Iran Closing In On Israel – Deal With Syria Could See New Military Base
By Barney Breen-Portnoy/Algemeiner.com
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Enhanced Human Operations – Welcome To The Next Generation Soldier
By PNW Staff
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Syria And Israel – One Missile Away From Conflict
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The real face of Jordan
by Caroline Glick
Jordan is the country to Israel’s east with which Israel has had a formal peace for 23 years.
And its people hate Israel, and Jews, even more than the Iranians do.
Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel. It’s ugly.
Twenty years ago, on March 13, 1997, 7th and 8th grade girls from the AMIT Fuerst junior high school for girls in Beit Shemesh packed box lunches and boarded a school bus that was to take them to the Jordan Valley for a class trip. The high point of the day was the scheduled visit to the so-called “Island of Peace.”
The area, adjacent to the Naharayim electricity station, encompasses lands Israel ceded to Jordan in the 1994 peace treaty and Jordan leased back to Israel for continued cultivation by the Jewish farmers from Ashdot Yaakov who had bought the lands and farmed them for decades.
Israel’s formal transfer of sovereignty – and Jordan’s recognition of Jewish land rights to the area – were emblematic of the notion that the peace treaty was more than a piece of paper. Here, officials boasted, at the Island of Peace, we saw on-the-ground proof that Jordan and Israel were now peaceful neighbors.
Just as Americans in California can spend a night at the bars in Tijuana and then sleep it off in their beds in San Diego, so, the thinking went, after three years of formal peace, Israeli schoolgirls could eat their box lunches in Jordan, at the Island of Peace, and be home in time for dinner in Beit Shemesh.
Shortly after they alighted their buses, that illusion came to a brutal end.
The children were massacred.
A Jordanian policeman named of Ahmad Daqamseh, who was supposed to be protecting them, instead opened fire with his automatic rifle.
He murdered seven girls and wounded six more.
On Jordanian territory, the guests of the kingdom, the girls had no one to protect them. Daqamseh would have kept on killing and wounding, but his weapon jammed.
In the days that followed, Israel saw two faces of Jordan and with them, the true nature of the peace it had achieved.
On the one hand, in an extraordinary act of kindness and humility, King Hussein came to Israel and paid condolence calls at the homes of all seven girls. He bowed before their parents and asked for forgiveness.
On the other hand, Hussein’s subjects celebrated Daqamseh as a hero.
The Jordanian court system went out of its way not to treat him like a murderer. Instead of receiving the death penalty for his crime – as he would have received if his victims hadn’t been Jewish girls – the judges insisted he was crazy and sentenced him instead to life in prison. Under Jordanian law his sentence translated into 20 years in jail. In other words, Daqamseh received less than three years in jail for every little girl he murdered and no time for the six he wounded.
Not satisfied with his sentence, the Jordanian public repeatedly demanded his early release. The public’s adulation of Daqamseh was so widespread and deep-seated that in 2014, the majority of Jordan’s parliament members voted for his immediate release.
Three years earlier, in 2011, Jordan’s then-justice minister Hussein Majali extolled Daqamseh as a hero and called for his release.
Last week, sentence completed, Daqamseh was released. And within moments of his return, in the dead of night to his village, crowds of supporters emerged from their homes and celebrated their hero.
Daqamseh, the supposed madman, never expressed regret for his crime.
And now a free man, he was only too happy last week to use his release as a means of justifying, yet again, his crime.
“Normalization with Zionists is a lie!” he declared in an interview with Al Jazeera. He went on to call for the conquest of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish state.
Jordan owes its existence not to its population nor even to its silver- tongued monarch, Hussein’s son Abdullah. It owes its existence to its location. For Israel and the West the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a critical piece of real estate.
For Israel, the kingdom is a buffer against Iraq and Syria.
For the Americans it is a safe port in the storm in the midst of the Arab world now suffering from convulsions of jihadist revolutions, counterrevolutions, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.
Jordan, which since 2003 has absorbed a million refugees from Iraq and another million from Syria, is viewed by Europeans as a great big refugee camp. It must be kept stable lest the Iraqis and Syrians move on to Europe.
If it weren’t for Israel and the Western powers, the Hashemite Kingdom would have been overthrown long ago.
Today, Jordan is an economic and social tinderbox. Its debt to GDP ratio skyrocketed from 57% to 90% between 2011 and 2016. Youth unemployment, while officially reported at 14%, actually stands at 38%.
