Although it’s still not clear exactly who’s responsible for the massive terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, there’s little doubt as to who the terrorists were going after: “The murderers expressly went after Britons, Americans and Jews,” reported Spiegel yesterday.

That’s a vital piece of information. Who, after all, do you think would want to target innocent Americans, British and Jews? You guessed it: Islamic terrorists.

And that’s why India is pointing its finger at Pakistan, the failed state next door that is riddled with Islamic terrorists—and that has, ironically, been a major recipient (to the tune of $10 billion) of American largesse and a primary staging ground in America’s war against terror since 9/11. Spiegel continued,

The uncomfortable resonance left behind by the series of attacks is that the criminals were almost omnipotent: They could strike where, when and—almost—whomever they wanted. …The terror struck a country that is closely allied, politically and economically, with the West. The terrorists’ mission can be neatly summarized: political, economic and cultural destabilization of the whole subcontinent.

In the wake of the tragedy, the Indian government is being forced to ask some hard questions and perform a cost-benefit analysis of its relationship with America and the West. Clearly these terrorists were after Westerners inside India, almost assuredly in an effort to undermine the Indian government’s alliance with America and the West. In all likelihood the Indian government’s response will largely be determined by America and the West’s response.

Should Washington and the West offer little more than condolences, and not choose to go after Islamic terrorism in Pakistan and bring Pakistan back from the brink of chaos, India will likely be forced to reposition itself in an alliance with a state, perhaps China, or Russia, that will be more inclined and capable of defending Indian interests.

One thing is for sure: The world, including both the Indian government and Islamic terrorists, is keenly observing America’s response to last week’s attacks in Mumbai.

Global Economic Crisis Winner: Europe

“As Financial Crisis Grows, EU Emerges Stronger,” headlined Spiegel on Thursday.

The global financial crisis creates new losers each day. So far, though, the EU is looking like a winner. For many countries along the continent’s northern edge, euro-skepticism is a luxury they can no longer afford. …Will anything be left standing after the financial crisis? The EU and its currency are among the few winners.

After a year when the Lisbon Treaty was rejected by Ireland and Europe appeared weak in its response to Russia’s attack on Georgia, the response by Eurocrats to the economic crisis “has had the effect of breathing new life into a bloc that just a couple months ago looked deflated and defeated,” Spiegel wrote.

Countries all over the bloc are leaning on Brussels for help and praising it for its efforts. Polls in economically ravaged Ireland now show that the majority would pass the Lisbon Treaty if given another chance.

Another big winner has been the euro. In light of the American dollar’s reputation being tarnished, Europe’s single currency has emerged as something of a safe haven for investors. Denmark suddenly says it wants to adopt the currency in order to benefit from its “political and economical stability.” Iceland, which has been severely rocked by the economic crisis, is witnessing a rapid surge in public support for the euro.

Spiegel’s article concludes, “Europe’s dream of ever-closer union might happen sooner than we think.”

We have been expecting just such news to emerge from Europe—not just since the recent economic downturn, but actually for decades. Why? Because, based on history and biblical prophecy, Herbert W. Armstrong forecast that it would be economic troubles—originating in the U.S. and making their way to the shores of the Continent—that would spark unification among European nations. Read this article for background on this astounding prophecy.

A Gloomy Black Friday

The International Herald Tribune is reporting that the holiday shopping season got off to a slow start. Early results from the “Black Friday” weekend—the weekend in which most retailers are said to finally turn a profit for the year—indicate that U.S. consumers might finally be cutting back. After adjusting for inflation, Thanksgiving weekend sales were flat, the first time they have not increased year over year since data was collected in the early 1990s.

Added to that, as the Associated Press noted on Friday, any Black Friday boost “won’t be enough to stave off what’s likely to become the next economic crisis”—mall foreclosures. “We’re living at what may be the beginning of the end of mallworld as we know it,” wrote the Washington Post.

“The worst-case scenario goes something like this: With banks unwilling to refinance, a shopping center goes into foreclosure. Nobody can buy the mall because banks won’t write mortgages as long as investors won’t purchase them,” explained the Associated Press.

“Everything’s connected, like a game of Jenga,” the Post noted.

Car Dealerships Reeling

If something is to be done to fix Detroit’s big three, it had better happen fast because its car dealerships are going out of business almost as fast as the manufacturers themselves. And the economy is beginning to feel it. The International Herald Tribunewrites,

The National Automobile Dealers Association predicts that roughly 900 of the nation’s 20,770 new-car dealers will go out of business this year, and automobile analysts say the number of failed dealerships could rise into the thousands next year.

