Obviously, there is a reason why the only nation that is still surviving from ancient times is the same nation that has been subjected to total annihilation time and time again! If you stop and ponder this fact for about thirty seconds you’ll get a glimpse of how mind-blowing this fact really is. No people ever tried to annihilate the ancient Canaanites. They just merged into another people with another identity, and today there is no trace of them as Canaanites. The same can be said about the Babylonians, Persians, Hittites, Assyrians, Philistines, Phoenicians, ancient Egyptians, and Romans. There is simply no trace of those people as a nation today. However, the other nations of the world have conducted attempt after attempt in trying to annihilate the nation of Israel, yet it has remained and is still among the modern nations that are present on the earth today.The American writer Mark Twain (who never even saw the re-birth of the State of Israel among the nations) wrote the following statement concerning the Jews which is actually quite an endorsement of God’s covenant with Israel, being that Mark Twain was a Gentile atheist:
“The Egyptians , the Babylonians, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have spring up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
The answer to Mark Twain’s question of Jewish immortality is actually quite simple and can be answered in two words. It's called an “eternal covenant”. All the other nations of ancient times did not have an eternal covenant, and therefore, there was no special purpose that they should remain throughout history as a nation as Israel has done. The Jewish nation is the messenger that brings to the Gentile world an everlasting message whereby as the messenger Israel must remain in order to give that message. In a since, the nation of Israel was to be the prophet-nation or the priestly-nation, hand picked by God to deliver His message to the rest of the nations. The Torah reveals that God wanted the Israelite nation to “lead” the world in the universal understanding God.
for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For who is a great nation whose God is coming near to them, as Jehovah our God is, in all our calling on him? - Deuteronomy 4:6,7
As with many of Israel’s righteous individual prophets such as, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the nations have sought to destroy Israel as a people even before Israel had even obtained the covenant. The first recorded, pre-covenant attempt of Jewish annihilation is found in the Bible involving the Pharaoh of Egypt around the year of 1435 BCE. (over 3400 years ago).
And he said, When you midwife the Hebrew women, and look on the birth stools, if it is a son, then you shall kill him. But if it is a daughter, then she shall live….
And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive. -Exodus 1:15, 22
About a thousand years later, a second planed "Finial Solution" is recorded in the Bible. This time it involved a man named Haman who lived around the year 483 BCE.
And Haman said to king Ahasuerus, There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people, in all the provinces of your kingdom. And their laws are different from all people, neither do they keep the king's laws. And it is not for the king's gain to allow them to live….
And the letters were sent by postal riders into all the king's provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day, on the thirteenth of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar, and to take what they owned for a prize. - Esther 3:8,13
Before I go any further, I would like to stop right here and take a swing or two at the anti-God, Bible scholars for just a moment. There are a lot of so-called Bible scholars who have their Ivy League-educated reasons for doubting the Bible as a historical record. However, spiritual evidence has a much greater impact in revealing what is truth and what isn’t the truth. For instance, read the words above in red from the book of Esther in which scholars will all agree was written at least well over 2600 years ago. Does the basic reading of these words in red from 2600 years ago concerning the Jewish people cause the reader to immediately think of a modern historical event concerning the same Jewish people?
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If the story of Haman is just a myth or legend as scholars might claim, isn’t it a little strange that such a myth or legend is able to be greatly related to the greatest evil plot known to man at least 2600 years before it ever occurred? Read the words above from Haman again in red and then compare those words from the book of Esther with the following words in red from this modern era which is from another political leader who spoke at the Posen Conference on October 6, 1943 named Heinrich Himmler:
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"I'm talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the evacuation of the Jewish race. This something that can be stated quite clearly; the Jewish race will be exterminated."
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Since episodes in the Bible include the phenomenon of governments seeking Jewish annihilation that we still see today as well as all throughout history, it is not a far stretch to believe that the Bible contains divinely inspired writings concerning this chosen people who just so happens to be the only surviving nation to make it out of the ancient and into the modern.
Another aspect of this ancient account concerning Haman and the Jews occurred on October 16, 1946 when ten Nazis were hanged for their war crimes at the Nuremberg Prison. There were originally eleven Nazis set to be hanged that day but some Nazi-lover (probably a prison guard) slipped Hermann Goring a cyanide capsule which he used just two hours before his execution. Therefore, the remaining ten Nazis were put to death which seems to be reminiscent of the ten sons of Haman that were put to death in the Biblical account for plotting Jewish annihilation.