Jordan, which is the second-poorest state in terms of its available water sources, relies on Israeli exports of water to survive. Its government is its largest employer. Its largest export is its people, whose remittances to their relatives back home keep 350,000 families afloat. And those remittances have fallen off dramatically in recent years due to the drop in oil prices on the world market.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the second largest political force in the country. Although Jordanians were revolted in 2015 when Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria burned alive a downed Jordanian pilot, ISIS has no shortage of sympathizers in wide swaths of Jordanian society. More than 2,000 Jordanians joined ISIS in Syria and several thousand more ISIS members and sympathizers are at large throughout the kingdom.
Whereas Palestinians used to make up an absolute majority of the population, leading many to observe over the years that the real Palestine is Jordan, since the Iraqi and Syria refugees swelled the ranks of the population, the Palestinian majority has been diminished.
Jordan is a reminder that nation building in the Arab world is a dangerous proposition. With each passing year, the US provides Jordan with more and more military and civilian aid to keep the regime afloat. And with each passing year, voices praising Daqamseh and his ilk continue to expand in numbers and volume.
Jordan shows that the concept of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is of limited value. So long as the hearts and the minds of the people of the Arab world are filled with conspiracy theories about Jews, and inspired by visions of jihad and destruction that render mass murderers of innocent schoolchildren heroes, the notion that genuine peace is possible is both irrational and irresponsible.
Recently it was reported that last October, Israel’s ambassador to Jordan Einat Schlein gave a pessimistic assessment of Jordan’s future prospects to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkott. Eisenkott reportedly reacted to her briefing by suggesting that Israel needs to figure out a way to help the regime to survive.
Eisenkott was correct, of course.
Israel, which now faces a nightmare situation along its border with post-civil war Syria, does not want to face the prospect of a post-Hashemite Jordan, where the people will rule, on its doorstep.
But Israel can ill afford to assume that this will not happen one day, and plan accordingly.
Under the circumstances, the only way to safeguard against the day when Daqasmeh and his supporters rule Jordan is to apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and encourage tens of thousands of Israelis to settle down along the sparsely populated eastern border.
After the massacre, the parents of the dead children and the public as a whole demanded to know why the school hadn’t smuggled armed guards into the Island of Peace to protect them. Their question was a reasonable one.
Daqamseh was able to kill those girls because we let down our guard.
The only way to prevent that from happening again – writ large – is to reinforce that guard by reinforcing our control over eastern Israel.
23 years after the peace was signed, nothing has changed in the Kingdom of Jordan. No hearts and minds have been turned in our favor. The peace treaty has not protected us. The only thing that protects our children is our ability and willingness to use our weapons to protect them from our hate-drenched neighbors with whom we share treaties of peace.
Biblical King’s Palace Found Under Shrine Demolished by ISIS
WAR ON THE HORIZON?
In my estimation, the foundations for a new regional conflict were laid in the 1980s.
Early in the decade, Iran-in the wake of the 1979 Shiite Muslim revolution-actively switched from being an ally of Israel to a self-declared enemy. This new enmity was fleshed out in 1982 when Iran fathered the radical Hezbollah movement in war-torn Lebanon.
Today, the movement’s militia wing possesses one of the largest arsenals on earth, including chemical weapons and hundreds of thousands of mostly Iranian-supplied missiles and rockets. For all we know, one or two “field” nuclear warheads may also be in its ever growing arsenal. It is fairly clear that Hezbollah would play a major role in any new regional conflict.
Later in the decade, the radical Sunni Muslim Hamas movement sprang up in the Gaza Strip. Although Shiite and Sunni Muslims are currently busy slaughtering each other elsewhere in the roiling Middle East, especially in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, the mullahs in Iran have succeeded in allying their country with Hamas terrorists, providing financial aid, weapons, and military training to the radical movement which openly calls for Israel’s total destruction, as of course do officials in Tehran.
Earlier this month, Israeli army leaders declared that Hamas is now back to full fighting strength following the radical militia’s blistering defeat in the 2014 summer war, during which the terrorist group blasted parts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with mid-range rockets for the first time.
Another terror group, the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” movement based in Syria and Iraq, became a fully active player in the Muslim jihad war to annihilate Israel on February 9. That is when the group announced that it had fired four rockets at the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat. The attack came from the nearby Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, where Islamic State fighters have been gaining strength for several years. Israel’s highly sophisticated Iron Dome anti-rocket system successfully intercepted three of the rockets while a fourth landed in an open area outside of the Red Sea port city, which is always bustling with mainly European tourists this time of year.
