The Weekend Web

According to Hamas tv, as reported by Palestinian Media Watch, the vast majority of those killed during Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza this weekend have been terrorists. “More than 180 Palestinian policemen were killed including the Commander, General Tawfik Jaber,” a news ticker read on the Hamas station earlier today. Dozens of uniformed soldiers were killed during a graduation ceremony for Hamas officers during the first wave of Israel’s attack yesterday.

So, though it’s not yet clear how far Israel intends to go with this assault, initial reports indicate that Israel may have learned a few lessons from its ill-prepared invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

Still, it’s hard to see how Israel’s retaliation against the constant rocket barrage from Gaza will turn out well for the Jewish state—even in the short run. In the last quarter-century, Barry Rubin observes, we have learned that “Western sympathy can be manipulated by increasing violence and blocking solutions to the conflict in a way that will be blamed on Israel” (emphasis mine throughout).

Also, by goading Israel into a fight, as Reuters reported yesterday, Hamas effectively steps “into the front line of the Palestinian struggle. A longer battle could marginalize Abbas’s Fatah movement and its Western and Arab peace backers.” As Professor Rubin notes, “More popular support can be garnered by producing martyrs than by producing higher living standards. Thus, Hamas will do better in its rivalry with the PA by fighting Israel than by fighting poverty.”

At Haaretz, Avi Issacharoff wrote last week, “Israeli air raids, assassinations and the sort, they would only serve to help Hamas regain some popularity—and not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and across the Arab-speaking world.”

Even within Israel, many Palestinians are proving themselves to be sympathetic to Hamas. Arabs in Jaffa stoned an Israeli bus in response to Israel’s retaliation. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, an umbrella group of Arab organizations, called for a national strike. Arab leaders have called the attack a “war crime.”

Some of the most violent protests were in East Jerusalem. In one neighborhood, hundreds of Arabs attacked police with rocks. In another, Arabs set fire to garbage bins along a major road. In the Old City, an Arab tried to run over an Israeli policeman. In the Muslim Quarter, Arabs threw rocks at the Border Police.

It’s all building toward the inevitable terrorist takeover of East Jerusalem, as prophesied in Zechariah 14:2. Once that happens, as we have written before, it will set off a chain reaction of events that will culminate in the Messiah’s appearance on this Earth!

Hamas Tougher Than Ever

In its war in Gaza, Israel faces a very different Hamas soldier than it has faced before: a far tougher, stronger and more professional warrior.

In an article titled “Analysis: A Hard Look at Hamas’ Capabilities,” Haaretz outlines the capabilities of the new jihadist military and what the Israel Defense Forces (idf) is up against in the Gaza Strip. Hamas now controls around 15,000 armed Palestinians, and would probably be aided by a few thousand troops from other militias in any conflict with Israel.

“For two years,” Haaretz says, “Hamas, with Iranian assistance, has been working hard on developing its military power, using Hezbollah as a model.” Like Hezbollah, it has made preparations to break the will of the Israeli people through rocket and mortar attacks while digging in to slow down the idf advance.

“Hamas is transitioning from a terror group to a paramilitary guerrilla organization,” reports Haaretz. “The transition includes improvements to the command and control structure, the acquisition of better weapons and the creation of a training program.”

Hamas’s core unit is Iz al-Din al-Qassam, a well-organized, well-disciplined and well-trained force of around 1,000 men. This elite unit is expected to do most of the fighting. Haartez details:

Palestinian sources say Iz al-Din troops undergo rigorous military training as well as participating in ideological classes held in mosques. Hamas forces do six months of basic training that includes live-fire exercises in which they learn to fire rockets, antitank missiles and mortar shells.They undergo urban warfare training, including exercises simulating an assault on a settlement complete with covering machine-gun fire and antitank fire prior to the assault. Some of the instructors were trained in Iran and Lebanon. In recent years, dozens of Gazans have traveled to training camps run by terror organizations and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. idf soldiers who have fought Hamas cells in the Gaza Strip in the past two years report an impressive improvement in their discipline and in their equipment.

Hamas has thorough defensive plans. It has built an underground network of bunkers, tunnels and booby-trapped structures. It has shown that it can destroy tanks and armored personnel carriers using high-grade explosives. In fact, Hamas has even acquired antitank missiles, though analysts do not know in what quantity or quality.

