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A Note from Zola
Dear Friends,
During our past Christmas tours we enjoyed sending Christmas cards postmarked in Bethlehem to some of our viewers. But since that town was given to the Palestinians, we can no longer do so. For one thing, we would have to buy Palestinian stamps, since Arafat's people don't recognize the State of Israel or its stamps. Secondly, we learned that 75% of the cards would never reach their destination anyway. Our pilgrims are very discouraged at the sight of the birthplace of our Lord, which has become a typical Arab town with peddlers and garbage in the streets. I say this as an eyewitness without bias. If we continue to chop up Israel and give it to these people, we will simply replace a working democracy with the 23rd Moslem police state.
As for the situation with Iraq, which has not by any means quieted down, it has come out that the Iraqis owe Russia eight billion dollars. Therefore, Russia wants to stop the U.N. sanctions against Iraq. Russia wants Iraq to prosper so it can pay its debts. The Chinese would also like some Iraqi customers, so they also oppose the sanctions. France, the third partner with these two evil states, would simply like more profits for itself, and so it sides with the folks who have the oil. If those three nations would simply stop their support of Iraq, I believe that our government could handle Saddam Hussein. Keep in mind that he continues to hide weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out millions of people while we continue to dither. Why have we taxpayers paid for weapons if they're not to be used at a time like this?
During our Christmas Tour, I ran into CNN Commentator Walter Rogers, who continually criticizes Israel, having lunch at an Israeli hotel. Stymied for criticism of Netanyahu lately, Rogers took on the Prime Minister's wife, Sara, calling some silly news about her "the blockbuster story." When CNN or most other American media run out of negative stories about our sister democracy, Israel, they will stoop that low. The facts of the "peace process" negotiations today are that 98% of Palestinians live under Palestinian rule, and there is no more Israeli occupation except in propaganda reports. Speaking of propaganda, Arafat, addressing a Moslem conference in Teheran, Iran, recently, said the Israelis intend to tear down the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with Solomon's Temple. This absurdity spoken to a billion Moslems could start a world war, which would probably be to Arafat's liking. On the other hand, out of his own mouth he has recognized that the Jews had a temple in Jerusalem under King Solomon some 3,000 years ago (16 centuries before Mohammed's birth)!
Netanyahu was recently criticized for calling the West Bank (biblical Judea and Samaria) "part of Israel proper." Well, what is it, if it isn't Israel? There were no "Palestinians" in these lands in biblical times, nor through the centuries in between. If I have title to a house and I leave it, even for years, when I return I still have the title and it's still my house. And if someone else has lived there and put his name on the mailbox, that has no validity against my prior title.
Shortly, you will see on our television program an interview I was able to get with the former prime minister and opposition leader, Shimon Peres, in Jerusalem. I sat there and listened for the better part of half an hour while this charming man praised the peace process, described Arafat as a reasonable and moderate negotiating partner, and gave a hundred excuses for the behavior of the Palestinians. While I didn't argue with him on camera, the idea slowly came to me that unbelievers in general simply do not understand Evil.
True Evil is a biblical concept, and without a biblical grounding, unbelievers try to overlook it, get around it, or otherwise come to terms with it. Satan is also a biblical personality whose ways are clarified in Scripture. Those who believe lies or get around lies with stories that excuse untruth simply have no comprehension of the "the father of all lies," Satan. In another interview, I learned that the Nazis tried to describe Jesus as a Gentile, using snippets of Scripture such as "Galilee of the Gentiles," in order to keep our Lord from being a "subhuman", their classification for all Jews. I heard also from a former Catholic divinity school scholar that his Polish mother-in-law stated unequivocally that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, so He could not possibly have been a Jew.
On my way home from our Israel tour, I stopped in London for Christmas. While there, I turned on CNN, where I saw an interview on its Question and Answer Program. Like all other related programs on CNN, this particular one tried to denigrate Israel as much as possible. But by accident, it seemed, the program had a born-again believing pastor as a guest, and it accidentally broadcast some truth. Ray Lockhardt of Christ Church in Jerusalem was the interviewee, and he could not be made to say that "Christians are being marginalized in the Holy Land," the theme of the program. On the other hand, this good witness said that there is true Christian growth in the Holy Land among the Jews and the Arabs, and that this growth looks forward to a coming Kingdom when Christians will prevail in Israel, including Jews and Arabs! The interviewer was dumbfounded, as would be almost any CNN personality confronting godly truth. He quickly closed off the program, unable to produce the negative, cynical drama that is CNN's daily bread.
