examination of the two parties’ stances identifies a markedly different tendency,” he continues. “Both seek a way to cast off the Camp David agreement in a manner that will incur minimal diplomatic and economic damage to Egypt, and restore Egypt to its leading role in the circle of states confronting Israel.”

He lists a gamut of leaders from both parties, including leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Dr. Mohammed Badie, saying the treaty should be abandoned or key points amended.

“The optimism regarding a radical change in the positions of these extreme Egyptian Islamic movements regarding Israel grasps at the straws of general statements that do not attest to an ideological reversal, but convey the tactics for obtaining the strategic objective: casting off the Camp David agreement and transforming Egypt into a prime regional force that will lead the diplomatic and military battle against Israel,” he concludes.

The Islamists are simply trying to have their cake and eat it too—they’re looking for a way to end the peace treaty with Israel while hanging on to the money and arms from America for as long as possible. And meanwhile, they’re giving the American ostriches more excuses to keep their heads in the sand.

The liberal media were wrong about the election, and they are wrong in saying that democracy will moderate Egypt’s Islamists.

But those purveyors of ostrich head bonnets are just selling what people will buy. As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote: “The media have a terrible history of being deceived by dangerous tyrants seeking to plunge the world into chaos.” And we, the readers, have a terrible history of buying it.

The world is a lot more dangerous than we want to think it is. Like it or not, we must stop buying the ostrich heads and take a good look at the world the way it is—not the way we want it to be.

For more information on our dangerous history of being duped by complacent media, read Mr. Flurry’s article “Churchill Versus the Media.”

Firouzabadi praised the “forced departure” of America that he said “was due to the resistance and determination of the Iraqi people and government.”

“I hope the humiliating failure of the United States after nine years of occupying Iraq will serve as a lesson for them to never think of attacking another country,” he said in a message sent to the Iraqi Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Babaker Zebari, and Iraq’s acting Defense Minister Saadun al-Dulaimi.

Last month, a delegation of Iraqi military leaders under General Zebari traveled to Iran to examine areas where the two militaries could cooperate.

Meanwhile, in the wake of America’s pullout, Sunni and Shia in the Iraqi government are divided. Iraq’s Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi of paying terrorists to attack the country. Al-Hashemi fled to the Kurdish region, and Sunni politicians are refusing to cooperate with the government.

This division plays right into Iran’s hands. It forces Iraq’s Shia to forgo any ideas of independence from Iran and instead turn to their Shia ally for support against the Sunnis. It also gives Iran a further pretext for getting involved in Iraq’s internal affairs—to restore order.

The Trumpet has forecast for decades that Iran would take over Iraq. The U.S. helped Iran by removing Saddam Hussein. Iran’s influence over the nation quickly grew. Now that American troops have left the country, expect Iran to quickly take charge.

The commander of the Iranian Navy, Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, said on December 22 that the war games would be conducted off the coasts of India, Pakistan, Oman, Yemen and northern Somalia. The purpose of the maneuvers, he said, was to display the prowess of Iran’s armed forces and to demonstrate the navy’s capacity to provide security for vessels sailing on the open seas.

Some analysts and diplomats, including a number of Iranian lawmakers, believe that these exercises are less about demonstrating Iran’s capacity to keep the seas open and more about demonstrating Iran’s capacity to close down the Strait of Hormuz in the event of any future conflict with the West.

“Soon we will hold a military maneuver on how to close the Strait of Hormuz,” a member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee, Parviz Sarvari, said on December 12. “If the world wants to make the region insecure, we will make the world insecure.”

Another lawmaker made similar comments before the Iranian Parliament on December 18. “If an oil embargo is placed on Iran, we will not allow a single barrel of oil to pass through here to the belligerent countries,” said Isa Ja’fari. “America should know that the world’s energy gullet, that is to say, the Strait of Hormuz, is in our hands.”

Hormuz is one of the world’s most important oil choke points, with a daily flow of about 15 million barrels passing through it. According to an analyst at Stratfor, that accounts for 90 percent of Persian Gulf exports and 40 percent of global consumption. With these statistics in mind, it is easy to see how even the threat of such a naval blockade could wreak havoc on oil prices.

While there are many who doubt that Iran actually has the military capacity to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed for an extended period of time, it must be remembered that when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, global oil prices more than doubled on the mere expectation of future shortages.

Also, now that Islamist governments are getting control of Libya, Egypt, Eritrea and Yemen, Iran is gaining greater influence over the northern and southern entrances to the Red Sea.

For Europe and America, Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb would be a strategic and economic catastrophe. The Iranian mullahs know this and are wasting no time in acquiring such control. Iran’s leaders may not currently have the power to keep these sea gates closed for an extended period of time, but they are swiftly moving in that direction.

