Answering Bill O’Reilly’s Question about Israel
Have you ever watched a television broadcast–maybe a newscast or even a game show–where a question was posed, and when no one seemed to know the correct answer, you leapt to your feet and shouted it out toward the screen?
The other night Shirley and I were watching the O’Reilly Factor which is the number one cable news program in America. Bill O’Reilly strikes some people as arrogant, and interrupts guests when they dodge his questions in the “No Spin Zone,” but he’s the clearest thinking television journalist in America and that’s why his program is number one.
For fourteen years running.
This week he asked a guest a question about Israel. Bill didn’t know the answer and neither did his guest. The question was: “Why is the tiny nation of Israel hated by so many people and nations?
Do you know why?
To be honest, I was surprised by Mr. O’Reilly’s question and his honesty about it. He asked his guest point blank at least two or three times why anti-Semitism was so prevalent in the world. He noted that Israel was a very small nation–and there are many small nations in the world.
So why the hatred toward puny Israel?
He mentioned that Israel was not a country for thousands of years, and then was reborn in 1948 after World War II. O’Reilly seemed sincerely confused as to why Hitler would kill millions of Jews (of all people), and why, at this present time, anti-Jewish protests were taking place in Europe and other parts of the world.
After all, he opined, we don’t hear of the terrorists vowing to wipe Lichtenstein, or Monaco, or the Gambia off the map.
Why tiny, peaceful and democratic Israel?
Bill O’Reilly also lamented the biased reporting on the present Middle East war. Most of the mainstream media is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian–despite the fact that Hamas started this war, they lie about everything (including their casualties and using children as human shields), and used much of their United Nations aid to build terrorist tunnels to kidnap and kill Jews instead of providing schools and hospitals for the people.
Bill O’Reilly, the most watched journalist on television, had no idea why the nation of Israel has always been and currently is being hated, slandered, and singled out among the two hundred nations of the world.
So I stood up and shouted out at the television the answer:
“It’s all about God’s plan of salvation.”
Apparently Mr. O’Reilly’s education failed to teach two very important worldview truths without which the history of earth makes little sense.
First, the reason for evil in the world is because a Devil exists, there are demons that tempt and deceive human beings, and all hatred, animosity, violence and non-defensive wars can be traced to the influences of the kingdom of darkness.
The main purpose of this dark kingdom is to kill, ruin, and destroy human beings so that they cannot be reconciled to God (John 10:10).
The second worldview truth is the most important one. There is a loving God who is actively involved in trying to reconcile all people into a right relationship with Him. His plan of salvation has been progressively unveiled through Abraham, the Jewish nation, the coming of the Messiah, Jesus (a Jew), and now through his people, the Church.
Israel is His chosen Old Testament people. He gave them his laws, a land on the Mediterranean Sea, and brought the Savior of the world through them.
Followers of Jesus, both Gentiles and Jews, are now the New Testament “Israel” of God (Galatians 6:16). They have been given a “Great Commission” to take God’s message of salvation to every person on earth (Matthew 28:18-20).
So Israel, both old and new, is at the center of God’s salvation plans. The destruction of the Jews and persecution of Christians is at the heart of the satanic strategy to stop it.
Gary Randall points a few important facts about Israel and its Messiah, Jesus.
1. In Genesis 12:2-3 God says to Abraham, “I will make you a great nation, I will bless you and make your name great, And you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse those who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
2. Paul wrote in Romans 15: 27 “…For if the Gentiles have been partakers of their ( Jews) spiritual things, their duty is also to minister to them in material things.” The Jewish people gave birth to the Christian faith and have given us the sacred Scripture, the Prophets, the Patriarchs, Mary Joseph and the baby who was God in the flesh, the 12 disciples and the Apostles. It is inconceivable to claim to be Christian and anti-Israel.
3. Some of the religious left attempt to separate Jesus of Nazareth from the Jews of the world. Jesus never denied His Jewishness. He was born Jew and circumcised a Jew on the 8th day according to the Jewish tradition.
