by James Jacob Prasch

From Annapolis to Armageddon
From Saddlebrook to Sodom
From Willowcreek to Wormwood

Although He lived in a politically charged environment, Jesus,   never,  aligned,  Himself or His message with political causes or parties. He simply expounded upon political events in light of biblical prophecy, particularly those prophecies found in the Book of Daniel. In,  passages such as,  Matthew 23 & 24,  He prophetically taught His followers the outcome of such events, including the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 and the events that would transpire in the very last days before His return.

In light of the events of recent weeks, ‚  as we enter 2008 we note ‚  that American and British politicians, ‚  in league with the Israeli left wing and the forces of Islam, have pledged to create a second Palestinian-Arab Muslim state in addition to Jordan by dividing God’s covenant land.
Moreover, they are supported by a list of ‚  supposed evangelical leaders following the Purpose-Driven "“ Emergent-Church "“ Inter-Faith/ecumenical agenda.

We do not expect politicians to be aware of Joel chapter 3, Zechariah chapter 12, or Revelation chapter 16. None seem to recognize the spiritual and theological implications of what they are doing, nor do they understand the prophetic significance. Nor, evidently, ‚  do the leaders of the increasingly apostate churches.

As we ‚  look forward to ‚  our next Bible study tour of Israel in September, 2008, we are planning to focus on modern Israel and prophecy, addressing themes such as Gog and Magog. In light of what God’s Word tells us to expect, some very crucial scenarios are indeed beginning to rapidly take shape.

We have also issued an updated version of our book, Israel, The Church, and The Jews, to highlight these issues. Again, our aim is not political, but biblical. Our ‚  focus is not political events themselves, but their prophetic importance.

Annapolis Summit "“ November 2007

In 1971, the administration of George H.W. Bush, with James Baker in the lead, handed Lebanon on a silver platter to Iran-aligned and terror-sponsoring Syria. Today, in the tradition of his father, George W. Bush, with his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, have pursued a foreign policy creating Iran-controlled Islamic terror enclaves in southern Iraq and also in Gaza. In league with Britain’s Tony Blair, arch eurocrat Xaviero Solano, and General Wesley Clark, they have also continued the Clinton administration’s policy of bombing the Serbs in Kosovo. This is in total violation of the NATO Treaty which allows for retaliation only on a country attacking another NATO country. Clinton intervened in the three-way blood bath (in which there was no totally innocent faction) on the side of the Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army, which is allied with Al Qaeda. This action alienated pro-western opinion in Russia and helped pave the way for Putin’s ‚  incipient neo-Stalinism to gain momentum. Bush and Rice oppose the Christian population of Kosovo on the side of Islam, thus working to create an Islamic state in Europe.

Not content with this, Bush & Rice (desperate to save their legacy as a failed administration and needing a foreign policy success) in league with the most unpopular and scandal-ridden prime minister in Israeli history, the leftest Ehud Olmert, turned against the easy target of Israel.

It was against this background that the Annapolis summit was staged with a pro-Islamic foreign policy bent on creating another Iran-backed terrorist enclave in the West Bank as had been done in Lebanon, Gaza, and southern Iraq. Daniel, chapter 10, warns us that the demonic principality over Iran (Persia) would rise in an attempt to destroy Israel in the last days. George W. Bush has given that demon a guest room in the White House. While claiming to build a buttress against Iran, Bush, in practice, continues to assist Iran in its goal of destroying Israel.

Bush, Rice, and "Road Map for Peace" ambassador Tony Blair pushed the myth that Fatah, the heirs of Arafat under President Abbas, are moderates and that only Hamas is evil. Blair, with probable presidential ambitions within the European Union (his style of governance as UK Prime Minister was, in fact, presidential, not parliamentarian), has a personal agenda that is overtly political.

Second-term US presidents are generally consumed with preserving their legacy for posterity. While Jimmy Carter is usually trumpeted by presidential historians, the press, and the academic world as the weakest and most failed president in modern American history, history will still accord him a feather in his cap for the Camp David Accords in which he brokered a pact between Menachem Begin and Anwar El Sadat. George W. Bush, however, has no feather in his cap, and will eclipse Carter as the president remembered as "The President of Failure." Condoleezza Rice is often estimated, even by many Republicans, as the most incompetent secretary of state in American history. Bush must somehow find that feather. And if it means the betrayal of Israel, then so be it.

