October 7. On the Hebrew calendar, it was the 22nd of Tishri: a weekly Sabbath day, and also a yearly observance of Shemini Atzeret punctuating the seven-day festival of Sukkot. Religious Israeli Jews, along with visitors from around the world, were observing this sacred time to differing degrees. Others went about their business or pleasure. The morning headlines were about light injuries from a two-car traffic accident, religion’s “outsized role” in Israel, roles of Supreme Court judges, negotiations with the Saudis, relations with the Americans, and other typical international and local news. (When you visit Israel, you realize that everything in this tiny nation of fewer than 10 million people is local news.)

The world didn’t know it yet, but the news headlines were about to change.

Something was knocking out observation posts in the south. Something had cut and bulldozed through the fences, shot through on motorcycles and other vehicles, landed on boats, flew in on paragliders, and was moving thousands of dark figures toward houses.

That something was absolute evil—vicious, depraved, incomprehensible and inhuman.

The figures were clothed in combat boots, fatigues, headbands and tactical vests. They carried lighters, knives, automatic rifles, thousands of bullets, cameras and detailed maps. In contrast, the families in their homes wore weekend sandals and carried their children.

Suddenly, in the field, at the pedestrian crossing, at the community gate, in the garden, on the porch, in the living room, at the bedside of the aged, in the nursery, the evil was there.

What followed cannot be described as an act of war or terror. It was cold, vile, heartless, animalistic mass butchery.

Bullets pierced through windshields, residential doors and windows, through husbands, wives, grandparents, children, babies. The evil surrounded, restrained and bound the defenseless; beat, tortured, bludgeoned, and burned them alive; broadcasting online much of it for the world—especially their families—to watch. Help didn’t come. So many of the murderers took their time.

These beasts bragged about their “conquests,” “heroism” and “service,” and praised “Allah” as they shot people in their homes, broke legs, “dirtied” women, and decapitated babies. Their plans called for dozens to be taken hostage through the fences to a horrific place to be used as human shields, tortured, raped, murdered. Women, one lying dead, naked, facedown in a pickup truck with men sitting on her, another still bleeding down her legs after being violently raped, were paraded and broadcast as trophies.

Footage from a large music festival shows hundreds of people dancing shortly before streaks in the sky and paragliders appeared. The sound of gunfire erupts, and the revelers scatter, hundreds of them running terrified across open fields with no cover from their killers who machine-gunned them in their backs and raped some of the women next to their friends’ corpses before killing them as well. Those who fled to their vehicles were chased straight into more murderers who were waiting for them. The parking lot and the roads looked like a war zone—a war zone where one side was unsuspecting, unarmed and massacred.

The overwhelming majority of these concertgoers, grandmothers, fathers and mothers, children, nursing infants, babies in the womb all shared one thing in common: They were Jewish.

Evil on October 7 exterminated about 1,400 Jews. It was Israel’s 9/11 of Islamic terror (if 9/11 had killed not 3,000 Americans but 60,000). It appears to be the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and just as jolting, obscene, defiling and wicked.

Where does this specific strain of evil come from?

Behind Hamas

The perpetrators infected by this bloodlust belong to the terrorist organization known as Hamas. After Israel unilaterally evacuated the southern Israeli territory of Gaza in 2005, Hamas murdered its rival Palestinians and took over Gaza in 2007, tightly controlling its people and using its position to launch terror attacks against Israel, including short-lived wars in 2008, 2012 and 2014 and violence in 2021, 2022 and earlier this year.

As people around the world were still struggling to believe the nature of what was happening in Israel, Hamas spokesmen bragged online and on international network television that they had recently restrained their attacks, negotiating with the Israelis on issues like permits for Palestinians to work in Israel proper and accommodations for improving the lives of Gazans. They were lulling the Israelis into complacency, even as they dried up Gazans’ water supplies by digging up pipes to convert into rockets.

How could this happen? How could they achieve this much carnage? Because Hamas steals resources from its people to kill Jews, Israel and even Egypt have kept the territory blockaded. It was and is completely unable to fulfill its bloody ambitions without help from outside.

But it does have help from outside.

Make no mistake: Hamas has help, from Iran.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran’s elite militant-terrorist organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, met with leaders from Hamas and from Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 2, and “senior members” from both groups stated that the purpose of the meeting was to refine the details of the massacre. Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad told bbc that Hamas “had direct backing for the attack from Iran.”

On October 3, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made this public threat against Israel: “The usurper regime is coming to an end. Today, the Palestinian movement is more alive than it has ever been during these 70 or 80 years. Today, the Palestinian youth and the Palestinian movement, the anti-occupation, anti-oppression, anti-Zionism movement, is more energetic, more alive, and more prepared than ever, and you can see this. And God willing, this movement will achieve its goals. The honorable Imam, may God be pleased with him, described, the usurper regime as a cancer. This cancer will definitely be eradicated, God willing, at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.”