As we have reported, Hamas’s missiles are improving also. Analysts believe that Hamas has over 1,000 rockets. Haaretz sources in Gaza report that “Hamas’s ‘military industry’ is working overtime to manufacture rockets, and that the organization can easily fire 80 rockets a day, as it did on Wednesday.”

The Popular Resistance Committees, a group of militants aligned with Hamas, have threatened to kidnap a female Israeli soldier in the event of an Israeli invasion of Gaza. A spokesman for this group claimed, “We have more than 10,000 missiles. Some of them are Russian-made, and others are anti-aircraft missiles. … We have the ability to neutralize Israel’s tanks, and we can also drop martyrs from the sky into Tel Aviv and its suburbs.”

Hamas has grown far stronger over the past few years. And Israel facilitated it by giving up the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip is now an outpost of Iran.

The analysts point out that Israel could defeat Hamas in Gaza if it wanted to. But Israel doesn’t have the will to do so. It may take a few feet of land, maybe the kilometer-wide Philadelphi Route, or bomb a few sites, but it won’t win a decisive victory. Hamas will fester on. Israel simply doesn’t have the stomach for the kind of war it would need to destroy Hamas.

“Lack of German Leadership”

“Europe is faltering due to a lack of German leadership,” said former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer during an interview with Spiegel this week. According to Mr. Fischer, the current German leadership has not taken an active enough role in Europe during the time of crisis “where everyone is looking to Berlin.”

“The fact that the German government did not energetically take action back in November caused a great deal of consternation and confusion in Europe,” said Fischer. He called on Germany to assume the responsibility of leadership in Europe.

Chancellor Angela Merkel “always takes positions that allow her to maintain a majority,” said Fischer. “However, in this global crisis, that is simply the wrong attitude. What is needed now is strategic, large-scale planning—in the European spirit.”

Spiegel suggested that Germany “cannot expect any help from the chancellor. She hasn’t given any great speeches during the crisis, and hasn’t shown direction.”

Fischer said Merkel and Steinbrück lack a certain drive that past German leaders once had. “From a political standpoint, though, I find it absolutely necessary that Germany once again assumes a leadership role.”

As the world economic crisis worsens, Bible prophecy says the German people will once again get a strong man determined to lead a united European superpower.

German elections are scheduled for next year.

The Pope’s Message of Unity

Pope Benedict xvi used his Christmas message to urge nations to join in “a spirit of authentic solidarity” to prevent global ruin, according to the Washington Times.

“An increasingly uncertain future is regarded with apprehension, even in affluent nations,” Benedict said, also warning, “If people look only to their own interests, our world will certainly fall apart.”

Earlier this year, in an April address, the pope said that the future of Europe cannot rest solely on political and economic unity, but that the continent must also undergo an ethical and spiritual renewal as well.

As we wrote in the Trumpet,

Right now we see Pope Benedict working feverishly at enabling the very spirit, the “vital lifeblood” of European unity, “Europe’s Christian heritage,” to be recaptured by the European populace in an effort to create a great wave of evangelism that will sweep all Europe up into the arms of Rome in a bonding of church and state, indeed, a final resurrection of that ancient Holy Roman Empire.

The Greatest Russian?

“The former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin may have killed millions of his own people,” the bbcwrote yesterday, “but this weekend he could be chosen by Russians as their greatest-ever countryman.”

Inspired by the British competition 100 Greatest Britons, one of Russia’s biggest television stations Rossiya has been conducting a nationwide poll for much of this year. … More than 3.5 million people have already voted and Stalin—born an ethnic Georgian—has been riding high for many months. …The fact that Stalin has been doing so well comes as no surprise to members of the Communist Party, which remains one of the biggest political parties in the country.