The economic toll of a mass failure of dealerships around the country has already begun to harm the broader economy:

In October alone, 20,000 employees of auto dealerships lost their jobs nationwide, more than half of those who were newly unemployed in the retail trade, according to the Labor Department. … The auto dealers association estimates that new-car dealers produce a $54 billion annual payroll for 1.1 million workers and nearly 20 percent of the retail sales and sales taxes in small and large communities alike.

The auto industry is just the latest victim of a dying American manufacturing industry. You can read about the demise and the consequences for America here.

A New, New Deal Won’t Work

As America implements another New Deal to solve its economic woes, it’s worth evaluating the first one.

The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America’s biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending—President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt—unemployment was 17.2 percent.

These facts are relayed by George Will in his column today. He further writes,

“I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started,” lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.In “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve’s tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. …In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries.

The Roosevelt administration’s interventionist approach significantly stripped the economy of some of its natural predictability and made decision-making very difficult for private investors, which exacerbated a certain paralysis. We see a similar dynamic at work today, as the government decides—with no predictable logic—which companies to bail out and which to let die. Will quotes Russell Roberts of George Mason University as saying,

By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next.

Will the change in government help matters? The president-elect says he wants to give another stimulus that will “jolt” the economy. And with more and more American businesses and individuals crying out for relief, there seems to be the stomach for broad, massive government intervention. The fact that President-elect Obama has bemoaned the fact that “the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society” would strongly suggest that he is ready to engineer just such “economic justice.”

Read this past week’s column, “The Welfare State Spreads,” to understand the danger behind such thinking.

Media in Bed With the President-Elect

There’s little doubt the media’s infatuation with Barack Obama served him well throughout the presidential election campaign. The question now, says Alan Nathan in the Washington Times, is “how can the blushing news media keep from sharing President-elect Barack Obama’s political bed—given they have already serviced his electoral needs?”

Among the evidence exposing the media’s central role in Obama’s election was this study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, reported on the Pew website October 22. Clearly the media’s refusal to put Mr. Obama or his campaign under the microscope while they scrutinized and undermined the McCain campaign equipped Obama with significant advantages in the election.

It’s those advantages we should be concerned about when Mr. Obama takes the Oval Office in January, says Nathan, because when facts are not presented honestly and “universal standards of neutrality” aren’t applied in the reporting of news, “the public naturally becomes more propagandized than informed” (emphasis ours).

Nathan raises a noteworthy point, especially in the context of the national discussion currently raging about Barack Obama’s proclivity for big government and tendencies towards socialism. History shows that a successful socialist regime is nearly always underpinned by a staunch symbiotic relationship between the media and the government.

Good Students—in a Bad System

Joseph Epstein has an interesting piece in this week’s Weekly Standard about how the people being chosen for positions in the Obama administration were all top-of-the-class students in America’s most prestigious universities. Drawing on his 30 years as a university professor, Epstein writes,

My sense of the good student is that, while in class, he really has only one pertinent question, which is, What does this guy, his professor at the moment, want? Whatever it is—a good dose of liberalism, libertarianism, feminism, conservatism—he gives it to him, in exchange for another A to slip into his backpack ….

And what sorts of ideas do these professors want from their students? The best name brands in education have become incubators of failed thinking. Epstein continues,

[T]he putatively best of American colleges have rushed to take on the worst of intellectual freight. Behind the much-vaunted notion of diversity in contemporary universities is the attempt to make sure that no corpus of bad ideas isn’t amply represented. In this attempt, the top universities have succeeded admirably.The problem set for the good student, then, is to negotiate his way through this bramble of bad ideas. My son, who went to Stanford, told me at the time that a not uncommon opening session in some of his classes was for a professor to announce that he was going to teach his course from the Marxist (or feminist or new historicist or Foucauldian) point of view, but he wanted the students to know that everyone in class was entirely free to disagree with him, and indeed he encouraged strong disagreement. My son was the boy who, from the back of the room, could be heard faintly muttering, “Yeah, sure, for a B-.”I did my teaching at Northwestern University, where most of the students had what I came to regard as “the habits of achievement.” They did the reading, most of them could write a respectable paper, many of them talked decently in response to my questions. They made it difficult for me to give them less than a B for the course. But the only students who genuinely interested me went beyond being good students to become passionate ones. Their minds, I could tell, were engaged upon more than merely getting another high grade. The number of such students was remarkably small; if I had to pin it down, I should say they comprised well under 3 percent, and not all of them received A’s from me.Meanwhile our good student, resembling no one so much as that Italian character in Catch-22 who claimed to have flourished under the fascists, then flourished under the Communists, and was confident he would also flourish under the Americans, treks on his merry way. From Yale to Harvard Law School, or Harvard to Yale Law School, or to one of the highly regarded (and content empty) business schools, he goes, as the Victorians had it, from strength to strength.In recent years I have come to think that some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools: Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spitzer, Mr. and Mrs. William Clinton, and countless others. And why not, since these institutions serve as the grandest receptacles in the land for our good students: those clever, sometimes brilliant, but rarely deep young men and women who, joining furious drive to burning if ultimately empty ambition, will do anything to get ahead.