Arafat has promised to shake up his cabinet in order to answer complaints of corruption, laziness, and simple non-provision of services to the people. Though no one says it out loud among the Palestinians, they simply cannot run an organized country with an international terrorist as its dictator, and that's all there is to that. As I predicted on day one of this "peace process," it will be impossible to make peace with Arafat in charge, and it's a fake peace in any case. While I was in Great Britain, I heard a lot of news from Ireland, another place where false peace is proclaimed all the time. Considering Bosnia, South Africa, and any number of other places in southeast Asia, Central America, etc,. talking about peace substitutes for making real peace. And this, of course, leads to the Antichrist, the theme of his reign is the false promise of peace, or, as the Prophet Daniel put it, "By peace shall he destroy many" (Daniel 8:25).
With all that said, I would like to thank you for a very wonderful year in 1997. Your generosity allowed our ministry to reach new heights in production values on television and in the quality of our interviewees. New TV programming is in post-production, and will be aired shortly. We are still mindful of the fact that we twenty or so people here in Dallas who are reaching out to millions can only do so because of your giving. I'm sorry that the news is negative, so that these letters have a negative sound, but if I were writing about what the believers are doing and thinking, this would be a happy and triumphant letter indeed. Thank you very much for all your support and sponsorship and prayers.
We're contemplating a Pentecost Tour this year, to take place at the end of May. The weather is excellent at that time of year in Israel. This tour will also include our Mediterranean island cruise and mainland Greece as part of our extended version. Brochures are being printed. Please write or call 1-800-WONDERS (966-3377) or Cynthia at 214-696-9760 for our spring brochure.
Your Messenger, by A. M. RosenthalThis writer is one of the best that we have published in past years, and his point is very well taken. As Christians, we simply have to care about religious persecution in this world. In this article that appeared in the New York Times on December 30, 1997, Rosenthal majors in China, but I would like to reinforce the point that Christians are persecuted as well throughout the huge Moslem world. The article speaks for itself.
By two journalistic tests, 1997 turned out to be one of the most awakening years in my lifetime of newspapering.
Did you report the full story on every important subject you wrote about?
No. Early this year I realized that in decades of reporting, writing or assigning stories on human rights, I rarely touched on one of the most important. Political human rights, legal, civil and press rights, emphatically often; but the right to worship where and how God or conscience leads, almost never.
In your belated awareness have you discovered any new and important developments that must be reported consistently?
Yes, two. One is the growing American public awareness of the persecution of Christians and desire to help the victims. They are persecuted in a half-dozen Muslim countries and China. Beijing adds a persecuting specialty, the unrelenting drive to wipe out free Buddhism in occupied Tibet.
These Americans understand that we are dealing with persecution, not just bigotry or prejudice but persecution, torture, incarceration, enslavement, abduction, confiscatory fines, mass deportation, against congregations and clergy.
The crimes charged are to belong to any of the unapproved religions, as in some Muslim countries, or loyalty to the spiritual leader of the nation, as in Tibet. In China, crime is the refusal to attend only government-regulated and approved "patriotic" Protestant or Catholic churches and risking arrest by worshiping at underground "house churches."
All this is not an incident now and then. It is persecution of scores of millions, government policy enforced by police terrorism.
What is also new and important is this. This natural desire of American Christians to help persecuted Christians abroad is being mocked and bitterly fought in America. The opposition is not from some fringe anti-Christians but from some Americans of great power and standing, almost all Christian themselves. They include President Clinton, those who serve him to obey him, and the chiefs of America's major companies and trade associations.
At the moment, their particular target is a bill introduced to Congress -by Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both Republicans. The Freedom From Religious Persecution Act calls for penalties that are mild, but important as signifying American refusal to be a silent witness. They include ending "non-humanitarian" U.S. aid and loans to these countries.
Like the anti-persecution movement itself, the bill is backed by members of both parties, and organizations normally far apart, like the A.F.L.-C.I.O and the Christian Coalition.
The range of support is why the lobby against the bill is hysterically harsh, well financed and organized and could defeat it if Americans allow. No mystery about motives.
Mr. Clinton knows the full failure of his promise that he could enrich China economically but somehow sweet-talk Beijing into loosening its strangulation of human rights; a fraud from the beginning. U.S. businesses know that investment in China makes them servants of its war against human rights.
The Administration-business partnership has dredged up some classic pieces of hypocrisy.
Most shameful is that opposing persecution would just bring more. Once that was said about the Nazis. Ask the prisoners.
And there is organized nastiness about the anti-persecution coalition drawing attention to Christians. Why not? They happen to be the largest victim group. And focusing attention on specific victims is the heart of the struggle for human rights. That is what Clintonians do on issues like women's rights that might bring cost-free votes.