Characterizing Israel and Jews as “cancer” is the kind of hate-saturated evil that constantly issues from Khamenei and his regime. Their regime has supported terrorism since the day it usurped power in 1979. It supplies Hamas with millions of dollars, smuggles in weapons, surely including machine guns and rockets used to murder and terrorize Israelis in October. Where does Hamas get its training—not just for fighting Israeli soldiers or police but also for killing families? From Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Iran revels in the same religion, the same overall ideology, the same ambitions and the same evil. It takes as full a part as it can in the murder, torture and terrorizing of its enemies, especially Jews.

Iran is a fanatical religious regime, an enemy to Europe and North America, economically smaller than Colorado, and the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. Iran is the power behind Hamas, but who is the power behind Iran?

Behind Iran

Comparing October 7 to Sept. 11, 20o1, is chilling, not only because both are remembered for radical Islamists murdering Americans and Jews, but also because the evil in Israel this October traces back to an evil that occurred this September. On the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the United States government announced that it was unfreezing an incredible $6 billion for Iran to pay for hostages.

Many people were outraged. It was shocking that the Obama-Biden regime would pay for hostages, and that it would pay so much. Biden could have picked any day to announce it, but he went out of his way to give billions of dollars to the number one sponsor of Islamic terrorism on the anniversary of the largest, most savage, most evil Islamist terrorist attack in U.S. history. Biden made some comments about it being used by the Iranians for “humanitarian purposes,” but even Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that “the Iranians have always found ways to use money, whether there are sanctions or not, for military purposes.” And in Iran, “military purposes” also means “terrorist purposes” and “mass murder purposes.”

“[T]his money belongs to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said publicly, “and naturally, we will decide … to spend it wherever we need it. … ‘Humanitarian’ means whatever the Iranian people need, so this money will be budgeted for those needs. And the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government.”

After Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, which traced straight back to Iran, Biden’s regime attempted to deflect blame from the Iranians. Biden’s State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense and other agencies not only supposedly failed to see this coming but after the fact denied that Iran was directly involved. And Biden tried to push through the $6 billion transfer anyway, while Israeli homes were still stained with blood! This would be in addition to the $235 million it had given the Palestinians in “humanitarian aid,” reversing a policy from Donald Trump’s presidency.

This means that the Hamas militants rampaging through Jewish children’s bedrooms were ultimately equipped, armed and trained not only by Iranian cash but by American cash.

During one of the most horrific instances of radical Islamic terror in a generation, Biden continued to try to provide political cover and to send billions of dollars straight to the world’s worst terrorists!

The facts are clear: Biden and the U.S. are openly supporting Iran at the very time that it has helped perpetrate hundreds of abductions, rapes, stabbings, shootings, beheadings and burnings—right when things like the charred corpse of a woman hugging a child are paraded before the eyes of the world. Without cover from America, Iran could never have done this!

How deadly, how far and how deep does this evil go? You have to see past Joe Biden, who is known not to be in charge of his illegitimate presidency. Who controls Biden? Who controls America?

Behind Biden

Think back to what was happening in the early 2000s: Sanctions were crippling the Iranian regime. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were on the ground and in the air in Afghanistan directly to the east and Iraq to the west.

Then Barack Obama, promising to fundamentally transform America, swept into power.

Look back at the Philadelphia Trumpet issues from those years (theTrumpet.com/trumpet_issues). When Obama was first elected, we wrote that he was likely no different from any other deeply misguided leftist politician.

In summer 2009, experts were musing on how the new president was raising eyebrows here and there with his first major Middle East trip and foreign-policy speech. But our August 2009 cover story characterized it this way: “President Obama’s Cairo Speech: How It Will Shake the Nations.” Obama had called for the U.S. to stop restraining Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons and for Israel not to intervene. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry warned that Obama’s words were not just surprising or empty but that they “will cause deadly problems.”

Obama went on to enable the Iranian terrorist regime to free itself of U.S. and Western sanctions. When protests and regime change swept the region in 2011, he helped depose the U.S.-friendly regime in Egypt but helped save the Iranian regime! Then he created and ramrodded through something Americans and people around the world never called for or expected: a “nuclear deal” to provide financial and political power to the mullahs and an eventual pathway to nuclear weapons.

In 2016, Americans elected Donald Trump, who opposed Iran, supported Israel, and terminated the insane nuclear deal. But in 2021 Biden was installed as president, and you see Barack Obama’s fingerprints all over his foreign policy.

America’s relationship with Iran and with Israel is not motivated by naivety, practicality or stupidity. It is motivated by a very intelligent, targeted, active evil.

Blot Out Israel

Look around you. At this point, the good is getting very weak, and the evil is getting very strong. This same evil force is active domestically. It is targeting political opponents and “fundamentally transforming” elections, courts, liberties, the economy, the military, the spy agencies, immigration, foreign policy and security.