4. Psalms 122:6 “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love you.”
5. Jesus went to the house of Cornelius ( Acts 10) and healed his servant. Luke 7:5 tells you why. “For he loves our nation, and has built us a synagogue.”
6. Acts 10:4 further illuminates this principle in relation to Cornelius-“Your prayers and your alms have come up for a memorial before God.” To whom were his “prayers and alms ” directed? The Jews.
7. All other nations were created by an act of men, Israel was created by an act of God. Genesis 12:1-3, 13: 14-18, 15: 1-, 17:4-8, 22: 15-18, 26: 1-5. Psalms 89: 28-37.
Isaiah 40:10 is a promise to Israel and to all who serve God;” Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.”
Verses 11 and 12 promise the Lord’s faithfulness saying those who “strive” against you shall “perish” and those who “war against you” shall be as nothing—nonexistent.”
Let’s add to these promises that in the last days of history there will be a great turning of the currently secular nation of Israel back to the God of their fathers (Romans 11:26).
They will accept their true Messiah–Yeshua (Jesus).
So, to sum up, the world’s hatred for and attention on the tiny nation of Israel is due to the special calling of Israel by God and their place in world history. It’s not because they’re worse than anyone else, or wealthier than everybody (though the blessing of God has brought great prosperity to many Jewish families).
It’s all about salvation.
The tiny nation of Israel is front and center in the news, hated by the terrorists, and protested all over the world because they are a sign of God’s coming salvation. The Devil wants to stop it–using his demons to stir up people to try and destroy the Jews (and also the Church).
That’s not so difficult to understand, especially when you understand the biblical worldview.
The evil plan will fail because God is directing history.
And Bill–that’s truly no spin.
Compassion as a Tool of Deception
Deception: 1. an act or statement intended to make people believe something that is not true (Merriam Webster Dictionary)
As I look around the world, I am amazed by the deceptions that dominate the media air waves and many of our classrooms. Here are a couple examples:
- Changing the definition of marriage to allow any consenting adults to believe they are “married”–something which can only take place between a man and woman as recognized by 5000 years of history. (You can watch a powerful short video here that shreds this deception into pieces.)
- That man-made global warming is the great issue of the 21st century when there is no proof that it is taking place and temperatures have been constant for over fifteen years.
I could list scores of others, from politics to medicine. But there are two that are currently in the news that really got my attention.
They both involve the tactic of compassion as a tool of deception.
It is clear from the Bible that the origin of lying and the spirit of deception so prevalent in our fallen world comes from the invisible satanic world. Jesus called Lucifer “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) and Revelation 12:9 gives him the description “the deceiver of the whole world.”
As the dictionary definition states above, to deceive is to get someone to believe something that is not true–oftentimes mixing a partial truth out of context with a lie to create confusion.
Two stories in the news use the good character quality of compassion out of its proper context to distort our thinking.
I am talking about compassion as a tool of deception in the immigration crisis and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Immigration
The greatest illegal immigration blow-up of my lifetime is currently happening at the Mexican border. The ebb and flow of illegal immigrants has been a problem for decades, but almost overnight it has overwhelmed the border patrol, outraged the citizens of the nation, and caused a fractious debate as to what should be done.
And much of that debate is built on deception.
First of all, let’s lay our the simple facts on why scores of thousands of children are “suddenly” crossing the Rio Grande and overwhelming our border resources:
- The Democratic Party (for potential votes) and the US Chamber of Commerce (for cheap labor) have encouraged the practice for years. There are lots of things to blame Republicans for, but the border crisis is not one of them. Most Republicans want the border secured (as do 70% of Americans). The Dems and crony capitalists do not.
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President Obama used his pen to sign the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, memorandum on June 15, 2012, rolling out the welcome mat to those seeking to immigrate illegally. From 2011 to 2013, the number of minors crossing the border illegally increased from 8,000 to 25,000. Officials now expect that number to be close to 90,000 in 2014.
- The president also changed the rules on deportations and refused to obey the law when it came to other immigration statutes (which is why impeachment talk has been in the air).
- The Democrats have changed the words “illegal alien” to “undocumented worker” to try to alter American public opinion about the crisis.
