America, America, God shed His grace on thee.

America is in a very dangerous state right now. In the early 1990's I began to wonder how it was that a nation like Germany that was a long bastion of Christianity managed to become such a brutal totalitarian state. I specifically set out on a journey to do a personal study to investigate why the Church failed to stand against the Nazis especially in relation to the stripping of all Jewish rights, properties and ultimately their lives.

I began with reading obvious books on the subject of Nazi Germany and allowed what I read to lead me to other books and to many different trails all related to the same. My main interest was why the Church allowed itself to be quietly swept into support of the Nazis, as I had heard the excuses that, #1. "They really weren't Christians" and #2 "They were fearful to oppose the Nazis."

I did not buy either excuse and my year long study of the question convinced me that my gut on this was accurate.

Now the reason I am saying all this is because I did not start with the rise of Nazi Germany and go forward, but I started prior to the rise of Hitler and studied the conditions that were present as he began to rise and as he was being seated in power. These types of power shifts have to do with a moral power shift in the public and Hitler was able to enact his ill-will because enough people of like-mindedness on political issues were to be found in key places - like the German judicial system and even German theologists which he used to convince German Christians to support him, or at least have the "godliness" to not resist their human authorities.

What I'm getting at is conditions that existed in Germany bureaucracies, as well as in misguided and easily manipulated Christianity, played a huge part in the totalitarian government that took hold of Germany under Hitler. Fear of resistance came much later, when they could no longer resist with any effectiveness.

I'm really concerned about the state of America. If Americans really knew what the actual state of things were - and I'm not talking about ANY conspiracy theories just the simple unvarnished truth behind all the current scandals of this administration and his like-minded bureaucrats - we would not go so stupidly quiet into this dark night.

I will tell you this: you better pay careful attention to the IRS scandal because it has the most potential to strip you of your freedom of speech and freedom of religion. We are a frog in a pot of warm water on the verge of bubbling into a rapid boil. We better wake up.
Do not grow scandal weary. These scandals of the government are not political witch hunts, they are real abuses by people who have a like-minded agenda for America that has no place for the convictions of people of faith.

These unrelated scandals of our current government does not require that all these people be directly related to a conspiracy network, because it is their mindset that connects them. Many take direct individual actions within their realms of authority - IRS, Homeland Security, Judicial, State Dept - because the environment is ripe for action.

Writing in hopes that we pay attention and take notice of the eroding of American individual freedoms - and that we do everything within our power to resist. When I did this study I discovered one German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who recognized the dangers early and who worked exhaustively to warn not only Germany but the world - especially Christians. But no one wanted to hear him.

Bonhoeffer gave his life to resistance of the Nazis. We should learn the lessons of history, rise early to resist America becoming totalitarian as this path is certainly forming.  I'm not advocating any crazy stuff, but I'm saying pay attention and fight it through the political and legal processes while we can.

Palestinian Christians in a Big News Week

If you have seen the video that has been appearing in Jewish circles of Palestinian Christy Anastas about how it is Palestinians and not Israel that is responsible for the most egregious violations of human rights against Palestinian Christians, then here are some background things you may not be aware of.

First thing you need to know is that it was the Jerusalem Institute of Justice that ‘broke the story’ of Christy as they shared the platform at a conference on Palestinian Human Rights week at Uppsala University in Sweden. 

JIJ’s Calev Myers also spoke at the Swedish Parliament addressing Palestinian Human Rights violations.

You can access many fascinating videos from JIJ time in Sweden at the JIJ channel on YouTube, including this Q&A session with Mati Shoshani moderating and Calev Myers, Christy Anastas and Eli Hazan fielding questions from the Swedish students. 

Second thing you need to know is that Christy Anastas appeared along with her mother, Claire, in a 60 Minutes segment by Bob Simon about Christians in the Holy Land in 2012.  That segment was universally denounced as dishonest and misleading by Israelis, Jews and many Christians.  During her talk at Uppsala University, Christy directly contradicts the story Bob Simon told in his 2012 smear of Israel, as CAMERA also did in 2012 here. 