This is true not only within the United States but also within the State of Israel. There is a reason why these two countries that you might think would be very different are very much the same in their fundamental beliefs and virtues. And there is a reason why the evil is attacking each of them using similar tactics in both cases. The figure orchestrating America’s destruction is attacking Israel for similar reasons.

The United States and Israel are indeed brother nations. They descend from the ancient nation of Israel, which had a history with God! That is why they are under spiritual, ideological, political, economic and physical attack.

Why such hatred for Jews? Why such hatred for the parts of Israeli society that trace back to virtue and to God? Why such hatred for the parts of American society that trace back to the Bible?

Because evil exists, it is strong, it is overwhelming, and it is murderously obsessed with eradicating good!

The good comes from God. He has intervened throughout human history, largely through the ancient Israelites and the modern nations of Israel. Why? Not as favoritism to the Israelites, but as part of His plan for the good of the whole world!

What we are now seeing is part of an enormous battle between the ultimate good and the ultimate evil.

This is why people rage with hate for Jews. This is why people who see anti-Jew demonstrators in Western cities and think that slapping them on the wrist is enough are dreadfully wrong. Those people celebrated not the lives of the Palestinians but the bloody, grotesque deaths of the Jews. The same spirit prevailed in “sophisticated” Europe on the outbound rail platforms of Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, Poland and the inbound stations in Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Jasenovac, Majdanek, Treblinka. And World War ii was not the only Holocaust of Jews.

That same inexplicable, inexorable, evil spirit was there in the Inquisition, in the emperors of Rome, in Antiochus and the Seleucids, in Haman and the Persians, indeed throughout history.

We must realize what we are dealing with. October 7 is only the tip of the iceberg of what has gone before, and what is coming next.

Specific Prophecies

A prophecy in 2 Kings 14:26-27 illuminates what is happening: “For the Lord saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very bitter: for there was not any shut up, nor any left, nor any helper for Israel. And the Lord said not that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven: but he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam the son of Joash.”

Gerald Flurry wrote The King of the South—a booklet that exposed Iran’s role in end-time events—as far back as 1992, which shows astonishing prophetic insight. This year, he updated it and expanded it at a time when anything but radical Islam was dominating world headlines. The booklet states: “A man tried to blot out the name of Israel—a very satanic goal. Satan hates everything God is about and wants to destroy it every way he can. But this passage shows that anciently, God stopped this from happening—and He did so through King Jeroboam ii. … History is repeating itself today. Just what is the prophetic name of Israel? In our day, the emphasis is on three physical nations of Israel: America, Britain and the Jewish nation in the Middle East.

“Iran’s mullahs publicly say they want to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’ That is another way of saying they want to ‘blot out the name of Israel from under heaven’!

“Why … would an American president align with these murderers? And why implement a deal that virtually guarantees Iran becomes a nuclear power?

“This prophetic passage in 2 Kings 14 explains. President Obama shares the goal to ‘blot out the name of Israel’!”

The news coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas focuses on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, but the real battle is between a man trying to destroy America, Britain and Israel and a man trying to save these unique nations! And behind it all is a very murderous spirit being.

“[Obama] was implying,” Mr. Flurry wrote in his 2020 article “The Barack Obama Mystery,” “You take care of the Jews and we’ll take care of America. We’ll ‘blot out the name of Israel from under heaven’ by transforming America into a socialist state our founders wouldn’t recognize. He wants to destroy everything good in America and to fundamentally change the nation into a Marxist dictatorship.”

The Gaza war proves this assessment correct. And it shows what it means to “blot out the name of Israel from under heaven.” Obama is not trying to foster peace in the Mideast. He supports Iran and the Palestinians because he shares their goal of driving Israelis into the sea.

There is good news in all this, however. As 2 Kings 14 brings out, God sees this attempt to “blot out” Israel. The Jewish state and other modern nations of Israel are tools God has used and will use to help bring all mankind to Him. He will not let evil blot out the name of Israel. He has chosen these nations, and no evil, however powerful, can stop Him.

Because the Jewish state and modern Israelites around the world have themselves succumbed to evils, turned away from God and refused to hear His warnings, they are heading into a terrible time when evil will rampage inside the homes and cities of America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa and beyond. The violence, nuclear and handmade, will spread to all nations around the world. October 7 was a bitter foretaste.

But the reason that evil has targeted the Jews and the rest of the nations of Israel is the very same reason why there is hope! The Creator of mankind does love His creation. He does have a plan for the Jewish people, the modern Israelites, and people around the world, young and old, friends and enemies, living and dead. And it will unfold from Jerusalem, from Israel and spread around the world.

You must watch Israel. You must watch Jerusalem. In so doing, you will see more bloodshed, but you will see evil overthrown with overwhelming force from that very city.