They also killed Parshandatha, Dalphon, Aspatha, Poratha, Adalia, Aridatha, Parmashta, Arisai, Aridai, and Vaizatha - the ten sons of Haman of Hammedatha the enemy of the Jews.
- Esther 9:7-10
What was even more striking was when Julius Streicher mounted the steps to the gallows where he was to be hung, he cried out: “And now I go to God”. He then stared at the witnesses facing the gallows and shouted: “Purimfest 1946!” The strange thing is that the Jewish holiday of Purim that Streicher referred to is the annual victory celebration that the Jews conduct in their victory over Haman! Furthermore, Purim is celebrated in the early spring and not in October in which Streicher was executed. No one really knows what caused Streicher to mention the Jewish festival and the current year as his last words on earth. My personal belief is that the evil spirit within Streicher that was yelling “Hail Hitler” just a few minuets before, knew of the spiritual connection between the Biblical account of Haman and his sons, and the ten men that were executed on that day.
When Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at the "World without Zionism" conference in Tehran on October 26, 2005, (World without Zionism, meaning: world without the God of Israel, Jews, and the land of Israel) and he stated that Israel was a “disgraceful blot” and that it should be “wiped off the map”. He also stated “Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury” and that “The Islamic world will not let its historic enemy live in its heartland.” The next day, Prime Minister Tony Blair responded to Ahmadinejad’s statements at a press conference at the Hampton Court by saying: “I have never come across a situation of the President of a country saying they want to wipe out, not that they have got a problem with, or an issue with, but want to wipe out another country.” I personally would like to ask Mr. Blair these three questions regarding his "surprised" response to Ahmadinejad:
1. How long have you been Prime Minister?
2. How old are you?
3. How "surprised" were you that it was the tiny nation of Israel that just so happened to be included in your very first experience in coming across such a situation where the president of a country was saying he wanted to wipe out another country?
Since it was just four years earlier in 2001 that the former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani called for a Muslim state to annihilate Israel with a nuclear strike,* how was it that Mr. Blair being in his high government position, did not hear about Rafsanjani’s statement? Perhaps Mr. Blair was so preoccupied with promoting a Palestinian state that would later become Hamas ruled, that caused him not to have the time nor the desire to be concerned with such statements? Perhaps the "surprised" Mr. Blair should have been reading Article 15 of the Palestinian Charter of 1968 (which has never been amended as promised by the Palestinian Authority) which reads:
The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine. Absolute responsibility for this falls upon the Arab nation - peoples and governments - with the Arab people of Palestine in the vanguard. Accordingly, the Arab nation must mobilize all its military, human, moral, and spiritual capabilities to participate actively with the Palestinian people in the liberation of Palestine. It must, particularly in the phase of the armed Palestinian revolution, offer and furnish the Palestinian people with all possible help, and material and human support, and make available to them the means and opportunities that will enable them to continue to carry out their leading role in the armed revolution, until they liberate their homeland.
Mr. Blair should also take the time to read what the political leaders in the Muslim world has stated openly within his very own lifetime concerning their mind set, goals, and political agendas towards “another country” that just so happens to be the same exact country that Ahmadinejad called for the destruction of. The following statements are just a few that the Muslim world has produced:
Egypt has decided to dispatch her heroes, the disciples of Pharaoh and the sons of Islam and they will cleanse the land of Palestine…There will be no peace on Israel’s borders because we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel’s death.
- Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser - August 31,1955
“I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”
- Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad - May 20, 1967
“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.”
- Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser - May 27,1967
“The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear --to wipe Israel off the map.” - President of Iraq Abdur Rahman Aref - May 30, 1967
It is not just the political leaders all over the Muslim world that has called for the destruction of Jews and the State of Israel. All throughout the Muslim culture anti-Israel expressions can be heard. Imams (leaders of prayer), Sheiks (chief of family, tribe or village), Muftis (judge of religious law), and militant leaders all over the Muslim world has called for the destruction of Jews and the State of Israel:
"Oh Allah, the Jews have transgressed all limits in their tyranny. O Allah, shake the ground under their feet, pour torture on them, and destroy all of them.”