- On the positive side, the United States has a history of loving and welcoming foreign immigrants–more than the rest of the world combined on an annual basis. The message of the Statue of liberty is a part of our DNA.
- We have welcomed immigration to our country for most of our 238 years. Only from 1924 to 1965 did Congress curtail immigration quotas to allow the previous flood of new immigrants to assimilate fully into American culture and values.
We Americans believe in immigration. For most of our history, it was regulated in a fairly orderly fashion. President Obama and his political and business allies have now turned it on its head.
And the rationale they are presenting to the American people is that we must approach the children and overall problem with “compassion.”
This new argument is built on a series of lies.
First, we are told people are coming here because of gangs, wars, poverty etc. in Central America. They say we should consider most of them refugees or worthy of political asylum. But the last time I checked, there were democratic governments in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, no wars are taking place, and life is the same as it’s been for decades.
I can understand poor people wanting to emigrate seeking a better life (that’s why my poor German ancestors came to America in the late 1800s), but in the past, we’ve have an orderly process.
The difference now is that President Obama sent the signal that children could come without a good system or fear of being sent home.
So the deluge started–and we have a mess on our hands.
Second, we are told that we must leave things this way because it’s the “compassionate” thing to do. We must care for them because we are a Christian nation that must take the higher moral road.
Interesting how this is the only circumstance today where our “Christian values” are being encouraged. On every other issue, they’re being shot down and removed from the public square.
Here is the heart of the deception: Governments are not supposed to be compassionate. Governments are meant to be just--to protect citizen’s property and rights. That is their God-ordained role (Romans 13:4).
Families and churches are the God-given spheres where compassion should flourish. That’s why it’s wonderful for Glenn Beck to be bringing supplies to the churches near the border to help the needy children and many charitable groups are dispensing aid.
Yes, God’s people must rise up and be charitable to those who have come because of our government’s stupidity.
But the government’s job is to seal the border–to protect its own citizens. They are failing miserably–and hiding behind the argument of compassion.
Third, this confusion of domains is akin to a father not putting doors, windows, locks, fences and walls on his property to protect his family–and inviting the neighborhood to move in. The mother might be “compassionate” toward the first guests, but it is an unworkable system if the father does not “protect” his family.
In God-ordained leadership spheres, civil government is the father (justice and protection) and the Church is the mother (compassion and nurture).
Maybe the destruction of fatherhood in America has something to do with the government breakdown. At any rate, our current political leaders are deceiving us. It is their job to provide sealed, orderly borders to protect our citizens, and also discourage the rape and abuse of children by the coyotes.
Government voices are using “compassion” as a tool of deception.
Middle East Conflict
The same thing is happening in the Middle East where Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank are at war. Before we show how compassion is being used as a weapon here, let’s state the simple facts about the current strife:
- At just over eight million, Israel’s population is a drop in the bucket compared to 300 million people who surround them in hostile Muslim countries.
- Most of those nations, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, are committed to wiping the Jews off the face of the earth.
- Israel is the only democratic nation in the region (Iraq is in turmoil) and thus America’s strongest ally. The other reason for our support for Israel is the American belief in the Bible, God’s purposes for the nation, and the messianic return of Jesus Christ.
- The Palestinians voted Hamas into power–a group on America’s watch list of terrorist organizations. The Hamas charter is committed to exterminating the Jews.
- The Palestinian Authority/Hamas started the current war by lobbing hundreds of missiles into Israel aimed at Israeli citizens. They are the aggressors who started the war.
- Hamas built miles of secret tunnels under the Israeli border for the purpose of terrorism.
- Israel has defensively invaded the West Bank for two reasons: To locate and destroy the missiles that are being fired at their people and to destroy the tunnels have hinder their security. The Israelis are fighting a totally defensive battle.
However, due to two factors, the superiority of the Israeli missile defense (Iron Dome), and Hamas placing its citizens as human shields around their missile launchers and ammo, many more people have died on the Palestinian side than Israelis.