When you add such a threat to a global economy already ailing from a eurozone sovereign debt crisis and an astronomically high United States budget deficit, you get a potential economic disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

If Iran gets control of these trade routes, it could unleash massive chaos in both Europe and America. Undoubtedly, America lacks the will power to tackle this problem. Therefore it is all the more important to watch Europe closely. Bible prophecy reveals that as American society unravels, a German-led European empire will rise up and clash with an Iranian-led Islamic caliphate.

For a more detailed explanation of these prophecies, read “Libya and Ethiopia Reveal Iran’s Military Strategy” and then carefully study the booklet The King of the South by editor in chief Gerald Flurry.

The motive of the attacker is still under investigation, but the Karachi Post in Pakistan reports that the attack was linked to the sentencing of an Islamic family charged with killing Sadia Sheikh over her refusal to accept an arranged marriage. If true, this motive would make the attack the latest events in a gruesome string of Islamist violence stretching across Europe.

A mob of some 20 radical Islamists recently stormed a debate being held in Amsterdam, screaming “Allah Akbar” and demanding the execution of two prominent liberal Muslim scholars. This confrontation took place just days after a group of disgruntled Muslim youths threw rocks at a man dressed as Santa Claus in the southwestern Slotervaart neighborhood of Amsterdam.

A similar rock attack took place against Roman Catholics celebrating a religious event at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Virgin of Santa Cruz in the southern French city of Nimes.

The Danish Islamist group Kaldet til Islam (Call to Islam) has even dispatched a 24-hour vigilante “morals police” to enforce sharia law in parts of Copenhagen. These patrols target non-Muslims caught drinking, gambling, going to night clubs or engaging in other activities deemed to be contrary to Islam.

Such violent episodes are pushing more Europeans to believe that radical action needs to be taken against the threat of Islam. Xenophobic ideas that were once characteristic only of fascist radicals are now working themselves into the mainstream of European politics.

On the morning of June 4, Muslim worshipers in southern Denmark found their mosque defaced with drawings of the prophet Mohammad and slogans urging Muslims to go home. A few months later, a dismembered pig was found on the construction site of a planned mosque outside of Copenhagen. Both incidents were the work of the Danish Defense League, a far-right vigilante group founded for the express purpose of taking action against Muslims in Denmark.

The Bloc Identitaire movement—with a wild pig as its logo—is now emerging as a force on the French political scene. Like the Danish Defense League, it likens Muslim immigrants to invaders threatening European civilization. The English Defense League, the Norwegian Progress Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Hungarian Jobbik Party, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Italian Northern League have similar views in other parts of Europe.

Perhaps the most shocking episode highlighting the rise of anti-Islamic sentiments in Europe was the July massacre of 77 people in an effort to incite an anti-Islamic revolution by self-described Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik. In a 1,500-page online manifesto titled 2083—A European Declaration of Independence, he railed against Islamic immigration and claimed that multiculturalism was sapping Europe of its Christian heritage.

According to the Telegraph, “Breivik has already become a heroic figure for sections of the ultra far right, much in the same way Timothy McVeigh became a hero for sections of the militia movement in the United States.” Two Italian parliamentarians of Italy’s Northern League Party publicly defended the logic behind Breivik’s Oslo massacre, even if they did distance themselves from his violence methods.

In his online manifesto, Breivik argued that Europe has to get back to its Catholic roots if it is ever going to repel the threat of Islam. “Today’s Protestant church is a joke,” he wrote. “I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic. … When a just and conservative pope mounts the chair of Peter, the tide will set strongly toward Rome. We will hear of conversions on every hand.”

There is definitely a radical element in both the Catholic and Islamic faiths! Even though most of the peoples of Europe currently stand aghast at the brutal murders committed by Anders Behring Breivik and those like him, many are starting to sympathize with his ideas about the need to take radical action against the “threat of Islam.” A Vatican-dominated Europe is about to take radical action against the threat of radical Islam and bring the specter of the Crusades to life once again.

Read “The Coming War Between Catholicism and Islam” for a rundown of Europe’s history of dealing with Islam and an explanation of this coming final clash.

Their suffering has a lot to teach us.

For over six decades, the rule of Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung is all these people have known. Before that was decades of harsh, exploitative rule by the imperialist Japanese.

Kim Il Sung institutionalized a grotesque combination of oppression and cult of personality. He enacted communist economic policies that isolated his country and impoverished his people. He outlawed dissent. He decreed that his enemies and political opponents “must be eliminated through three generations,” condemning them and their families to prison camps, without trial, for life. Meanwhile, he erected monuments to himself by the tens of thousands and enshrined himself in the constitution as the nation’s “Eternal President.” He suppressed all religion outside the worship of himself.