One of the latest threats emanating from Tehran came in late January when Iranian Revolutionary Guards official Musqtada Al Sadr said that any attempt by President Trump to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem, would be considered “an act of war” by Iran and other Muslim countries and groups, and would be responded to accordingly.
In fact, Iran needs no excuse to go to war with Israel since it has already been in an open state of hostility with the world’s only Jewish State since 1979. What Al Sadr’s harsh words seem to indicate is that Iran is now ready to attack Israel at any time, at the very least via its Muslim proxy forces stationed in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
In early February, the Shiite Islamic regime test fired another ballistic missile in violation of a UN resolution endorsing the 2015 nuclear pact between Iran, the Obama Administration and several other world powers. President Trump responded by saying Iranian leaders were “playing with fire.” Later his new national security advisor, Michael Flynn, told reporters that “The international community has been too tolerant of Iran’s bad behavior. The ritual of convening a United Nations Security Council in an emergency meeting and issuing a strong statement is not enough.”
In response to the warnings coming out of Washington, Supreme Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a fiery a speech on February 7, proclaiming that President Trump “should be afraid of me.” He added that Trump’s electoral triumph “confirmed what we have been saying for more than 30 years about the political, economic, moral and social corruption in the US ruling system.”
Earlier in the week, Iranian-backed Yemeni Shiite Houthi rebels announced that their forces successfully launched a long range ballistic missile that can reach the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Any missile attack upon the oil rich Sunni Arab country would probably unleash a much wider regional war along with a worldwide oil price surge that would greatly benefit Vladimir Putin’s struggling petroleum-based economy.
Another possible regional war spark is the vicious internal conflict raging in neighboring Syria since early 2011, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and always has the potential of spilling over into Israel. In fact, numerous clashes have already taken place along the shared border, and Israeli warplanes have periodically bombed Syrian, Hezbollah and Islamic State positions inside of the crumbling Arab country. Several Israeli military analysts say the Trump Administration’s contested travel ban from Syria and six other regional Muslim countries has also increased the prospect of armed attacks upon American and Israeli targets in the turbulent Middle East and elsewhere.
The escalating turmoil in the Middle East comes as Russia continues to grow in regional strength and influence, largely due to America’s widely perceived retreat from the region under former President Barrack Hussein Obama. The prospect that Russian military forces may end up clashing with Western and/or Israeli forces, either by design or accident, is always ever present and seemingly growing.
Many Christian prophecy buffs are expecting Russia to soon launch the international attack upon Israel foretold in Ezekiel 38 and 39. I’ve already mentioned that I do not share this view, given that the prophesied end time assault is said to end with Israel’s total spiritual salvation. Such a “pre-tribulation” attack does not jive with other biblical oracles which reveal that a powerful worldwide ruler known as Antichrist will govern and oppress the entire planet, including Israel, for three and a half years before the final battles of history engulf the Middle East and elsewhere.
However a separate “preview war” pitting Russian forces against Israel and its allies, possibly including the United States, is entirely possible in my estimation. Given Vladimir Putin’s escalating worldwide aggression, and Donald Trump’s apparent assertiveness, such military clashes may now be considered probable.
It may be that in the midst of any pending clash between Syria and Israel, the Syrian capital city of Damascus will be entirely wiped out, as foretold in Isaiah 17. I suspect that this ancient oracle will be the next one to be fulfilled on the world stage as the prophesied final military and spiritual showdowns of history unfold.
Many more difficult days seem to lie just ahead for America, Israel and the rest of the sin-soaked world. However we who know the Lord as our Savior and King can rejoice over the fact that these dark days were clearly foretold long ago by many ancient Hebrew prophets, including Peter, Paul and Yeshua (Jesus).
In fact, the Lord instructed His followers to “lift up your heads” toward heaven in response to the world’s end time drama because the dark days would signal that “your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 22:28). And that is the glowing silver lining behind today’s stormy skies!
Many Christian prophecy buffs are expecting Russia to soon launch the international attack upon Israel foretold in Ezekiel 38 and 39. I’ve already mentioned that I do not share this view, given that the prophesied end time assault is said to end with Israel’s total spiritual salvation.
I have great respect for David’s views on prophecy, that’s why I published his article here on my blog. But I disagree with his belief that the Gog-Magog war will result in Israel’s “total spiritual salvation”.