This prompted the United Nations, liberal media outlets, and the bumbling John Kerry, US Seceratary of State, to press for an immediate cease fire in the name of compassion.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the one who has it right:
“If Arabs lay down their arms there will be no more war, but if Israel lays down its weapons, there would be no more Israel.”
It is absurd, even devilish, to ask Israel to stop fighting without utterly destroying Hamas with its arsenal and tunnels. The Jewish government, known for its extreme patience with terrorism, is doing its God-required duty–to do what’s necessary to protect its people.
Any argument about moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel is ludicrous. Hamas is a murderous rogue organization; The Jews simply want to live peacefully on their tiny piece of real estate on the Mediterranean.
Israel is not responsible for the Palestinian casualties. They didn’t start the war, but they must end it. They did not force Palestinians to be human shields–Hamas did.
Asking Israel to stop before victory–in the name of compassion for civilian casualties–is a lie of the highest order. It would reward terrorism and leave our democratic and biblical ally exposed to annihilation.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) is credited with saying that “Hell is full of good intentions or desires.”
Sadly true.
We must never allow godly compassion to be a tool of satanic deception.
Saving Liberalism: An Appeal to My Progressive Friends
I’ve never liked the words “liberal” or “conservative” to describe people because I’m both liberal and conservative in the historic meaning of the words.
The problem comes when words carry multiple meanings or change over time and end up connotating something far different than when they were first introduced.
Words are sometimes like the proverbial frog boiling in the kettle: slowly and subtlety they can change over the years and need to be either renounced due to distortion or renewed to their original context.
I want to make an appeal to my liberal, progressive friends today. Liberalism has devolved; It is in danger of becoming nothing less than brute force– which is not liberal.
Will you join with me in saving liberalism?
I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time, and this week I read an article by Michael Barone that expressed my hunches better than I could.
Barone is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, and one of the most knowledgeable political pundits in America. He is probably the nation’s leading authority on the political demographics of the United States. Name any county or Congressional District in the nation and Michael Barone can tell you why and how they will vote.
He’s also an independent man who is not an ideologue for either liberal or conservative politics. And he’s spot on regarding the present and extremely dangerous devolution of liberalism.
Here are his recent thoughts after which I will make some suggestions about how liberalism can be saved.
How Obama is Turning Liberalism into an Instrument of Coercion
By Michael Barone
Liberals just aren’t very liberal these days. The word “liberal” comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade — for minimal state interference in people’s lives.
In the 20th-century, New Dealers revised this definition by arguing that people had a right not only to free speech and freedom of religion but also, as Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech, freedom from fear and from want.
Freedom from want meant, for Roosevelt, government provision of jobs, housing, health care and food. And so government would have to be much larger, more expensive and more intrusive than ever before.
That’s what liberalism has come to mean in America and much of the Obama Democrats’ agenda are logical outgrowths — Obamacare, the vast expansion of food stamps, attempted assistance to underwater homeowners.
But in some respects the Obama Democrats want to go further — and are complaining that they’re having a hard time getting there. Their form of liberalism is in danger of standing for something like the very opposite of freedom–for government coercion of those who refuse to behave the way they’d like.
Example one is the constitutional amendment, sponsored by 43 of the 55 Democratic U.S. senators, which would cut back on the First Amendment and authorize Congress and state legislatures to restrict political speech [i.e. fund-raising).
The amendment is poorly drafted and leaves many questions dangerously open, perhaps because its sponsors know it has no significant chance of passage.
It also seems animated by a delusionary paranoia: Democrats profess to be afraid that conservatives will be swamped by a flood of rich people’s money, even though rich Democratic supporters have raised more than the other side in recent years.
Nonetheless the picture is striking. Many conservatives wanted to change the First Amendment in order to prosecute flag burning, not the Founding Fathers’ central concern. Today’s liberals, in contrast, want to change the First Amendment to restrict political speech, which is the core value the Founders sought to protect.
Or consider liberals’ recent attitude toward free exercise of religion, made plain in their reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision declaring the Obamacare contraception mandate invalid as a violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The RFRA was passed, with three dissenting votes, and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993. It was prompted by a Supreme Court decision upholding the penalization of Oregon Indians for using peyote, which they claimed was a religious rite.