The unsettling result of this propagandism was on display when Kim Il Sung died in 1994 at age 82. His son declared a 10-day grieving period, and hundreds of thousands attended his funeral, outdoing one another with their weeping and gnashing of teeth. The crowds of mourners were so intense that some people actually died in the crush.

What can explain it? How can a people so tyrannized be so filled with remorse at the loss of the tyrant?

Kim’s body was preserved and embalmed in a glass coffin for viewing—where it bizarrely remains. To this day, the president of North Korea is, legally, a man who has been dead for nearly two decades.

Kim Jong Il has ruthlessly perpetuated his father’s failed totalitarian policies. He funneled much of the poor country’s money into building a massive army and weapons of mass destruction. His government’s economic mismanagement has made life miserable for millions. His people broadly suffer from chronic malnutrition; hunger and famine are rife. North Korea is functionally a broken state.

Such failure is carefully protected through crushing authoritarianism. There is no freedom of speech or information. All radio, tv and news organizations are government-controlled and heavily censored. A blackout of outside media is enforced. The people have no right to privacy; their correspondence is rigorously monitored. They have no freedom of assembly or religion, except to worship the Dear Leader or his father, the Great Leader, whose portraits are everywhere.

Those who break the rules pay terrifying penalties. Korea’s gulags are chambers of horrors: arbitrary imprisonment in terrible conditions, hard labor, torture, forced abortions and infanticide, deliberate starvation, public executions by hanging or firing squad, cannibalism. In terms of the percentage of the nation’s populace that has starved or wasted away in his concentration camps, Kim Jong Il ranks among the bloodiest dictators of the 20th century.

Watch Video Still, with his death this past Saturday, we are witness to the same unearthly story: uncontrollable crying and anguish on display by a nation of mourners. “Father!” they cry—speaking not of God, but of Kim—beating their chests, convulsing, losing their balance between sobs.

By all accounts it is sincere sorrow—amplified, surely, by the contagious nature of such hysteria. It is the genuine agony of a people who have been programmed their whole lives to praise and worship this man. Who have been indoctrinated, brainwashed, day after day after day, into seeing only good in him.

Even as he trampled and ruined them.

It is a disturbing, potent example of the vulnerability of the human mind to dangerous deception.

A person can become conditioned to accept the perverse, the degrading, as normal. Without an accurate gauge of measurement, his perception gets distorted. And propaganda colors his thinking all the more. He comes to embrace circumstances that are beneath the God-given dignity of human beings.

The noble North Koreans are an extreme example. But such deception is not nearly as rare as one might think.

The Bible reveals, in fact, that all nations are under the sway of a particularly deadly deception, foisted on them by a tyrant far worse than Kim Jong Il. Satan the devil is the deceiver of this whole world (Revelation 12:9).

Just before he died in 1986, Herbert W. Armstrong explained this remarkable truth in a booklet titled A World Held Captive. He wrote of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, who was brainwashed into preferring the criminal life of her captors. “But most astonishing,” he wrote, “is the actual fact of the colossal kidnapping of all time—in which the captive for 6,000 years has willed to pursue the life and evil philosophy of the archkidnapper—Satan the devil. The willing victim in this case is the world that inhabits this planet Earth! Yet this world has been so completely deceived that it cannot realize what actually has happened to it.”

The devil’s way of life causes nothing but misery. Yet from our earliest days in life, Satan bombards us with his propaganda to convince us the opposite. He is “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience,” encouraging people to satisfy “the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind” (Ephesians 2:2-3). That is how he cements his power. Sin is bondage. When we fall into its snare we become “servants of corruption” and captives of this despot (e.g. 2 Peter 2:19; 2 Timothy 2:26). And yet the vast majority are duped, blinded to their plight. In their deception they are convinced of the inherent rightness and goodness of the very things that are destroying them.

Through his political system, the devil has wreaked untold suffering and destruction; he has “weaken[ed] the nations” (Isaiah 14:12). Yet remarkably, when God brings this beastly power to justice, Scripture prophesies a scene, one might say, uncannily similar to what is unfolding in North Korea right now. As much suffering as this beast power has caused, when it falls, people will “bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning” (see Revelation 18:9-11).

The story in North Korea is one of a queer and tragic type of unrequited love: people deceived into loving the cruel dictator who did not love them back. It typifies a greater tragedy enveloping our whole world.

Kim Jong Il’s death will not substantially improve life for his people in the near term. But soon—very soon—God will permanently dethrone “the god of this world,” free North Koreans and all other peoples from their captivity, and establish a new world, a world free of deception.

As Jesus Christ, who at that time will rule as King of kings, promised, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

“I am clear that the single biggest strategic risk facing the UK today is economic rather than military,” he said at the start of his speech. Britain “may have to prioritize more ruthlessly now that we have fewer ships, men and planes.”