How much such polls are manipulated by a government-controlled media is unknown. Which is just the point: The popularity of Stalin and what he represents is being pushed from the top. Whatever the people actually think, the Putin-controlled Russian government is pushing for a repeat of history: a return of Russia to superpower status—through whatever means necessary. To get the people behind Russia’s nationalist ambitions, the government is using a mixture of threats and repression of free speech together with the resurrection of patriotic sentiment. bbc continues:

Many in Russia do still revere Stalin for his role during World War ii when the Soviet Union defeated the forces of Nazi Germany.But now there is a much broader campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and it seems to be coming from the highest levels of government.The primary evidence comes in the form of a new manual for history teachers in the country’s schools, which says Stalin acted “entirely rationally.” …But the campaign goes further than reinterpreting history for schoolchildren. It is also physical.Earlier this month, riot police raided the St. Petersburg office of one of Russia’s best-known human rights organizations, Memorial.Claiming a possible link with an “extremist” article published in a local newspaper, the police took away 12 computer hard-drives containing the entire digital archive of the atrocities committed under Stalin. …It seems Russians are to be proud of their history, not ashamed, and so those investigating and cataloguing the atrocities of the past are no longer welcome.

It is plainly evident that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is transforming Russia back into a great power by embracing authoritarianism. Biblical prophecy clearly shows that Russia will indeed emerge as a great power and—in league with China and much of the rest of greater Asia—eventually threaten Europe and fulfill some dramatic Bible prophecies. Read Russia and China in Prophecy to learn how this all connects to the coming return of Jesus Christ to Earth.

The High Cost of Printing Money

The International Herald Tribune published this amazing article that correctly identifies the main cause of the global financial crisis: the biggest borrow-and-spend binge in history.

For decades, businesses and consumers feasted relentlessly, as if gravity, arithmetic and the tyranny of debt had been defanged by financial engineering.Armed with credit cards and belief in a bountiful future, Americans brought home ceaseless volumes of iPods and cashmere sweaters, and never mind their declining incomes and winnowing savings. Banks lent staggering sums of money to homeowners with dubious credit, convinced that real estate prices could only go up. Government spent as it saw fit, secure that foreigners could always be counted on to finance American debt.

The piece describes what the eventual result of a borrow-and-spend policy will mean for Americans.

The value of outstanding American Treasury bills now reaches $10.6 trillion. … Worry centers on the possibility that foreigners could come to doubt the American wherewithal to pay back such an extraordinary sum, prompting them to stop—or at least slow—their deposits of savings into the United States.

The Trumpet has been warning about this for years. Ten years ago, for example, we were warning of America’s “financial destruction.” Notice this paragraph, in particular, from that 1998 article:

For the last 15 years, America has been on this unsustainable financial high that was and is made possible only by the injection of enormous amounts of foreign money into American bond and stock markets. But that will come to a screeching halt as soon as the American dollar and markets lose their “reserve currency” and “safe haven” status.

As the International Herald Tribune points out today, we are very near to that point.

Elsewhere on the Web

If you want to be left with a feeling of thorough disgust with the banks that helped create the economic crisis and are now receiving tax-payer bailout money, here is a good read. It’s astounding how corrupt, greedy and selfish these banks were. The downside to the article, however, is that it glosses over the widespread dishonesty of others within the industry. It’s not a one-way street. For every fraudulent loan, the odds are high there were several liars on the other side too—appraisers, real-estate agents, brokers—and oh, don’t forget the home buyers either.

With Barack Obama’s inauguration now only 24 days away, that means there are less than four weeks for the major media to bash President Bush, as Wesley Pruden notes here.

And Finally …

Some year! Stay tuned to the Trumpet for our summary of the prophetic events of 2008. Until then, though, enjoy a more lighthearted look at it with Dave Barry’s Year in Review column. Some excerpts: from the summary of February: “amid much fanfare, Congress passes, and President Bush signs, an ‘economic stimulus package’ under which the federal government will give taxpayers back several hundred dollars apiece of their own money, the idea being that they will use this money to revive the U.S. economy by buying television sets that were made in China.” From May: “the International Atomic Energy Agency releases a report stating that Iran is actively developing nuclear warheads. In response, Iran issues a statement asserting that (1) it absolutely is not developing nuclear warheads, and (2) these are peaceful warheads.” From July: “Barack Obama, having secured North and South America, flies to Germany without using an airplane and gives a major speech—speaking English and German simultaneously—to 200,000 mesmerized Germans, who immediately elect him chancellor, prompting France to surrender.”