The Bush government at the dawn of 2008 is frantic in its efforts to salvage a legacy fraught with one diplomatic failure after another as well as a massive expansion of federal debt for which he and a Republican congress were mainly responsible. His administration has also contributed to a serious decline in the value of the US dollar. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a Republican who is not without his own culpabilities, holds Bush and the first term Republican Congress directly responsible for this hyper-deficit spending which makes the record quadrupling of the deficit under Ronald Reagan almost insignificant in comparison. Reagan took America from being the world’s largest lender to its largest borrower, destroying the America’s balance of trade in favor of Asia. Even George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s vice-president at the time, had described his "Reaganomics" as "voodoo." But the economic decline of America under George W. Bush has gone well beyond this.

The badly weakened dollar under the current President Bush failed to significantly help correct the record trade deficits that cheaper-dollar-denominated exports normally would. And while his beloved oil cartel and energy conglomerates have profited, Bush has made the US more and more ‚  dependent on Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Emirate support of the dollar. ‚  Keeping Persian Gulf crude priced in petro-dollars is vital to the weakened dollar being retained as the base currency of world currency reserves. This affords fundamentalist Moslem governments more influence in American policy, especially as they in turn recycle their astronomical profits into capital investment in the American economy. Warren Buffet has warned that under Bush, 1% of the ‚  capitalized wealth in the American economy goes into the hands of foreign investors. ‚  Under Bush, ‚  America is sold off cheaply, not only to China but to Islamic oil interests. It is sold ‚  piece-by-piece at bargain prices due to the weak dollar and ever richer Gulf oil states and Saudi Arabia. These, in turn, fund fundamentalist Islamic institutions in America and the West, which inherently generate support for Islamic radicalism.The abysmal Bush economic record of mega fiscal-deficit, combined with mega trade-deficit and Saudi sweetening of record oil prices that will haunt his legacy, can be salvaged only by a Middle East foreign policy that makes Israel the sacrificial lamb.

This has been compounded by the Bush imbroglio in Iraq that dates back to his father and the Senior Bush’s secretary of state James Baker, who left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 because the Saudis did not want any regime change in the Persian Gulf. Add to this the Reagan administration’s supplying of arms to the vehemently anti-American regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and his covering it up with the Iran-Contra scandal.
If Saddam Hussein was to be deposed, the US could have done it with world approval (including most Arab and Islamic approval) in 1991. But their Saudi masters said no amidst fears of an Iranian Shia regime in Southern Iraq. The most desperate factor in the failed Bush legacy remains Iraq. Bush Sr. failed to finish the job, so his son took it over and just botched it up.

Bush, Iraq , and The Ghost Vietnam

A Republican administration under Gerald Ford, with a hostile Democrat Congress and a fed up public, saw the loss of Vietnam. Now, just as the Republicans lost Vietnam, a Republican with a hostile Democrat congress and a fed up public is losing the "War on Terror." Moreover, the Republicans are doing so for the same reasons.

As Americans died in Vietnam, ships of America’s allies visited The North Vietnamese port of Haiphong. As the Soviets and Chinese supplied the North Vietnamese with the wherewithal to kill Americans, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger pursued d ƒ ©tente with the Soviets and an open door policy with China, thus increasing trade with those funding the war effort to kill Americans. ‚  Some non-partisan conservatives saw this as a diplomacy of treason.

As a Vietnam-style imbroglio has taken root in Iraq and the threat of terrorism increasingly looms, Bush has pushed America more and more into economic league with the Saudi and United Arab Emirate Wahabist financiers of radical Islam that inherently generate support for terror. Again, a Republican president’s diplomacy of treason places the West in bed with the enemy whom we are not allowed to identify as such in the name of "oil d ƒ ©tente."

We may rest assured that the farce taking place in Iraq has the Democrat Congress and Senate as its co-architects, and that any Democrat president will be just as beholden to Muslim oil industry interests as any Republican.

Indeed, as the current American presidential race began to take shape in 2007, Al Qaeda toned down its activities in Iraq and elsewhere to prevent a conservative from being elected. The White House exploits this as evidence that its strategy against terror is working. The strategy of either party, in fact, works as much in favor of terrorism as it does in opposition to it.

Once the plight of persecuted Christians is ignored and God’s covenant land to Israel is divided however, judgment becomes inevitable and the stage is further set for Joel chapter 3 and Zechariah chapter 12.
Putin and Bush, Gog and Magog

There indeed appears to be a political insanity to policies of Russian President Vladamir Putin. After the Moscow theater and stadium massacres and the Beslan slaughter of little children in front of their parents by Islamic terrorists in the Chechnya dispute, common sense demands the recognition that a fundamentalist Iran on the doorstep is not desirable and constitutes a serious militant Islamic threat to Russia "“ potentially more serious than that faced by the West.