America's press has been disappointing: When it does in rare moments pay attention to the persecution, it often misses the point: the suffering. In a recent 5,600-word cover story in The New York Times Magazine, I am sorry to say, only a few hundred touched on that. The rest was how the coalition might split the Republican Party.
But, colleagues of the press, secure in the knowledge that my news judgment about religious human rights is correct at last, and yours still wrong: I wish you a happy new year, and an awakening one.
Monsters vs. Moderates"Western governments seem ready to assist in their own undoing," writes Angelo Codevilla, who directs the Division for Research in Strategy at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem and Washington.
It is fashionable these days to imagine that the problem with the peace process is Israeli intransigence or the policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu. In reality, as this clear-eyed article attests, the other side has historically been next to impossible to deal with. We have held this article, which originally appeared in The Jerusalem Post in July 1997, for some time since the atrocious murder of Palestinians who sold real estate to their Jewish neighbors in Israel. It's time all of our viewers read it.
The courage of Western governments at the news that the Palestinian Authority had condemned to death anyone selling real estate to a Jew, was brief, muted, and certainly did not interrupt the various kinds of support these governments give the PA.
Much less did the PA's campaign of extermination against those who sell to Jews lead any of these governments to question the PA's legitimacy. This attitude amounts to collaboration in the physical elimination of Arab moderates.
Since the purpose of Western governments--, including Israel's, support of the PA is precisely to encourage moderation and normal relations between Arabs and Jews, the PA's killing of just the Arabs who deal most moderately and normally with Jews obviously defeats Western purposes. And yet Westerners seem ready enough to lend a hand to their own undoing.
Unfortunately, this has been going on longer than most of us have been alive.
In 1921, the British chose to create a Supreme Moslem Council to exercise a variety of powers over the Arab population of Palestine. As the grand judge or mufti of this precursor to the PA, they appointed Amin el-Husseini, whom historian Paul Johnson describes as "a dedicated killer who devoted his entire adult life to race murder."
The mufti's greatest legacy, however, was not a great body count of Jewish settlers, nor even the fact that he organized a "Moslem-SS legion" that fought on Hitler's side.
Rather, it was, in Johnson's words, "the systematic destruction of Arab moderates.... By the end of the 1930s Arab moderate opinion had ceased to exist...."
As for the British, having creating a monster, they continued to treat him as the legitimate representative of Arab opinion.
How sad that the British were not secure enough in their own conception of legitimacy to apply it to the Arabs.
THE HISTORY of the Third World is a sad refrain to all this. Western governments are always searching for the authentic representatives of peoples struggling for independence and dignity. But whom do they choose as recipients of money, invitations and indulgence?
In the 1950s the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency placed its bets in Algeria on the National Liberation Front, and helped make its theoretician, Frantz Fanon, into an idol for two generations of intellectuals. Moderates like Ferhat Abbas were of little interest.
Meanwhile the FLN massacred Arabs who had friendly relations with Europeans and made itself the sole power among the Arabs.
Once the French government acquiesced in the elimination of the moderates, the option of getting along with the Arab population vanished. The French had to kill, or be killed, or leave. They left Algeria in the hands of a gang that has tyrannized it and impoverished it. Similar things have happened throughout Africa and Asia.
It is noteworthy that Western governments tend to continue supporting such regimes of thugs despite horrors.
The British supported Idi Amin until nearly his overthrow, while France supports Algeria even now.
The Israeli government's relationship with the PA is complex indeed. On the one hand it officially views the PLO as a terrorist organization; on the other hand, it considers the PA a government sovereign enough that it calls it leader "president." Yet the PA is nothing but the creature of the PLO.
The reason for treating the PA as if it were the legitimate representative of ordinary, decent Arabs is the deep, fervent hope that it will become just that.
There are reasons for such hope. Clearly, peaceful coexistence with the Jews is the prerequisite for Palestinian Arab prosperity.
Perhaps as more and more Palestinian Arabs gain an economic stake in peace, they will influence the gangsters who sit atop the PA to moderate their behavior.
And then there is time itself. If the peace process goes on long enough, even the least moderate Palestinians will lose their roughest edges.
The killing of Arabs who sell land to Jews, gangland style, confronts these hopes with harsh reality and highlights the self-contradictory nature of Israel's relationship with the PA.
Grant, for the sake of argument, that the peace process and economics indeed produce moderates. But what good is that if the PA kills them?
And if the PA is in the business of killing those inclined to deal with Israelis on a businesslike basis, what is the Israeli government doing to Palestinians and Jews alike by supporting the PA?
