Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

The Rutherford Institute: We are Metamorphosing Into a Police State
Jan 29th, 2010
Daily Newsaugustforecast.com
Categories: Commentary;Contemporary Issues;Warning

Ominous developments in America have been a long time coming, in part precipitated by "we the people" -- a citizenry that has been asleep at the wheel for too long. And while there have been wake-up calls, we have failed to heed the warnings.

Just consider the state of our nation:

We're encased in what some are calling an electronic concentration camp. The government continues to amass data files on more and more Americans. Everywhere we go, we are watched: at the banks, at the grocery store, at the mall, crossing the street. This loss of privacy is symptomatic of the growing surveillance being carried out on average Americans. Such surveillance gradually poisons the soul of a nation, transforming us from one in which we're presumed innocent until proven guilty to one in which everyone is a suspect and presumed guilty. Thus, the question that must be asked: Can freedom in the United States flourish in an age when the physical movements, individual purchases, conversations and meetings of every citizen are under constant surveillance by private companies and government agencies?

We are metamorphosing into a police state. Governmental tentacles now invade virtually every facet of our lives, with agents of the government listening in on our telephone calls and reading our emails. Technology, which has developed at a rapid pace, offers those in power more invasive, awesome tools than ever before. Fusion centers -- data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency -- constantly monitor our communications, everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected -- the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police -- a relationship which will make a transition to martial law that much easier. We may very well be one terrorist attack away from seeing armed forces on our streets -- and the American people may not put up much resistance. According to a recent study, a greater percentage of Americans are now willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in order to feel safer in the wake of the failed bomber's attack on Christmas Day.

We are plagued by a faltering economy and a monstrous financial deficit that threatens to bankrupt us. Our national debt is more than $12 trillion (which translates to more than $110,000 per taxpayer), and is expected to nearly double to $20 trillion by 2015. The unemployment rate is over 10% and growing, with more than 15 million Americans out of work and many more forced to subsist on low-paying or part-time jobs. The number of U.S. households on the verge of losing their homes soared by nearly 15% in the first half of last year alone. The number of children living in poverty is on the rise (18% in 2007). As history illustrates, authoritarian regimes assume more and more power in troubled financial times.

The White House and our representatives in Congress bear little resemblance to those they have been elected to represent. Many of our politicians live like kings. Chauffeured around in limousines, flying in private jets and eating gourmet meals, all paid for by the American taxpayer, they are far removed from those they represent. What's more, they continue to spend money we don't have on pork-laden stimulus packages while running up a huge deficit and leaving the American taxpayers to foot the bill. And while our representatives may engage in a show of partisan bickering, the Washington elite -- that is, the President and Congress -- moves forward with whatever it wants, paying little heed to the will of the people.

We are embroiled in global wars against enemies that seem to attack from nowhere. Our armed forces are pushed to their limit, spread around the globe and under constant fire. The amount of money spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is nearing $1 trillion and is estimated to total somewhere in the vicinity of $3 trillion before it's all over. That does not take into account the ravaged countries that we occupy, the thousands of innocent civilians killed (including women and children), or the thousands of American soldiers who have been killed or irreparably injured or who are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Nor does it take into account the families of the 1.8 million Americans who have served or are currently serving tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

America's place in the world is also undergoing a drastic shift, with China slated to emerge as the top economy over the next decade. Given the extent to which we are financially beholden to China, their influence over how our government carries out its affairs, as well as how it deals with its citizens, cannot be discounted. As of July 2009, China owned $800.5 billion of our debt -- that's 45% of our total debt -- making them the largest foreign holder of U.S. foreign debt. Little wonder, then, that the Obama administration has kowtowed to China, hesitant to overtly challenge them on critical issues such as human rights. The most recent example of this can be seen in the Obama administration's initial reluctance to confront the Chinese government over its reported cyberattacks on Google and other American technology companies.

As national borders dissolve in the face of spreading globalization, the likelihood increases that our Constitution, which is the supreme law of America, will be subverted in favor of international laws. What that means is that our Constitution will come increasingly under attack. 