Russia has a 70% abortion rate with only Muslims growing as a demographic sector of ‚  its society. The Islamization of Russia is more pronounced than similar trends in Holland, France, and Britain (China also faces a rising Islamic threat in its western regions).
Yet, in a policy that makes no strategic or logical sense, Putin repeatedly aligns himself with Iran against the West. This for the sake of short-term political gain in his quest to revive a defeated and humiliated Russia that lost the Cold War and saw its Soviet Empire collapse as a major player on the global stage.

The illogical nature of Putin’s policies cannot be explained rationally or politically. It is indeed conspicuous in its resemblance to the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel’s warning to Gog and Magog that God would put hooks in their jaws and draw them into a Middle East conflict to destroy them. This is found in chapters 38 & 39 of Ezekiel’s amazing prophetic book.

In Putin’s world, the short-term gain of alignment with heathen Shia Iran is attained at the expense of long-term security of Mother Russia. In the world of Bush, it works in precisely the same way against the US. Short-term gain attained from alignment with no less barbarian Saudi Arabian Wahabists is attained at the expense of long-term security for America and the West.
Many conservatives wonder what kind of president refuses to define the enemy, protect the nation’s borders during a time of war, and continues to hand out express visas to Saudi Wahabists after 9/11 (not unlike handing out visas to Japanese kamikaze pilots after Pearl Harbor).

Bush and Putin are two of a kind. It is furthermore ‚  most unlikely that the successors of either will have any more brains or any more integrity than their predecessors. It is also unlikely that either will even read the Book of Ezekiel.

ANNAPOLIS "“ The Feather Came From A Vulture

The Bush Administration knows that George W. Bush is the Jimmy Carter of the Republican Party. In his time, Gerald Ford, the Republican president who lost Vietnam, was portrayed in the media as a dunce. But his tenure in office was too short to be remembered for its failure there. Nixon will be remembered as a liar and a thief, but he saw America land on the moon and at least had that as a highlight of his administration. Reagan was half senile and may have run the most corrupt and sleaze-ridden administration in American history, but he oversaw the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
So Bush must have his highlight. He needs a publicity ploy that will be remembered as his crowning success in what is otherwise a legacy of failure. He needs his feather. But the only place he can get it is from a bird of prey "“ Islam.

What Bush and Rice did not want addressed in setting the agenda for the Annapolis Conference are these facts:

Fatah has a Palestinian Constitution that is Islamic and inherently supportive of future jihadist terror and the suppression of women and non-Muslims, and enshrines hatred of Jews and Christians in its Sharia laws.
Fatah and its leader, Abu Abbas, have a militant terrorist faction as bad as Hamas, also supported by Iran.

In the weeks prior to the summit, Fatah’s TV, radio, and print media continued as usual, broadcasting their anti-American, anti-western, anti-Judeo-Christian, and anti-Israel hatred, as well as promulgating jihadist violence, implicitly endorsing terrorism. Yet Bush demanded further concessions to those openly wanting to destroy us.

Bush and Rice claim to be in pursuit of their fantasy endeavour to democratize Muslims, yet Abbas has no democratic or electoral mandate from his own people. In any free election, Hamas would likely win.

Fatah stole most of the international assistance given to develop an infrastructure. Blair and Bush want to give them even more American and western money without having to account for the missing misallocated and misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, it is the overtaxed European and deficit-strapped American taxpayers ‚  whom Bush, Blair, and Rice expect to pay for this "“ not the ‚  oil wealthy Saudi Wahabists who are enjoying escalating oil revenues which they use to propagate the intolerance of Wahabism globally.

The Palestinian delegation claims it will never accept as a condition for agreement the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, maintaining that no nation can mix its religious and national identity. Except, of course, the state they hope to establish with their own Islamic Palestinian constitution, as well as more than 30 Islamic nations including Saudi Arabia. Bush utters not a word. Israel is supposed to negotiate away its land to those fundamental Islamists who refuse to recognize its existence as a Jewish homeland.

The National Intelligence Estimate that Bush has been aware of since August 2007 (although not released until after the Annapolis summit in early December) stated that active Iranian pursuit of nuclear arms has been dormant since 2003, even though the supposedly peaceful technology could be converted to enrichment of weapons-grade plutonium at a future point. Bush and Rice pushed the summit by exploiting the need for a common front against Iran by so-called moderate Muslim states (such as extremist-funding Saudi Arabia) and Israel.

Israel was to be propelled by Bush and Rice to sit down with the number one among sixteen mainly Muslim countries, including terror-sponsoring Syria and human rights-violating Saudi Arabia. The very week that Bush invited the Saudi government to attend, Saudi Arabia ordered a young 19-year-old woman who was gang raped by 21 Muslim men to be flogged with 200 lashes (initially 90, but raised to 200 when the international media were alerted). The US State department under Rice admitted the victim was going to be mercilessly whipped under the Islamic law of the savage "House of Saud" which is a business associate of the Bush family.