It is my belief that it will result in a return to Old Testament observance with Temple worship and sacrifice re-instituted. And that this, along with a peace covenant, will mark the beginning of the final seven year period prophesied by Daniel.
Cash No Longer King: Europe Moves To Begin Elimination Of Paper Money
By Shaun Bradley/theAntiMedia.org
In the shadow of Donald Trump’s spree of controversial actions, the European commission has quietly launched the next offensive in the war on cash.
These unelected bureaucrats have boldly asserted their intention to crack down on paper transactions across the E.U. and solidify a trend that has been gaining momentum for years.
The financial uncertainty amplified by Brexit has incentivized governments throughout Europe to seize further control over their banking systems.
France and Spain have already criminalized cash transactions above a certain limit, but now the commission has unilaterally established new regulations that will affect the entire union.
The fear of physical money flowing out of the trade bloc has manifested a draconian response from the State.
The European Action Plan doesn’t mention a specific dollar amount for restrictions, but as expected, their reasoning for the move is to thwart money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
Border checks between countries have already been bolstered to help implement these new standards on hard assets. Although these end goals are plausible, there are other clear motivations for governments to target paper money that aren’t as noble.
Negative interest rates and high inflation are a deadly combination that could further destabilize the already fragile union in the future.
With less physical currency circulating, these trends ensure that the impact of any additional central bank policies will be maximized. If economic conditions deteriorate, the threat of citizens pulling cash out of their accounts and starting a bank run is eliminated in a cashless system.
So long as the people’s wealth is under centralized control, funds can be shifted at will to conceal any underlying problems. But the longer this shell game is allowed to persist, the more painful it will be when reality overrides the manipulation.
Since former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kenneth Rogoff, published a paper last year advocating for the U.S. $100 bill to be removed, governments around the world have pushed forward their agendas towards a cashless society. He wrote:
“There is little debate among law-enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the U.S. $100 bill, facilitates crime: racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug and human trafficking, the corruption of public officials, not to mention terrorism.
There are substitutes for cash–cryptocurrencies, uncut diamonds, gold coins, prepaid cards–but for many kinds of criminal transactions, cash is still king.
It delivers absolute anonymity, portability, liquidity and near-universal acceptance.”
This announcement comes just months after the 500 euro note was discontinued, and it follows India’s lead in subverting the financial independence of their citizens.
The incremental steps currently being taken may look trivial in isolation, but the ultimate end is to lay the foundation for an entire network for economic repression.
The German people have placed themselves in strong opposition to the action and previously pushed back hard against domestic legislation that would have limited cash.
Nearly 80% of all transactions in Germany are made with paper currency, putting Europe’s economic engine in direct conflict with the vision coming out of Brussels.
The spillover effect has affected new forms of investment, like Bitcoin, which witnessed an astronomical rise over the last months and has been brought back into the discussion as a viable alternative to fiat currencies.
Of course, the E.U. Commission is also attempting to impose similar limitations on crypto-currencies to make sure no transactions fall outside of their domain. The ECB and BOJ are working towards a trojan horse blockchain network that will serve only to entrap those naive enough to trust it.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote last year that the E.U. would likely be the trailblazer of the West towards this new digital model:
“But a moratorium on printing new high denomination notes would make the world a better place. In terms of unilateral steps, the most important actor by far is the European Union.
The ¬500 is almost six times as valuable as the $100. Some actors in Europe, notably the European Commission, have shown sympathy for the idea and European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi has shown interest as well.”
Since the public’s attention has been drawn to emotional manipulations and political stunts, the threat the war on cash represents has gone unrecognized. Instead of feeding energy into systems meant to divide and conquer, individuals must educate themselves to secure their own financial futures.
By submitting to the hive mind and following the media down whichever rabbit hole they choose, the most important issues of today will go unnoticed.
The value of advocating for decentralized and physical alternatives to the banking system may not be easily grasped by the activists of today, but few other things have the potential to erode freedom on such a massive scale.
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It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
The above quote from Revelation 13 speaks of the actions of the second beast, also referred to as the false prophet: causing all to take the mark of the first beast in order to buy or sell.
What more ideal way of controlling the funding of criminal activity and terrorism than this method? And as terrorist incidents increase, and it’s presented as the solution, public resistance to a cashless society will certainly give way to it’s introduction.
Scholars have debated the identity of this false prophet for many centuries without coming to any consencus. But I think as we draw closer to the final seven years of this age it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this false prophet is the one whom the majority of terrorists draw their inspiration from, and will follow as their returned Mahdi.