- Sheikh Adb-al-Bari al-Thubayt - June 7, 2002 - sermon at the Holy Mosque of Medina, (broadcast on official Saudi television)
“Allah shall make the Muslim rule over the Jew, we will blow them up in Hadera, we will blow them up in Tel Aviv and in Netanyahu ….
We bless all those who educate their children to jihad and to Martyrdom, blessing be he who shot a bullet into the head of a Jew.”
Sermon broadcast on Palestinian Authority television - August 3, 2001
During the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein launched thirty-nine Scud missiles into Israel (who didn’t participate in the Gulf War fighting at all) hitting major population areas such as Tel-Aviv and Haifa. One has to wonder what was the reason population centers were targeted with such large missiles? It should never be forgotten what would have happened if Saddam had larger missiles with nuclear or biological warheads attached to them at the time? It is obvious that Saddam, as the president of a country that was a member of the United Nations, wanted the total annihilation of the State of Israel!
With all these expressions of Jewish / Israel annihilation among the entire Arab / Muslim world (which is truly a remarkable phenomenon when one stops and thinks about it, not to mention adding the actual events of the Holocaust along with them) one might wonder if the Bible has anything to say regarding this extraordinary human-world condition that causes the nations to continually seek out these historically annihilation-targeted people? Actually it does! The Bible even refers to the same bodies of land from where some of these Islamic desires of Jewish annihilation came from:
For behold, Your enemies make a tumult; And those who hate You have lifted up their head. They have taken crafty counsel against Your people, And consulted together against Your sheltered ones. They have said, "Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, That the name of Israel may be remembered no more." For they have consulted together with one consent; [under Islam] They form a confederacy against You: The tents of Edom [southern Jordan] and the Ishmaelite [Arabs]; Moab [Jordan] and the Hagrites; Gebal, [in Lebanon] Ammon, [Jordan] and Amalek; Philistia [Lebanon] with the inhabitants of Tyre; [Lebanon] Assyria [Syria -Iraq] also has joined with them; They have helped the children of Lot. Selah. Deal with them as with Midian, [Saudi Arabia] As with Sisera, As with Jabin at the Brook Kishon, - Psalms 83: 2-9
Muslim Infighting / Against-Israel Uniting:
It is interesting fact that many of the Arab / Muslim nations and the different Islamic sects within those nations, has a long history of not getting along with each other. The Shiites and Sunnis powers have long histories of trying to obliterate the other. Iraq’s civil war is due to Sunni and Shiite struggle for power. Just in the last thirty years Iran and Iraq has tried for years to destroy each other in a holy war beginning in 1980. Muslim Egypt fought with Muslim Yemem (1962-67). The Palestinians has fought the Hashemite government of Jordan in a bloody religious war known as Black September. In his attempt to rule the Islamic world, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and fired Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia, not to mention gassing the Kurds within his own country who were also fellow Muslims. There has been an armed struggle between Lebanon and Syria for many years now involving assassinations of prominent leaders. And now, recently in the news, we hear about Fatah and Hamas killing each other in gruesome ways.
More extreme Islamic movements from within Muslim countries have fought less radical Muslim governments for power, sometimes even winning control over that country’s government. The Muslim Brotherhood that arose out of Egypt in the 1930s have fought the Egyptian government for many decades and has splintered off into other terrorist groups and have gone into other places of the Muslim world to fight the governments there, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Arab populations in Israel, Al Queda in Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah in Iran, the Baath party in Iraq, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, with all of this war and strife within the Muslim governments, sects, and communities, there is one particular political agenda and religious doctrine that every Muslim nation, every Islamic religious sect, and every radical political power within the Islamic world, can agree on, hands down.
Would you like to take a guess as to what this all-in-agreement, political agenda, and religious goal just might happen to be? Here is a biblical hint: “Psalms 83”.
From the beginning (even many years before Israel’s statehood) and continuing until the present, the many Arab and Muslim nations that surround Israel, (though many times being enemies of each other) are bonded together in a spiritual union that seeks the destruction of Israel!
One perfect example of this spiritual phenomenon occurred on January 29, 2007 in the city of Eilat, Israel when a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered three Israelis at a bakery of all places. Palestinians murdering themselves in order to murder Israeli citizens was certainly nothing new in Israel, but the reason behind this particular suicide case gives insight into the spiritual thinking of Israel’s enemies rather than trying to cover them up by political claims.