“The UK will require other carefully chosen alliances over the coming decade through which to influence the strategic landscape and help determine the outcome of fast-moving crises, all at minimum cost,” he said. The economic reality “will require us to accept that some capabilities will be kept at a lower readiness or, (horror of horrors!) provided by others.”

General Richards praised the Anglo-French alliance. He also talked about the intervention in Libya, where ground forces were provided by “our Arab partners,” as a model of this type of cooperation.

Bible prophecy shows that reliance on foreign allies is a crucial weakness for Britain. Trusting in foreign countries for defense, it will be betrayed.

For information on how this same dangerous weakness afflicts America, and what the outcome will be for both nations, see our article “Former Superpower Seeks Foreign Lovers.”

All totaled, twelve billion-dollar disasters pounded the United States in 2011—three more than the previous record set in 2008. These catastrophic events were responsible for killing 1,000 Americans and causing $52 billion in damages.

As the Associated Press reported on December 7, “With an almost biblical onslaught of twisters, floods, snow, drought, heat and wildfire, the U.S. in 2011 has seen more weather catastrophes that caused at least $1 billion in damage than it did in all of the 1980s, even after the dollar figures from back then are adjusted for inflation” (emphasis added throughout).

Breaking it down further, AP revealed this alarming trend: During the 1980s, the United States averaged just one billion-dollar disaster per year. In the 1990s, it jumped to 3.8 per year—then 4.6 during the first decade of the new millennium.

So far in this decade—after just two years—we have averaged 7½ billion-dollar disasters per year.

Something is frighteningly wrong with the weather. Some experts say we’ve just had a run of bad luck—that it’s purely a matter of happenstance. Others attribute the cause to “global warming.”

God, however, says it is a sign that we are living in the very last days. Weather disasters, as they increase in frequency and intensity, are actually fulfilling Bible prophecy. They are among the signs that Christ gave pointing to the end of this present evil age.

In His Olivet prophecy in Matthew 24, Jesus Christ gave His disciples a chronological overview of events to occur in the lead-up to His return. In verses 21-22, Christ said there is a time coming when no flesh would be saved alive if He didn’t return and prevent it. This is speaking of World War iii—a 3½-year bloodbath that will culminate in the “battle of that great day of God Almighty.”

But before the battle of mankind against Christ—before the European beast power and the Asiatic kings of the east square off—before Europe lashes out at the modern-day descendants of Israel—before it surrounds Jerusalem with armies—before the European king of the north comes against the Islamic king of the south like a whirlwind—before radical Islam captures East Jerusalem—just before all of this happens, Jesus said weather patterns and other natural phenomena would take a violent turn for the worse!

“For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in [different] places” (verse 7). The return of Jesus Christ, in other words, will be preceded by a sharp upsurge in “natural” disasters.

Jesus also said that famine—a shortage of food and water—and then pestilences (or disease epidemics) would accompany these weather-related disasters.

In May of this year, in a television program, my father told Key of David viewers that the word famines needs to be seen not only in the context of war—which certainly causes famine—but also in the context of extreme weather. These epic disasters, in other words, are prophesied to have a profoundly negative impact on food production—a reality that is now making headlines nearly every day.

In like manner, Christ’s reference to pestilences can also refer to the diseases that often follow in the wake of such disasters. And if you examine how the Greek word is used in Acts 24:5, another dimension is added to Christ’s prophecy—the social breakdown that comes as a result of famine and pestilence.

These are the days we are living in right now! Weather disasters, as they increase in frequency and intensity, are actually fulfilling Bible prophecy. We are experiencing the outer edge of a storm that is about to inflict the worst suffering mankind has ever known.

Jesus Himself said it: “All these are the beginning of sorrows” (verse 8). This is where we are right now in Bible prophecy! Sad to say, the ever intensifying disasters we are seeing right now are only the beginning. It is prophesied to get much worse.

But Jesus did not leave us without hope! The Anchor Bible compares the “beginning of sorrows” to the beginning of birth pangs: “It’s almost a technical term for the sufferings which would immediately precede a new age, the age of the Messiah’s reign.”

What a beautiful picture! Right now, this world is being violently shaken by a rapid succession of agonizing birth pangs. But Jesus tells us that these catastrophic events will soon “give birth” to a new age of world peace and prosperity—a utopian paradise that will be totally free of weather extremities and other unnatural phenomena!

To learn more about the many physical signs Jesus gave about the end of the world as we now know it—and the beginning of a wonderful new age to be set up by Jesus Christ, request our free booklet Why ‘Natural’ Disasters?

American power is now in full-scale retreat. And this rapid decline has been on full display throughout the war against terrorism. It was also foretold in your Bible, which is why, from the very beginning of the war against terrorism, we told you that the United States did not have the “necessary will” to win the war. That forecast was based on Leviticus 26:19.