Why Do We Help Fund Palestinians To Pay Terrorists?
By Sander Gerber/Algemeiner.com
On March 8, 2016, Taylor Force, a 28-year-old West Point graduate and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, was visiting Israel with members of his graduate class from Vanderbilt University when a Palestinian terrorist attacked civilians in Jaffa with a knife.
Force was killed, and 10 others, including a pregnant woman, were wounded.
US vice president Joe Biden, who happened to be in Israel on a state visit at the time, said: “The kind of violence we saw yesterday, the failure to condemn it, the rhetoric that incites that violence, the retribution that it generates, has to stop.”
But the rhetoric and the Palestinian payments to terrorists have not stopped.
In fact, the very next day, Abbas’ Fatah party praised the attacker, Bashar Masalha, as a “hero and martyr,” and added that these attacks would continue as “long as Israel does not believe in a two-state solution and ending its occupation.”
Masalha, who was shot and killed by police after he stabbed his last victim, was given a hero’s funeral with thousands in attendance.
The PA even criticized Israel for not releasing Masalha’s body in a timelier fashion.
But the truly obscene part of this story is not really Masalha’s killing spree; it is the PA ‘s efforts to incentivize more terrorists to commit acts of violence against civilians in Israel.
According to Law Number 14, Articles 1 and 2, enacted by the PA in 2004, Masalha’s family will receive a pension for life, amounting to three times the average yearly salary in the West Bank.
The Palestinian government makes absolutely no attempt to hide its rewards for terrorism. In the Amended Palestinian Prisoners Law 19 of 2013, the payments were actually enhanced for a terrorist who commits a violent act and is jailed.
Under this law, the longer the sentence (i.e., the greater the violence), the higher the salary that a terrorist receives.
Article 4 offers free tuition to the children of those jailed. In Article 6, there is even a clothing allowance and monthly stipend linked to the cost-of-living index.
Health insurance is included in Article 4, section 12. Article 5 provides the ultimate bonus: a lifetime pension for a prison term of five years (or only two years in the case of a female terrorist).
In response, some members of the US Congress are planning to introduce the Taylor Force Act, which would cut off funds to the PA until it revokes its laws supporting terrorism.
Why the Israeli government fails to highlight that the PA has legislation incentivizing terrorism, and that it allocates $315 million, nearly 8% of its budget, to pay terrorists in prison and the families of the “martyrs,” is bewildering.
While the Israeli government has begun to criticize the PA for paying terrorists, it has never done anything to stop the PA from doing so.
The PA has named 25 schools throughout the West Bank after terrorist murderers. Three of them honor Dalal Mughrabi, a member of the Fatah faction of the PLO (the precursor to the PA ), who was part of the group that ambushed a bus near Tel Aviv in 1978 (38 Israeli citizens were killed, including 13 children).
The late Ms. Mughrabi also has a public square, a soccer tournament, a summer camp and a computer center named after her.
Perhaps it is time for Israel to admit that no two-state solution and no peace will ever be achieved if the Palestinian leadership continues to incentivize terrorism against Israel and teaches its children to hate and kill Jews.
There has been a continued argument that being too forceful with the PA could weaken it, which would lead to the rise of an even more lethal entity, like Hamas or Hezbollah.
This is simply wrong, and the US, under President Donald Trump, is now setting into motion the simple idea that terrorism of any sort and against any people is completely unacceptable.
For more than 50 years, much of the world has accepted the Palestinians’ argument of moral equivalence: that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
We’ve heard this in response to the PLO airplane hijackings of the 1960s, the Munich Olympic massacre, the Ma’alot slaughter of Jewish children and the stabbing death of Taylor Force.
But things appear to finally be changing.
In December, Great Britain temporarily suspended funding to the PA because the UK claims, correctly, that the money winds up in the hands of terrorists.
Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump held up a last-minute cash giveaway of $221 million to the Palestinians that Barack Obama authorized just hours before he left office.
Too many innocent victims like Taylor Force have suffered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. It’s time we stop adding to this list.
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In fact, the very next day, Abbas’ Fatah party praised the attacker, Bashar Masalha, as a “hero and martyr,” and added that these attacks would continue as “long as Israel does not believe in a two-state solution and ending its occupation.”
That quote highlights the lies and hypocrisy spread by the Palestinian propaganda machine. Al Jazeera recently broadcast a documentary on the Israel/Palestine conflict that proved the Palestinian terrorism was never a fight for a two-state division of the land.