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Before the attack, it had been months before the last successful attack had been pulled off by the Palestinians due to their busyness of trying to kill each other over a political power struggle. The two parties that claimed responsibility - Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Brigades of Fatah, did not use their old line of justification claiming revenge for Israel taking one of their masterminds of suicide deployment. Instead, this suicide murderer was send into action that it might end weeks of infighting between Hamas and Fatah. They themselves knew that by focusing on Israel as the target, it would help decrease any Palestinian feudal aspirations caused by a political power push. Because they have an ability to hate Israel at a greater depth than they have the ability to hate themselves, answering their higher-calling of Jew-murder brings peace and calm among the different factions of the Jew-haters.
Ancient Words - Modern Words
I personally get goose bums and cold chills when I see the comparison between what the leading coordinator of the Arab/ Muslim War of Annihilation of 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stated prior to the war, and what the ancient Hebrew book of Psalms stated concerning the enemies of Israel 3000 years ago:
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“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” - May 27,1967
“The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel….to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan, and the whole Arab nation.” Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nazzer - May 30,1967 A.D.
For behold, Your enemies make a tumult; And those who hate You have lifted up their head. They have taken crafty counsel against Your people, And consulted together against Your sheltered ones. They have said, "Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, That the name of Israel may be remembered no more." For they have consulted together with one consent; - Psalms 83:2-5 - Approximately 600 -1000 BCE
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These are not the only examples of world leaders expressing their desire to see the end of Jewish existence. Statements like these have echoed down through the centuries. Like the modern day Nasser, Pope Urban who initiated the Crusades, stated in 1096 almost word for word Psalms 83: “Let us first avenge ourselves on them and exterminate them from among the nations, so the name of Israel will no longer be remembered, or let them adopt out faith.”
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There probably has been hundreds of thousands, if not millions of organized physical attacks on the Jewish people throughout the history of the Diaspora that has left millions of Jews either maimed or dead. Even as recently as July 2006, the Shiite faction of Hezbollah from the north of Israel and the Sunni faction of Hamas from Gaza, has sent close to four thousands of rockets deep within Israel seeking the killing and wounding of as many innocent Jewish people as possible. Even if the events of the Holocaust were left out, the fact still remains that there has always been a people on the earth seeking Jewish annihilation.
Grave Desecration
While the Jewish people are the most hated and most persecuted people living on the face of the earth, it must be noted that it isn’t just the living Jews who are continually persecuted. Oh yes, this world hatred for Jews is a very special hatred that is unprecedented in world history that even the dead are not immune. There have been more Jewish graves desecrated from around the world than any group of people who has been buried in the earth! Think of this: It is the Jews that hold such a record as to the most grave desecration, while at the same time maintaining one of the smallest population groups of the earth!
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In the last few years in both Europe and in the United States there has been a barrages of Jewish grave desecration more than ever before, including before the rise of Nazism. One such example occurred on July, 24, 2006 where vandals broke into Holocaust memorial in Brussels. Using condoms and excrement of all things, these Jew-haters desecrated a urn and its ashes from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp. This act was the closest expression that these Jew-haters could come up with whereby acting out "the rape" of the Jewish-persecuted dead. I hope you can see the spiritual aspect of just how deep and dark anti-Semitism can run in a human soul. It's not just something political, it's very spiritual on the side of pure evil.
If you go to a cemetery anywhere in Europe which have their fare-share of Jewish grave sites, you will more than likely find swastikas and other vulgar signs painted on Jewish headstones. Why? It for the same reasons Jewish synagogues and other holy sites of the Jews have been desecrated throughout history. Jewish persecution (even the persecution of the their dead) is based upon spiritual reasons - they hate the God of Israel and anything that relates to Him. It is not a coincidence that in all the history of the world, the greatest crime and inhuman atrocities for a people to commit against another people was targeted directly at the Jews that we now call “the Holocaust”. The closest thing to persecuting God Himself in hatred is to persecute His chosen people.