We told you early on that as active and aggressive as America would be in the war, in the end, its strength would be spent in vain. Now the major media outlets are writing about these developments every day it seems.

This week, the United States of America accepted defeat in Iraq—the “mother of all disasters,” to use the words from a recent piece in the Weekly Standard. America’s military power has been shockingly diminished. Its economy is broken. And social unrest is now spilling into our streets.

It’s been a decade of defeat for the United States.

On Monday, a senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, Justice and Consumer Affairs Minister Michael Braun, was forced to resign from office in the wake of publicity surrounding allegations of his involvement in bad property deals.

Wednesday, the general secretary of Chancellor Merkel’s coalition partner, the Free Democrat Party, stepped down. Christian Lindner, an ally of the economy minister, Merkel’s Vice Chancellor Philipp Roesler, resigned over Free Democratic Party (fdp) ructions concerning the EU’s permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism.

Divisions within the fdp run deep and forced the resignation of former party head, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, from the fdp general secretary’s position some months ago. His replacement, Roesler, will be seeking someone who can watch his back to replace Lindner.

To top it all off, German President Christian Wulff returned from a tour of the Middle East on Tuesday facing increasing pressure to explain a questionable loan which he received previous to his presidential appointment. His accusers maintain that by compromising standards of transparency expected of a public official, Wulff disqualified himself from acting as the nation’s moral exemplar.

Each of these situations being hyped by Germany’s liberal press risks Chancellor Merkel becoming distracted at a time when she and her government need both political focus and party unity to ensure that the goal of swiftly attending to the euro crisis is not compromised.

Already the markets are reacting negatively to perceived divisions within Germany and other nations in the wake of last Friday’s fiscal compact deal.

There are no surprises in all of this.

Germany’s coalition government has been divisive since its beginning under Merkel’s leadership. Her grasp on coalition unity is clearly slipping at a most dangerous time in both German and EU politics. Whether Merkel can last the distance till the 2013 elections is a moot point. The loss of two key coalition members in a matter of days this week does not bode well for Merkel’s continuing leadership, for coalition unity in a time of great crisis, nor, least of all, for the survival of the eurozone.

In a comment not welcomed by many EU leaders, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey recently warned: “The eurozone is at great risk. … I know that they’ve taken some measures here with the 17 members of the eurozone to try to better align … monetary and fiscal policy. But it’s unclear, to me at least, that that will be the glue that actually holds it together.”

General Dempsey then expressed a fear that sharper analysts share, warning of “the potential for civil unrest and the breakup of the Union” (ibid). The Intelligence Digest observes that “the fears he expressed are by no means misplaced” (December 14).

To put things in true perspective, the alignment of monetary and fiscal policy, rather than being the glue to hold the EU together, is but a catalyst to break it apart. Already some EU leaders are expressing skepticism as to their being able to effectively enact necessary changes in legislation to permit operation of the pact with the speed that the current escalating crisis demands.

With Chancellor Merkel having to start placing fingers in the leaky dyke of her governing coalition, this mitigates against processing the mooted fiscal pact in the fast lane. There simply is, as yet, no glue activated to bind such a pact together over such a disparate group of 27 nations.

Enter Rome.

Editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in the April 2006 issue of the Trumpet: “So the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation existed through subsequent history as a union of two separate authorities—one giving protection to the church, the other supplying the unifying glue of a state religion to bind together the separate nations and cultures within the empire.

“Herbert W. Armstrong believed the same pattern would occur again in our time—that European nations would unite suddenly because of a crisis, and that the Roman Catholic Church would play a huge role in solving that emergency. In times of crisis, religion has a way of pulling people together!”

As farfetched as that prospect may seem to be in reference to the European Union today, it is as sure as tomorrow’s rising sun!

Our research leads us to the conclusion that the Vatican is well advanced in formulating, together with German elites, a process that will soon divide the EU apart and cement together a Roman Catholic core of 10 nations under the spiritual influence of the pope.

We are not alone in this conclusion, as future articles will point out. But we are unique in prophesying its ultimate outcome in detail that you will find from no other source.

Chancellor Merkel is between a rock and a hard place, trying to keep her governing coalition together and satisfy the domestic demands of her German constituents with an important election year looming amid the current challenges of the fiscal compact.

The road ahead is a rocky one that may even cost Merkel her political career. In the process, the way will increasingly be opened up for a Roman Catholic leader to soon sweep into power in Germany and busy himself applying the spiritual “glue” binding 10 EU nations together into a powerful economic, political and military force. The pope’s aggressive new evangelism, slated to move into higher gear in 2012, will only serve to accelerate this process.

A Gift From Above?