The Fatah controlled PLO began their campaign of terrorism when the West-Bank was under Jordanian control, and they stated at the time that they had no claim to it.
Their true goal was, and still is to drive all Jews off all the land “from the river to the sea”.
Russia’s Power Play In Middle East Brings Together Nations of Ezekiel 38
By PNW Staff
Russia continues to expand its influence in the Middle East and is bringing together more and more countries into its fold.
Intervention in Syria has been the catalyst to re-establishing its power in the region not seen since the cold war days.
Iran has been a long time partner with Russia but now we see new developments in both Libya and Turkey to also bring about a stronger alliance.
Iran saw a massive cash influx after sanctions were removed last year, thanks to the Obama administration, and as a result a substantial portion of this money will be put toward military modernization including an estimated $1 Billion air defense missile system supplied by Russia.
Part of this deal also includes the Russian S-300 air defense missile system, considered one of the most effective anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile systems in existence. A clear response to Israel’s threat that Iran will never be allowed to become a nuclear power.
Russia, in a bid to regain its previous influence enjoyed in Libya before the overthrow of the Ghaddafi government, has also reached out to a Libyan general named Khalifa Haftar who controls as many as 60,000 men in the Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east of the country.
Russia recently received General Haftar aboard its aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, pledging their support for his bid to control Libya, a move that would give Russia significant influence over North Africa.
A former colonel under Ghaddafi stated that “Haftar is going to facilitate Russian access to ports in Libya as well as open up airport runways to them.”
In the case of Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has thrown himself on the side of Russia as Turkey’s relations with both Israel and the United States have soured.
In August of 2016, Erdogan praised Putin as his “dear friend” in a visit to St. Petership that saw the two leaders pledging to strengthen ties.
The 2015 downing of a Russian jet by Turkish forces seems all but forgotten as the two nations continue to strengthen their military ties.
Turkey’s half-century old EU membership bid is also currently tottering on the brink of collapse, after the European Union’s legislature asked the bloc to freeze membership negotiations with Turkey over the government’s heavy-handed crackdown following a failed coup in July.
Turkish president Erdogan indicated in a recent interview that he was fed up with waiting for the European Union to accept Turkey as a member state, indicating that he would be willing to consider joining the Russia-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an alternative to the Western bloc.
2,600 years ago, the prophet Ezekiel foretold of a time when a coalition of Nations would gather together to invade the nation of Israel. This well-known conflict is known as “The War of Gog and Magog.”
According to the book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39, this confederacy of nations will attack Israel during a relatively peaceful period that appears to be generated by a recent conflict resulting in a “state of peace” for the Jewish nation.
According to the prophet, “After many days you shall be called. In the latter years, you shall come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered out of many peoples, against the mountains of Israel which had been always a waste. But its people were brought out of the nations, and they, all of them, are dwelling safely … and you shall say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will go against those who are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls and having neither bars nor gates'” (Ezekiel 38:8, 11).
The nations cited by Ezekiel are each referenced in the Old Testament, yet they all represent nations which exist today.
Long before Russia became a major world power, most Biblical scholars identified Magog as the nation of Russia and Gog as the ruler of Russia.
These other nations mentioned in Ezekiel 38 are:
” Magog (also said by other experts to include Meshech, and Tubal) = Russia
” Persia = Iran
” Cush = Ethiopia/Sudan
” Put = Libya
” Gomer = Turkey (Some have identified as parts of eastern Europe)
” Beth-Togarmah = Turkey (also said by other experts to include Armenia, and the Turkish-speaking people of Asia Minor).
The Bible indicates that in the “latter days” the Lord will put a “hook in the jaw” of these nations listed and according to the prophet, “you shall ascend and come like a storm; you shall be like a cloud to cover the land, you and all your troops, and many peoples with you.” (Ezekiel 38:9)
Some speculate that “hook in the jaw” could be Israel’s newly discovered oil and natural gas riches which directly affect the Russian economy.
Other analysts believe Russia’s alliance with Iran could be a “hook’ if Israel pre-emptively attacks Iran’s nuclear program, resulting in retaliation by Iran and the ensuing continued draws in Russia.
For now we see the alliance of nations forming exactly as Ezekiel described. Now we await the “hook”.
Transhumanists And The Quest For Godhood
By Eric Metaxas/Breakpoint.org
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danielsealbroken 
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