The corporate media, increasingly acting as a mouthpiece for governmental propaganda, no longer serves a primary function as watchdogs, guarding against encroachments of our rights. Instead, much of the mainstream media has given itself over to mindless, celebrity-driven news, which bodes ill for our country. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about tabloid news, entertainment news or legitimate news shows, there's very little difference between them anymore. Unfortunately, most Americans have bought into the notion that whatever the media happens to report is important and relevant. In the process, Americans have largely lost the ability to ask questions and think analytically. Indeed, most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their rights or how their government even works. For example, a national poll found that less than one percent of adults could name the five freedoms protected in the First Amendment.

Finally, I have never seen a country more spiritually beaten down than the United States. We have lost our moral compass. A growing number of our young people now see no meaning or purpose in life. And we no longer have a sense of right and wrong or a way to hold the government accountable. We have forgotten that the essential premise of the American governmental scheme, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, is that if the government will not be accountable to the people, then it must certainly be accountable to the "Creator." 

But what if the government is not accountable to the people or the Creator? 

As Thomas Jefferson writes in the Declaration, it is then the right of "the People to alter or abolish it" and form a new government.

The Burdensome Stone - Palestinians will Accept Only Jerusalem As Capital
Jan 29th, 2010
Daily Newshaaretz.com
Categories: Today's Headlines;The Nation Of Israel;Peace Process

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared on Thursday that Palestinians would not accept any alternative to Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, despite other proposals. 

Abbas told Russian television that Jerusalem should not be divided and that there should be free passage for people of various faiths. The Palestinian leader added it must be made clear what belongs to the Palestinians and what belongs to Israel. 

Abbas said that he could only recognize Israel as a Jewish state in the framework of a conclusive peace agreement that leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state. 

Abbas also said that he could not agree to resume the stalled peace negotiations with Israel as long as construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem continue. The peace process would collapse after the first meeting of such negotiations, said Abbas. 

"If Israel says in the meeting that it will not accept the 1967 borders and that it is not prepared to discuss Jerusalem and the refugee situation, what is there to talk about?" Abbas said in the interview. 

"If I enter negotiations with them and the building in East Jerusalem continues, Israel will be saying that Jerusalem is theirs. So why would I agree to negotiate while building in East Jerusalem continues?" 

Israel has already turned down two initiatives formulated by the Palestinians, Egypt and Jordan to re-launch talks, Abbas said. Those proposals would have Israel agree to freeze all settlement building for at least a short period and recognize international resolutions. Also, the negotiations would be renewed from the point where they left off during the Ehud Olmert administration. 

Abbas said that U.S. had asked Israel to make gestures to the Palestinians, including transferring additional territories in the West Bank to Palestinian control, halting Israeli military incursions, releasing prisoners, dismantling checkpoints and allowing building materials to enter the Gaza Strip. 

According to Abbas, Israel said it would consider these gestures but had not yet responded. 

Fayyad sees no agreement yet to resume Israel talks 

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said on Thursday there was no agreement yet to resume talks with Israel, and Palestinians would have no faith in a process which failed to halt Israeli settlements. 

A Palestinian official said this week President Mahmoud Abbas was studying a U.S. proposal for talks at a level below full-scale negotiations between leaders, which have been frozen for 13 months. 

"We heard about low-level, mid-level, high-level (talks)," Fayyad told Reuters. "I don't think there is anything yet that has been crystallised in terms of going forward." 

U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell has been trying to bring about a resumption of negotiations but Abbas has insisted first on a full halt to Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. 

He has rejected a 10-month, partial Israeli freeze, announced in November, as insufficient. 

"I don't know when the process will be resumed."

Emergent Church? Guru Brian Mclaren on a Trashing Israel Tour?
Jan 29th, 2010
Daily Newsfrontpagemag.com
Categories: Commentary;The Nation Of Israel;Anti-Israel

“Emergent Church” guru Brian McLaren is a key figure on the Evangelical Left who is trying shift Evangelicals, who are America’s most pro-Israel demographic, into a more neutralist stance. Currently, he is leading a delegation through Israel and “Palestine” to broadcast the sins of Israeli oppression against Palestinians by “listening, learning, thinking, observing, reflecting.” His blog is providing daily updates of his discoveries, all of which confirm his previously often declared bias against Israel.

“I hope you will start questioning what you think you know about the situation here,” McLaren warned on his blog recently, with the assumption that most readers are deceived by pro-Israel partiality. “I’ve been an avid reader on the subject for quite a while, but being here now, I see how many of my most basic assumptions were skewed from a lifetime of half-truths, unfair and imbalanced news, well-planned propaganda, and misinformation.”