Gary Cooperberg is another of our very popular columnists who will appear shortly in a TV interview with Zola, taped in Israel on our Christmas Tour. An outspoken resident of Kiryat Arba, a settlement outside Hebron, Cooperberg knows the situation on the ground everyday and contributes these articles to the Internet. His Web address is http://www.virtual.co.il/city_services/lists/voice.
Chag Succot, Festival of Tabernacles, was a very unusual one this year in Hebron. Coming, as it does, during the time of year when the weather is unpredictable, it is always a challenge for the Jew to express his faith by leaving his home and moving out into the frail succah [temporary shelter].
This year, we had just begun to experience a cooling trend in the weather, and the clouds threatened possible rain. Yet, on the first night of the holiday, it was so warm that the evening meal was held in a summer-like atmosphere. While in former years we were used to wearing sweaters and even light coats inside the succah, this year we were as comfortable as if we were inside our permanent homes.
But the real marvel of the holiday in Hebron came on Shabbat [Sabbath]. As we began to partake of the evening meal, suddenly the sky burst out in repeated flashes of lightning and loud claps of thunder. Yet, despite the "sound and light show," the atmosphere remained warm and dry! It wasn't until after we finished our meal that the rain began to come down. For nearly a half-hour we sat and watched and listened to the "show" as we remained safe and comfortable in our succot [shelters]! Even after we had to leave, owing to the rain, it soon stopped and the winds dried up all the dampness, enabling us to return and sleep in the succah!
This experience is a clear indication of the real meaning of the holiday. It is called the holiday of our rejoicing. We are actually commanded by God to rejoice on this holiday even more than on any other. One can hardly imagine the need for a commandment to rejoice. That is one activity most people find easy and pleasing to do. Yet, given the situation under which we live in this country, it is not always such a easy thing to do.
When you are having your dinner in a little frail hut and you can see lightning and hear thunder, the immediate instinct is to run for cover. Yet, until the rain actually falls, or the wind causes genuine discomfort, we are required to remain in the succah. This is a test of faith.
When you live in a country where terror abounds, where our leaders negotiate the terms of our self-destruction, and where every nation in the world seems to be siding with our enemies, the natural instinct would be to get out of here as fast as possible. But we must remember that Israel is just like the succah, only on a larger scale. Yes, it is a tiny country. Yes, it certainly appears frail and vulnerable to threats from powers greater than we. This, like the lesson of Succot, is just a test of our faith in God.
The God of Israel has brought us home to take possession of our homeland, which was given to us by Him as an everlasting possession. We have an obligation to do everything in our power to hold on to all of it. If it is taken from us by force, that would be proof that we have no right to it. But for us in advance of our own efforts to hold on to it, to willingly part with any part of our homeland is a slap in the face to the Living God of Israel by whose grace we exist from day to day. We should be far more terrorized by the irresponsible acts of our leaders, who ignore our greatest "Ally" of all in deference to puny earthly powers, than we are of Arab hoodlums and American pressure.
We only have a Jewish State because it is the Will of God. The Jewish return to the Land of Israel is the beginning of fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Can anyone imagine such miracles taking place only to be undone by the Peres Peace Center? Is it possible that Netanyahu can bring world peace by giving Arafat an airport and limiting the right of Jews to build in Israel? . . .
No Jewish leader, not even a genuine Jewish King, has the right to "negotiate" the birthright of the Jewish people. It is just not negotiable. Aside from this fact, it is difficult to understand, even on a logical and mundane level, how anyone could as much as hope that peace could be achieved with Syria even were we to give her all of the Golan. Our leadership is presuming to run our country via policies based upon desperation. They continue to trust in many meaningless agreements whose terms are already violated by our "partners." To sit and continue to make more "agreements" with our enemies in which Israel makes very real concessions in return for less than nothing is just plain stupid. A genuine Jewish leader would stand up to the world and announce that we have nothing to negotiate. It is time to stop playing dangerous and foolish games and just be honest.
World peace is definitely attainable. But you won't find it at the Peres Peace Center or in the Oslo Accords. It is to be found in Jerusalem when a true Jewish government acts in total submission to the Will of the God of Israel while ignoring the threats of its enemies.
The process of redemption has clearly begun, despite the fact that we fail to take notice. All of the stupid and foolhardy steps taken by Jewish leaders of little faith and even less knowledge of Judaism, only prolong our agony even as the redemption continues. It is only by ignoring the "lightning and thunder" and continuing "our meal" with trust in our Creator that we will find true rejoicing under the "Canopy of Peace" in fulfillment of Jewish Destiny.
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Copyright © 1997 by Zola Levitt Ministries. All rights reserved.