Terrorism in Israel
I have personally visited Israel twice on short stays once in 1987 and again in 1997. My 1987 visit came a few weeks before the first Palestinian uprising know as the first intifada which focused on continuous attacks of killing Jews. However during both of my non-intifada visits there were terrorist attacks that left several Jewish people dead during the few days I was there. This wasn’t because of an extra ordinary coincidence that the only two visits that I have made to Israel thus far in my lifetime just happen to be when Israel just happened to be victims terrorist attacks. If I were to plan a ten day trip to Israel for anytime this year or any other year in the future, the chances would be extremely high that Jews would be murdered on the streets of Israel before I got on the plane for my fight home. The reason why is because Jews die because they are Jews almost on a bi-weekly basis in Israel. Seeing terrorism on both of my visits in such a small country made me realize just how bad the terrorist ordeal really is to the Jews living in Israel throughout the entire year!
Comparatively to size and population with the Untied States, the hundreds of attacks that has killed thousands of Jews in Israel is like having to deal with a 9/11 tragedy about every three weeks, not to mentions the tens of thousands attacks that have been averted due to Israel’s (world criticized) very tight security! Israel doesn’t fight wars for purposes of self-interest such as the United States has done in Viet Nam, Korea, and Iraq. All of their wars have been fought on the bases of survival and to avoid total annihilation. All of Israel’s war-time enemies have always been the aggressor and not having to worry about Israel annihilating them if they should lose, while Israel having to always be the defender, fights with the knowledge that a lost would result in their total annihilation. Yet the world including the United States has the audacity to criticize Israel for putting of a security wall to protect their citizens! Every terrorist attacked on Israel and its Jews, whether a suicide bombing like the one in Netanya at the Passover Seder on March 27, 2002 that killed 22 and wounded 140, or whether its news of a Kassam rocket striking a Jewish school in Sderot as it did in September 2005 and again in May 2006, or whether it’s the thousands of Ketyasha and Fajr rockets that Hezbolla sent into northern Israel with the aim at killing as many Jewish civilians as possible, I am reminded of the scriptures that speaks of these very events:
Yea, for Your sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. - Psalms 44:22
The ancient Jews of the Bible experienced 3,000 years ago what every Jew in the world has had to deal with both now and since the time of the writing of the 44th Psalm, which is simply that the God-haters of this world loves dead Jews. The fact is that the more spiritual the Jew is, the more hatred arises in the anti-Semite’s soul thereby causing more joy and celebration when they are slaughtered for the sake of God as it states in the 44th Psalm. There are many peoples of the world that have endured persecutions for religious and nonreligious political reasons. However, there can only be one nation of people that is the most hated out of all of them, and that one nation just happens to be the only nation to ever be defined in terms of its religion. Israel (the single state for Jews) is the only nation where even its nonreligious members are attacked and murdered for his / her religion! How about that for being chosen?
As Albert Einstein proved that there was for every action, a reaction, so to was there a reaction of the Jews from the action of the Gentile world persecuting them. In God’s perfect dichotomy system, the Jews had to be persecuted by the Gentile nations in order to survive as a nation after the Diaspora. This allowed God to punish Israel for her sins that caused the exile to begin with and it also allows God the punish the Gentile nations as well for hating God’s Torah and for going beyond their call.
Thus saith the LORD of hosts; I am jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with a great jealousy.
And I am very sore displeased with the heathen (Gentiles) that are at ease: for I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction. - Zechariah 1:14,15
Persecution also has forced Israel to embrace the idea of God’s deliverance at the End of Days. The historical and ever-present attacks on a Jew living in exile and away from their ancient land of promise, is literally a spiritual call to come back to the land of Israel and to come back to the covenant by which they can only find true peace.
…and they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the LORD, when I have broken the bands of their yoke, and delivered them out of the hand of those that served themselves of them. And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen, neither shall the beast of the land devour them; but they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid. - Ezekiel 34:27,28
This is why the Holocaust as bad as the worst atrocity known to mankind, was a major birth pain for spiritual Israel to awaken, and it was the leading reason why there is a national State of Israel in the world today. As the End of Days approach it is spiritually beneficial to keep your eyes on these chosen people. For at the End of Days this chosen nation, while in their rightful place, will no longer be the whipping boy of the gentile nations, but will again be the spiritual leaders to the knowledge of the God - the God of Israel.
Yea, many people and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you. - Zechariah 8:22,23
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