None of this, of course, matters to Bush. But the political injustice was not the beginning of the Annapolis betrayal which committed Israel to the creation of a second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan. This will likely be another non-democratic Islamic state that persecutes Christians and continues its support of terrorism courtesy of the American government, Middle East oil interests, and the European Union.

As we witness in the biblical books of Daniel, Zechariah, and Revelation, these political events are merely the result of dark spiritual forces in the heavens, as described in Ephesians chapter 6.

Apostasy Paves the Way

In 2007 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $630 million in compensation after its Cardinal Mahoney protected pedophile clergy at the expense of the children whose lives these sex criminals destroy. A similar huge settlement was made a week later by the Archdiocese of San Diego (indeed, nearly every single Roman Catholic diocese in the US alone, with their bishops, have been similarly found liable in court "“ a saga repeated globally).

Yet that very week, Pope Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued the "Criminale Solicitacciones" directive from the Vatican instructing bishops to protect these criminals, made a declaration stating that only Roman Catholicism was valid and other churches were not. Not a word was spoken in reaction by Chuck Colson, James Dobson and other evangelical henchmen of ecumenical union with Roman Catholicism. Thus these "evangelicals" support the Vatican’s widespread sex-pervert violation of children and its conspiracy to protect its pedophile priests and nuns.

This same pope, who received a letter from 38 Muslim leaders (including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is on public record for supporting terrorism and hatred of Jews and Christians), responded in a good-neighbor letter without calling them into account for any of their actions, thus placing his religious benediction on terrorism, hatred of America, Britain & the West, ‚  intolerance of Christians, and murder of Jews. In effect, he has endorsed the Islamic practice of "˜taq’yya’, permissible lying in the struggle for Islam, dissimulating misleading information to the infidel in preparation for jihad.

At the same time, President Bush displayed his departure from biblical evangelical Christianity (which he appears to have never embraced in any scriptural sense) by decreeing that all faiths (particularly Islam) have the same god as he. "I Am The Lord Your God, You Shall Have No Other gods Before Me" is erased from the Bush Bible in the name of oil money and political correctness.

The prelude to the Annapolis summit was indeed to be religious and spiritual. Annihilationist John Stott, Robert Schuller (who hosted the Muslim Grand Mufti of Damascus in his pulpit), Bill Hybels (who hosted a Muslim imam in his), Rick Warren (after paying tribute to the terrorist nation of Syria and telling Christians to ignore end-time prophecy), Emergent Church guru Brian McLaren (who mixes New Age and post modernism with a version of mystical Christendom, and argues for a 5-year moratorium on debating homosexual & lesbian ordination), and David Yonggi Cho (who combines oriental shamanism with Christianity in his book The Fourth Dimension), and a host of other apostate clergy, endorsed the pope’s letter.

The letter was also endorsed by a representative of the National Association of Evangelicals, whose recently resigned head honcho Ted Haggard was caught in a web of lies, deception, and scandal regarding his involvement with homosexual prostitutes and dangerous illegal drugs. As if the pope who instructed the protection of child molesters and denounced the very existence of their churches as invalid represented Christianity, this sad collection of theocrats also issued a letter of reply to the Muslim letter.
These so-called "Christian" were pleased to ignore the pro-terrorist history of many of the Muslim signatories (some of whom are Wahabists who impose the death sentence upon their Muslim constituents who become Christians). They apologized to the Muslims for the Crusades (a Roman Catholic response to Islamist conquests of western nations, not a Protestant one) and for the way in which "the war on terror" has in part been pursued.

This same crowd, eager to placate Islam, stands prepared to shun Israel and support Bush and whoever succeeds him on the same course. This is not new. Disclosure of released Nixon tapes in 2006 revealed that Richard Nixon and Billy Graham were both secretly malicious anti-Semites and discussed their vehemence against Jews in the White House at some length. In his retirement, Jimmy Carter has become a spokesman for fundamentalist Islamic interests and a virtual defender of anti-Israel Islamic terrorism paid for by Muslim oil money donated to his "Peace Center." Like Bush and Graham, Carter also proclaimed himself to be a "born again" Christian.

It is righteousness that exalts nations. How could treason in the pulpit yield anything but such de facto treason in the corridors of political power?
A day of judgment is indeed coming for corrupt governments and godless nations. A day of judgment is coming on those who curse Israel and betray the persecuted Christians. A day of judgment is indeed coming on Israel for her rejection of her Messiah and persecution of Jewish believers. A terrible day of judgment is coming with Gog and Magog, Armageddon, and Isaiah 17 on the Arab Muslim world.

But judgment must first begin in the House of God!