In passing RFRA, liberals and conservatives alike responded as Americans have often done when small groups have claimed laws infringed their religious beliefs: They put a higher priority to a few individuals’ free exercise of religion than they did to widely supported laws of general application.
Thus Congress allowed for conscientious objectors to be exempt from military service in World War II, in which more than 400,000 U.S. service members died. Even in a national emergency, when lives were at stake, Americans were willing to accommodate religious beliefs that a large majority did not share.
Today’s liberals take a different view. They want to make Hobby Lobby’s owners pay for what they regard as the destruction of human life. They spent much time arguing the owners are mistaken (actually, Hobby Lobby had a plausible scientific basis for their belief).
But the point about freedom of religion isn’t that everyone has to agree. On the contrary: Almost no one agreed with the Oregon Indians’ beliefs about peyote. They just thought the larger society should not use compulsion to bar them from practicing their religion.
Today’s liberals seem comfortable with using the force of law to prevent people from doing so.
Or consider the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn, ruling that care givers for disabled relatives paid with Medicaid funds are not state employees and thus cannot be forced into a public employee union.
Today’s liberals did this in President Obama’s Illinois to channel public money away from low-income care givers and toward public employee unions that do so much to fund and support the Democratic Party. They seem unembarrassed by this crass political motive and indifferent to the plight of the needy.
Today’s liberals seem bent on pushing people around, preventing them from speaking their minds and practicing their beliefs. It’s not just the language that’s changed.
Barone is right. American liberalism has dangerously altered course in the past century–and even in the past six years.
Noah Webster’s original 1830 dictionary summarizes the classical view of liberalism:
1. To be liberal is to be free to be generous–to give or bestow blessings.
2. To be liberal is to not be self-centered, but have an enlarged mind regarding others and their needs.
3. To be liberal is the embrace literature and sciences (as in a liberal arts education).
4. To be liberal is to desire to liberate or make people free. The word itself comes from the Latin liber or “free.”
I’m a liberal according to that definition. I wholeheartedly agree with all the meanings.
British jurist John Locke is widely recognized as father of liberalism. In his “Two Treatises of Government” which were first published in 1690, Locke taught that men had God-given rights to “life, liberty and estate (property)”–i.e. people were meant to be free–something no king, religion, or cultural tradition could usurp.
His ideas found Christian expression in the birth of America and the Declaration of Independence, and a fascist form in the French Revolution where two million people died–400,000 of them by execution. Both revolutions were based on the concept of “freedom”–but one was brought about by virtue and principle and the other by bloodthirsty force.
The founders of the American Revolution were all classical liberals, not fascists. Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism says this was due to American exceptionalism. “American culture supersedes our legal and constitutional framework. It is our greatest bulwark against fascism.”
Goldberg says that today’s “conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals.” In fact, Goldberg points out that in the past fifty years, it was been conservative leaders that have really carried on the legacy of Lockian liberalism:
“Conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life [during the latter 20th century]. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States political system. To the contray, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley and other conservatives dedicated themselves to restoring the classical liberal vision of the founders.”
Yet, as Michael Barone laments, today’s liberals are turning their backs on their heritage and are beginning to behave like totalitarian fascists, not true liberals–forcing their ideas and morality down the throats of the American people.
I appeal to my progressive friends to wake up and see that your liberalism is being hijacked by a spirit of force and control.
This is not liberalism. It is coercion or bondage (non-freedom).
It’s the same spirit behind fascism, communism, militant Islam, and ISIS who recently forced all Christians in Mosul, Iraq to either convert to Islam or be killed.
We’re not that extreme yet. Our culture (exceptional Christian heritage) still prevents it. But we’re on our way, and the devolution of liberalism into force or coercion has picked up steam during the Obama years.
Let’s be true liberals through a renewal of faith, freedom, generosity–and true conservatives by preserving our culture through the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
This means anchoring ourselves to the Bible–the source of liberal ideals (freedom) as well as conservative ones (wisdom).