McLaren, of course, used to be a more traditional, conservative Evangelical. So his emergence into the Evangelical Left in recent years, including the requisite negativity towards Israel, is part of an ongoing spiritual rebirth into which he invites his fellow Evangelicals. Of course, McLaren insists that he is not anti-Israel, and certainly not anti-Jewish. He simply wants to liberate both Palestinians and Jews from the enslaving mindset of the “occupation” that holds both peoples captive.

“The struggle here is about people being held in various forms bondage – both occupiers and the occupied each in their own ways, and everyone needs liberation,” McLaren explained. He is himself apparently one agent of that “liberation.” In his typical post-modern way, he further posits that none of the people in that region are really responsible for the strife and horrors. Rather, it is the “harmful ideologies and world views and narratives that rule and exert power in and through people’s lives” and “cause them to do terrible things they would never do in their right minds.” Indeed, he warned, that “when hateful and dehumanizing ideologies take control, both victimizers and victims are dehumanized.”

Of course, though McLaren wants to liberate everybody from their various spiritual/political blindness, he implies that most or all of the spiritual confusion comes from Jewish Israel and its Christian supporters. He is very concerned about Israeli “razor wire and segregation walls,” as part of the “ugliness of occupation.” But he is not as interested in the Palestinian and Islamist terror that generate Israel’s defenses. He helpfully included photos of graffiti art on the infamous security wall, and other blank slates, by left-wing British graffitist Bansky. One shows the Statue of Liberty pulling out her empty pockets, perhaps illustrating the bankruptcy of American capitalism, or America’s hoped for inability to back Israel. Another graffiti artwork shows a Palestinian girl searching an Israeli soldier, in a hoped for role reversal.

McLaren recited first hand from his West Bank visit “heart-shattering stories of Palestinians being arrested without cause, tortured, humiliated, re-arrested, re-tortured.” Amazingly, he has discovered a “lack of hatred” and a thirst for “non-violent” action among Palestinians, despite all the abuse from their Israeli “victimizers,” and the mischaracterizations from the purportedly pro-Israel U.S. media. Revealingly, McLaren learned that Palestinians do not want a “two-state solution” but instead desire to “live in peace with Israelis” and want “Jews, Muslims, and Christians to learn to live together as neighbors.” In other words, the Palestinians want the eradication of Jewish Israel and the creation of a new Palestinian and Islamic dominated state where, purportedly, Jews and Christians also could live, at least for a time. McLaren finds this discovery to be very “powerful” and encouraging.

“We in the US have been given a terribly false impression – from the media, from political leaders, and from many Christian and Jewish leaders as well,” McLaren incredulously recounted of the “quiet but gracious attitude” he found among Palestinians towards Israel. “All of us who are here in Palestine are now witnesses to realities we can’t be silent about in the future.”

One of McLaren’s fellow pilgrims is former journalist Greg Barrett, author of The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok. Maybe not quite as naïve as the rose-tinted McLaren, Barrett blogged that Palestinians graciously endure American tourists despite all the torments that America purportedly inflicts on them through Israel because “we help buoy a difficult economy.” But deep down, Palestinians are justifiably “tired of us and our elected officials who look the other way while an oppressed people is bullied, robbed and mocked.” Christian tourists have too long visited Bethlehem to see Christ’s birthplace while “we’ve failed to follow His teachings.”

Appropriately, Barrett cited a favorite social activist/philosopher for the Left: “Seeing the infamous Wall built by Israel to imprison the Palestinians, I was reminded of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. In it, Alinsky writes about ‘the rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends.’ First among them is the belief that a person’s concern with the ethics of a social action correspond to one’s distance from the consequences of action or inaction.”

Perhaps Barrett should instead have cited Alinsky’s better known quote about left-wing polemics: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” McLaren’s Holy Land tour, whether deliberately or cluelessly, seems like just another Alinsky-inspired cause from the Religious and Evangelical Left, which are determined to demonize Israel and its U.S. ally, in pursuit of “liberation” for Palestinians. But this brand of “liberation” would result in the eventual eradication of Jewish Israel in favor of an Islamist dominated “Palestine,” where fellow-travelling Christians like Brian McLaren would only be tolerated for their political utility.