On December 5, Iran announced it had shot down an unpiloted United States spy drone that was in Iran’s airspace, and said the drone sustained only slight damage. American officials say the craft crashed on its own due to a malfunction, but no one disputes the fact that the U.S.’s sophisticated surveillance technology is in Iran’s possession.

On Sunday, Iran said it will not return the drone to the U.S., and called America’s drone mission an “act of war.” On Monday, Iran said it was “reverse-engineering” the American technology, and announced plans to file a lawsuit against Washington, in U.S. courts, over the U.S.’s “invasion” of Iran’s airspace.

If Iran were a lone voice of defiance crying out against Western powers, the situation might be manageable, but Tehran has the backing of two of the world’s most powerful nations. Russia and China, both veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council, have vowed to block any move to impose additional sanctions on Iran. Last week, a leading Chinese admiral even spouted off the kind of rhetoric normally heard only from leaders in Iran or North Korea, saying he would be willing to “start World War iii” in order to protect Iran from Western powers.

Moscow and Beijing sent intelligence teams to Tehran this week to study the drone, but Iran is not willing to grant them free access. Revolutionary Guards commander Gen. Ali Jaafari said the teams may study it only if they give Tehran the S-300PMU-1 air defense system, which Russia has consistently refused to sell Iran. If Iran’s nuclear program forges ahead, the ruling clerics could use nuclear weaponry to fuel greater defiance against the West. And Russia and China appear bent on allowing it to continue, probably for that very reason.

‘We Will Make the World Insecure’

A member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee said on Monday that Iran’s military will “soon” practice its ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

“Soon we will hold a military maneuver on how to close the Strait of Hormuz,” said Parviz Sarvari to Iran’s isna news agency. “If the world wants to make the region insecure, we will make the world insecure.”

Around a third of the world’s seaborne shipped oil passes through Hormuz, making the 4-mile-wide strait the most important oil transit channel on the planet. Such a military drill would demonstrate to the world that Iran is capable of disrupting global markets, and prepared to do so if Tehran is not given its way.

Calling the EU’s Bluff?

While Iran is eager to demonstrate its willingness to “make the world insecure” by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran reckons that Europe has exactly the opposite mentality—and that the EU’s behavior will be governed by fear of upsetting global markets.

In a Sunday statement channeling Iran’s defiance directly toward Europe, an Iranian official said the EU “definitely” will not impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports because such a move would jostle the global crude market. “Our policy is sustainable supply of oil to Europe …. Iran is a major oil producer and any sanctions on our oil export would harm the global market,” Iranian Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi said. “We (would) have no problem to find a replacement for the EU oil market.”

Qasemi’s statement was a response to calls by EU leaders on Friday to levy more sanctions against Tehran in order to intensify pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. But Tehran is not worried because it has seen that the EU’s vulnerable economies are too dependent on Iranian oil to back an EU ban on it. Germany, France and Britain are striving for such a ban, but nations like Greece have voiced concern over the notion because of their reliance on Iran’s oil.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said, “When they (EU) have so many differences among themselves then they should know the unity they have is only superficial. Each member goes after its own maximal interests … they have this profiteering approach and, with such a rift, such sanctions cannot be imposed.”

But the rift in the European Union will not exist for long.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes this about Iran’s increasingly defiant international behavior and what Europe’s response to it will be:

The stage is being set for an Islamic group of nations to be led by Iran as the prophesied king of the south, which will push at the king of the north, the European Union. “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over” (Daniel 11:40). Let’s not forget that this is an end-time prophecy. Iran has a foreign policy with a lot of “push.”

Iran’s recent defiance is the latest in a long list of indicators of its belligerent attitude toward the West. Tehran is pushing against Western powers with increasing ferocity, and that push will continue to intensify until a German-led EU reacts “like a whirlwind”—with a decimating blitzkrieg attack. Iran’s jeering about Europe’s lack of unity will be among the catalysts that convert the EU into a unified powerhouse, capable of shocking devastation. The “whirlwind” response of Europe, once it is unified under Germany, will put a violent stop to Iran’s jeering and defiance.

To understand more about the rapidly-approaching fulfillment of these prophecies, and how closely they connect to the best imaginable news, read Mr. Flurry’s landmark booklet The King of the South.

Following seven years of delivering support, by Iraq’s own invitation, to Iraq’s efforts to train cohesive military and police forces, despite nato’s willingness to continue the mission the Iraqi government has unceremoniously denied nato that opportunity. As the press release states, “Agreement on the extension of this successful program did not prove possible despite robust negotiations conducted over several weeks.”

The largesse nato members extended to Iraq since 2004, in addition to training over 17,000 personnel, includes “over €115 million worth of military equipment and a total of €17.7 million in trust fund donations from all 28 nato allies for training and education at nato facilities” (ibid).

