Tim Wildmon

AFA president

September 2006 – If you are not following what is going on in the Middle East closely, you should be. We could be on the brink of World War III, and our way of life here in America will be affected greatly should that happen.

I want to give you what I see happening with respect to Israel, also known as the Holy Land. The land of the Bible. Although I do not purport to understand everything, I do speak from much experience traveling in the Holy Land and working with both Jews and Arabs. So I have listened and learned from both sides.

The Jewish-Arab conflict goes back to Biblical times, but for the sake of this column I will start with the creation of modern day Israel in 1948 by the United Nations (U.N.). Prior to 1948 the British controlled the land known as Palestine, whose inhabitants were Arab. Today they are known as Palestinians. After World War II there was sympathy for the Jews, mainly by the Americans, because of the persecution they had suffered during the Holocaust when most estimates say there were six million Jews killed by the Nazis. So the British gave the land to the United Nations, and the U.N. created Israel for the Jews against the will of the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries.

Then the fighting began. The Arabs/Palestinians felt as if their land was being taken from them and the Jews felt as if they had no homeland and nowhere to go. The rich religious history of the Jews in Jerusalem and the fact that most Palestinians are Muslim only added to the problems. Jerusalem is the holiest city in the world for Jews. It is the third most holy city in the world to Muslims. In photos of Jerusalem, the most prominent feature is often the Dome of the Rock, a large gold-domed mosque built by the Muslims in A.D. 687 directly on top of Judaism’s most holy site, the Temple Mount. There is much, much more to this story, but this gives you a better understanding of why passions run so deeply on both sides.

The bottom line is, this is a fight over who controls what land. And peoples, tribes and countries have been fighting about who controls what land since time began.

As an aside, I always am amused when historians or left-wing political types speak out about the “white man” taking the land from the Native Americans in building this country and what an injustice that was. As if that was the first time in history such an “injustice” had ever been inflicted. I am not going to defend some of the wrongs that the whites committed along the way in dealing with the Indians, but you know what? The Native Americans were fighting other Native Americans who were fighting other Native Americans for land and territory long before the white man ever came on the scene. But that fact is rarely mentioned.

I wrote earlier that we are on the verge of another World War. If the Islamic terrorist organization Hezbollah – who provoked this latest situation by kidnaping and killing Israeli soldiers – decides to fire rockets into Tel Aviv, the largest city in Israel, I believe Israel will attack Syria and possibly Iran in an attempt both to cut off weapons those governments are providing Hezbollah and to punish those countries for supporting groups openly committed to the annihilation of Israel.

At that point America would have a decision to make. Help Israel militarily or let her go it alone against the same forces that seek the destruction of the Christian West, especially the U.S. But if we joined Israel, other Arab/Muslim countries might retaliate against the U.S. by cutting off our oil supply from that part of the world. And where would that leave our economy? With the increasing modernization of India and China, oil producing Middle Eastern countries are not so dependent on America buying their oil anymore anyway.

Probably the key element in understanding this crisis is not a political element at all. It is rather a human emotion: hatred. Hatred can be a powerful motivator. What Americans have a hard time coming to grips with is this: A large number of Muslims in these Middle Eastern countries hate both Jews and Christians, and there is nothing we can do about it. We are dogs and infidels. It is what fundamentalist Islam proclaims. So, they want to bring down Israel because it is Jewish and destroy America (The Great Satan) because we are largely a
Christian country.