As Herbert W. Armstrong often said, our world is a product of our educational system. Our failures as a society are directly traceable to the erroneous instruction we are giving our young people. For another look at how dangerous some of today’s educators truly are, read this recent column. And for a look at how this trend will be reversed, read Education With Vision.

Russia Applauds U.S. Decision

The U.S. has backed away from its plan to initiate ex-Soviet states Georgia and Ukraine into nato, much to Russia’s delight. Britain has also said it is looking for an alternative to the proposed Membership Action Plan. Russia applauded the news this week.

“I am satisfied common sense prevailed,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told reporters. “Whatever the reasons, European pressure or whatever else, the main thing is that they [Washington] no longer push ahead with their previous ferociousness and senselessness.”

In another article in Spiegel this week, Germany also voiced its continued resistance to U.S. plans for nato’s expansion. Angela Merkel said the time is “not yet ripe” for Georgia and Ukraine to join nato.

This squares exactly with what we have been writing in recent months: “Russia and Germany are cunningly undermining and systematically dismantling nato! The demise of this American-led security alliance, the rise of a resurgent Russia, the newly forming European superpower, and the imminent emergence of a new Russo-German pact all are evidence that a major shifting of geopolitical tectonic plates is currently under way.”

Why Give Up the Golan for Nothing?

Following Israel’s move to release another 250 prisoners, outgoing mayor of Jerusalem Uri Lupolianski said that Isreali Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is trying to split the city. Even U.S. President George Bush is concerned Israel is giving too much away.

“Why do you want to give Assad the Golan for nothing?” Mr. Bush asked Olmert, according to Haaretz.

“It’s not for nothing,” replied Olmert. “It’s in exchange for a change in the region’s strategic alignment.”

“Why should you believe him?” replied Mr. Bush.

At the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick also weighs in on Olmert’s intention to give away something for nothing in return:

Last week the Prime Minister’s Office leaked a classified document to Haaretz which detailed the view of senior military brass that Israel should give the Golan Heights to Iran’s best Arab friend Syria. By placing its national security in the hands of Iran’s Arab proxy, the General Staff claims absurdly that Israel will be better off because Assad will disavow the very ties to Iran to which he owes Israel’s willingness to give him the Golan Heights.

To learn more about where this strategy will lead, read Jerusalem in Prophecy.

How the UN “Celebrates” Israel’s Birth

Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the United Nations’ decision to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. But instead of celebrating the move, the UN today uses the anniversary as a platform to spew its hateful, anti-Israel bias.

This year, UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann accused Israel of being an apartheid state and called for countries to consider boycotting Israel, until peace is achieved. He also called for the international community to impose sanctions on Israel.

The General Assembly went on to adopt six anti-Israel resolutions, two of which related directly to Jerusalem. One of these resolutions maintained that Israel’s treatment of Jerusalem as its undivided capital is illegal. The other expressed unhappiness with Israel’s attempts to control Jerusalem. Another resolution condemned Israel’s “occupation” of the Golan Heights.

An overwhelming majority of over 100 nations approved each resolution, with only eight countries, including Israel and the U.S., voting against them.

Elsewhere on the Web

Last week, news emerged that Israel had found another friend to help with its defense. Working in secret, Israel and Germany have developed a nuclear missile detection system. A short-term alliance between Israel and Germany is something we have been prophesying for some time. For more information on how history and prophecy point to this event, see Jerusalem in Prophecy.

The Times says that British expatriates are fleeing South Africa in droves as political, social and economic fears escalate. “Over the past 12 months we have seen a 210 percent increase in the number of clients moving funds out of the South African rand and back to the UK,” says James Hickman, of Caxton FX.

This week Vatican officials announced that Pope Benedict xvi may visit Jerusalem next year. According to Reuters, the Vatican “hopes a papal trip can help political and religious dialogue aimed at a comprehensive Middle East peace.” Both sides hope that this visit will ease the tension between Israel and the Vatican over the issue of the possible beatification of Pope Pius xii, the pope who presided over the Catholic Church during World War ii.

And Finally …

In search of low Black Friday prices, rabid shoppers at one Long Island Wal-Mart rammed through the doors and then trampled workers, one of whom died: “He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said co-worker Jimmy Overby. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too. … I literally had to fight people off my back.” If people will explode like this over discount plasma TVs, imagine what will happen when the food runs out.