It remains to be seen just how effective the nato effort has been. With pending withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq slated to also commence this month, the door will be opened wider inviting incursion from Iraq’s eastern neighbor, the nuclear-sabre-rattling Iran.

This nato withdrawal is but one more step toward emboldening the increasingly aggressive push from the biblical king of the south against the rising king of the north.

The year 2012 is set to witness a sea change in Eurasia as nato packs up and leaves Iraq and U.S. troop withdrawals accelerate.

Read our booklet The King of the South for background on these events in Iraq and Iran.

An Egyptian official denied the report, saying Egypt has the Sinai completely under control.

“Israel has called on Cairo to increase its efforts to restore order in Sinai and to prevent attacks, but the Egyptian military has held back from dismantling the Hamas infrastructure in the peninsula,” the Jerusalem Post writes.

Israel prevented an attack by Hamas through the Sinai last Thursday by bombing several senior terrorists while they were in Gaza. Because Israel won’t attack Hamas targets in Egypt, it is trying to stop attacks while they are being planned in Gaza.

The Post also reports that Hamas has smuggled advanced weapons stolen from the Libyan military into Gaza—including weapons like Russian-built shoulder-to-air missiles.

Hamas’s position in Egypt will only improve. The Muslim Brotherhood—its parent terrorist organization—is rising in Egypt. The recent election results reveal it is the most popular political party. Hamas is cementing its connections with the Brotherhood. A senior Hamas source said the group has added “a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—Palestine,” according to the London-based al-Hayat newspaper.

Even without being openly hostile to Israel, Egypt is already damaging Israel’s security by allowing Hamas to operate with impunity. But soon, people who agree with Hamas will be running the Egyptian government. The so-called Arab Spring in Egypt puts Israel in a perilous position.

These results indicate that nearly two thirds of Egyptians want Islam to play a greater role in the nation’s government. The strong showing by the hard-line Islamist Salifis took many by surprise. Their success will only cause to strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood, which will appear to be the “moderate” alternative. But in foreign policy, hostility to the West, and strategic objectives for Egypt, the Islamist parties differ little. It is mostly tactics that they disagree on.

“A common reaction among Western politicians and in the mainstream Western media has been that this unwelcome result mostly reflects better organization on the part of the Islamist trend rather than the extreme weakness of liberal tendencies in Egyptian society,” wrote JKC de Courcy. “Our view is simpler, it is that the results are an accurate reflection of the preferences of Egypt’s 50 million voters, and the significance of this can hardly be exaggerated” (Courcy’s Intelligence Brief, December 7).

De Courcy says that although there is a lot of politicking still to be done in Egypt, it is clear that public opinion, “which can no longer be ignored, is overwhelmingly Islamist.”

This means that in the future, Israel may not, “without serious repercussions, get away with military operations such as the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank to suppress the second intifada, the 2006 Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah, or the 2008 Operation Cast Lead attack on Gaza. Whereas in the past these operations may have been criticized by Egypt, the peace treaty with Israel still held firm. Now, Israeli military planners are saying, no such assumption can be made; which either means Israel must constrain itself when dealing with future attacks from the Gaza Strip, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, or another intifada—or it must, simultaneously prepare to defend itself against Egypt” (ibid).

What this means is a drastically strengthened Iranian power in the Middle East, able to use its proxies with less fear of reprisal.

Argentine patrol ships have boarded 12 Spanish fishing boats over the last few weeks, saying that their fishing licenses were not valid. They said the boats were operating “illegally” in disputed waters.

“The UK has protested to Argentina …. We consider that it is not compliant with international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos),” said the British Foreign Office in a statement.

Argentina’s National Congress is considering a proposal that would make the country’s Olympic logo the image of the Falkland Islands with the words “The Falklands are Argentine.”

Meanwhile, Argentina is not pleased that Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is to be stationed in the Falklands next February as part of his training duties with the Royal Air Force. Britain’s plans to create a 1 million-square-kilometer protective zone around South Georgia—an island in the region of the Falklands also claimed by Argentina—are not likely to make the waters any calmer. The protective zone is designed to preserve the unique marine life in the area and will limit fishing.

Britain’s Times newspaper writes that Britain would not be capable of saving the islands if Argentina took them over, as it did in 1982. “It is highly unlikely that Britain could repeat the mission,” it writes, “particularly since we no longer have an aircraft carrier available.”

“Nor,” it continues, “given France’s ambivalence over the issue, would there be any realistic prospect of borrowing a French carrier, as stipulated under the recent Anglo-French defense pact.”

Rockhopper Oil, a drilling company that focuses on the Falklands, is drilling in the seabed around the islands to determine if there are commercially viable fields of oil or gas. This could give the islands more than a geographical significance, which would heat up competition for the islands.

This is a competition that Britain has neither the capabilities nor the will to win.