CAMERA put out an alert sharing Christy Anastas backstory and the video of her talk at Uppsala University, making mention that it was the Jerusalem Institute of Justice that first put up the video but later pulled it off YouTube.  Christy shot a new intro and outro to wrap-around her talk at Uppsala, and it was re-posted to YouTube by the Emmaus Group, a Christian group in the UK that draw attention of mistreatment of Christians in Muslim-majority settings. 

Clearly Christy wanted her talk on the web despite the death threats, so I contacted Calev Myers at Jerusalem Institute of Justice to see if there was anything I didn’t know that factored in to JIJ pulling the video.  I suspected that they pulled the video out of concerns for the death threats.  Calev confirmed that the information Christy shared was correct, and that JIJ had taken the video down because of the death threats to not only Christy but also the Anastas family.

Christy has been given asylum in the UK (still not a safe place from Islamists) and her family members  still live in Bethlehem.  Pray for them. 

Christy says in the Uppsala video that she was Christian by birth but one day she read the Bible and she became a different kind of Christian.  One that recognizes, for instance, as the Times of Israel reports, “I believe God has given this land to the Jews as an everlasting covenant.”

Like many Palestinian Christians, Christy’s family rejects what Christy now believes and speaks about Israel and the source of so much of the human rights violations of Palestinians.  This is not unusual from Palestinian Christians – some of whom are fearful for their own safety but also from some who are nominally Christian (born into a Christian family but not with a living faith relationship). 

Some get incensed over anyone making that distinction, but it is a reality that is never clearer than on ground in the disputed territories where denominationally-Christian Palestinians relate more to Islamists than to the international Church of believers in Jesus. 

This is also a distinction that CAMERA noted in their 2012 article about certain Palestinian speakers of the Christ at the Checkpoint conference.  In fact, I would recommend those who are interested in the recent controversy over Messianic Jewish participation in the CATC conference in 2014, read CAMERA’s report which contains many honest quotes from Palestinian Christians about the rock & the hard place they occupy.

The facts of matter and the truth are always important for honest people of faith to lay hold of. There are many resources in this short article to educate even those who do not know what the issues are.

ALSO IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK

Pray also for "Son of Hamas" Mosab Hassan Yousef.

Did you know when Abbas claimed that Hamas would recognize Israel, it was Mosab's father, an imam who is a spiritual founder of Hamas, who said , Oh no we won't! Hamas will never recognize Israel's right to exist.

One of the striking things that came out of the evidence of the Holy Land trial is how at the secretly wiretapped meeting of Islamists in America in a several day gathering in 1993, is how the men grappled with how to present themselves to appeal to the U.S. public without appearing to their own followers to be caving into core principles like never abandoning the cause of destroying Israel.  

When President Abbas threw out this claim that Hamas would recognize Israel simply as a political neutralizer of Israel saying a unity PA-Hamas govt ended any hope for a peace process, it was Sheik Hassan Youseff, speaking as the SPIRITUAL authoritative voice of Hamas who said what Hamas was going to do. 

I was reading Sunday in Barry and Batya Segal’s Jerusalem News Network email about this and my eyes locked on the name Hassan Youseff quoted from a UK newspaper, The Independent.  If you will remember, this is the father of Mosab Hassan Youseff, who is known as “The Green Prince” in Israel.  His book, “Son of Hamas” about his ten years as a spy for Israel was made into a movie which won awards a few months ago at the Sundance Film Festival. 

Could father and son be any more far apart?  Mosab was not a Christian at the time he was spying for Israel, but he saw in prison that Palestinians afflicted Palestinians more than Israelis did.  When he was released from prison he became a valuable asset for Israel’s counterterrorism because he wanted to stop terror attacks.  Later Mosab’s pursuit of justice and truth led him to become a Christian as well.

This week we have a Palestinian daughter and a Palestinian son who went against everyone they hold dear in order to stand in the truth.  Their influence cannot be truly measured. This is a clear call to pray for Palestinians to love the truth and follow it to the ultimate truth who is Yeshua/Jesus.