Suddenly, their lives were consumed in the roar of diving planes, popping machine guns, thunderous exploding bombs, and the shouts of shocked people trying to summon a response to the surprise strike.

That attack holds a vivid lesson for you and me, a profoundly relevant lesson written in the blood of the 2,400 Americans killed 70 years ago today.

And for a number of reasons, it is particularly poignant for us here at the Trumpet.

Evidence abounds of a terrible truth: The tragedy of all those lost lives is compounded by the fact that they could have been spared. Before the attack, warning after warning went unheeded.

In 1940, as Japan’s land war with China raged, its need for more resources became plain; rumors spread of Japan possibly expanding the war. American strategists were aware that Pearl Harbor was a potential target. That is where the U.S. Pacific Fleet, usually berthed on the American mainland, was located at the time—despite commander Adm. James Richardson warning that it was too vulnerable there.

In January of 1941, Peru’s envoy in Tokyo, Dr. Ricardo Shreiber, told the U.S. Embassy that intelligence sources had uncovered a war plan involving a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The information reached the State Department and naval intelligence, as well as the admiral in Hawaii.

In August that year, a top British agent warned the fbi of the planned attack. He reported that a Japanese naval leader had been collecting secret data on a successful British surprise air assault on the Italian fleet in its home port—effectively, a blueprint for Japan’s assault.

Soon after, an agent for the Sino-Korean People’s League told cbs News of proof that Japan would attack Hawaii before Christmas; this information also reached U.S. Army and Navy intelligence.

Admiral Richardson protested to both the U.S. president and the secretary of the Navy—and was dismissed for his trouble. The chief of naval intelligence insisted that Pearl Harbor be warned of looming attack, and was also replaced.

How easy it is, and how distressingly common, to overlook a warning. Hindsight may be 20/20—but foresight is rare, and acting on it exceedingly so. Similar unheeded signals preceded 9/11.

Here is why the history of Pearl Harbor is so deeply relevant today. These examples of missed signs and unrecognized threats are mere shadows of a far deadlier surprise attack that is about to descend on us.

Before saying more about that, though, I’ll explain why, for us at the Trumpet, December 7 is also an important date to mark for another reason. It was 22 years ago today that this work began.

This magazine’s editor in chief was a minister in the Worldwide Church of God. In the nearly four years since that church’s founder, Herbert W. Armstrong, died in 1986, the new leadership had begun demolishing the doctrines of the church. For resisting them, Gerald Flurry was summoned to church headquarters in Pasadena on December 7 of 1989 and fired that very night.

That termination was more a beginning than an end, however. Out of that crisis point, the present work emerged. The Philadelphia Church of God held its first service December 16 of that year; it published and mailed its first piece of literature, Malachi’s Message to God’s Church Today, by Jan. 16, 1990; the first Philadelphia Trumpet was the February 1990 edition.

That the pcg began on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack is uniquely fitting.

Our aim from the beginning has been to “prophesy again” (Revelation 10:11), holding fast the truth proclaimed by the work of Mr. Armstrong. However, given the urgency of the times and the rapid pace of world-changing events, this work puts a greater emphasis on warning.

America today faces many grave threats: economic distress; violence in the cities; moral and family breakdown; a dearth of quality leadership; terrorism and war. All these problems—and far greater—are specifically prophesied in Scripture to befall America just before this nation suffers its deathblow! (Read this article for a good overview of these prophecies.)

These are the final days before the surprise attack. The warning is going out! This magazine and website, this work, strive to trumpet the alarm as loudly as possible.

And yet, even as proof of the accuracy of those prophecies piles higher each day, most Americans slumber. Like the sailors at Pearl Harbor, people tend to their routines, unaware of the severity of the threat just over the horizon.

Very soon—suddenly—their lives will be consumed in the thunder of what Jesus Christ Himself called “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.”

Consider Christ’s warning in Luke 17. Prophesying of world conditions that would precede His Second Coming, He said this: “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all” (verses 26-27, English Standard Version). Look at the history: Noah warned of that disaster for a hundred years—and it still shocked the world! Christ continued, “Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed” (verses 28-30, esv).

God has given such warnings as long as man has lived on Earth, yet still, Christ said, when the present age closes in a spasm of unprecedented violence, it is going to catch the world completely off guard. He specifically warned His followers not to be thus caught unaware (verses 34-35).

The Apostle Paul left us a similarly chilling warning: “[Y]ou yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3, esv). He concludes, somberly: “Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober” (verse 6).

The time ahead will be filled with tragedy, to be sure. But these verses give a clear hope. God warns for a reason! He does promise to spare the lives of those who turn to Him (e.g. Ezekiel 33:11).

The attack is roaring up from the horizon. Time is short. Heed the warning—and live.