The Weekend Web
Soon-to-be President Barack Obama, who campaigned on the themes of “change” and “hope,” has set an extraordinarily high bar for himself. As he prepares for his first day in office on Tuesday, most Americans, according to a recent poll, seem confident he can follow through on his grandiose promises and fix the nation’s mammoth-sized problems—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic meltdown, unemployment, health care, etc. The optimism even cuts across party lines. According to the New York Times/CBS News Poll,
Overwhelming majorities say they think that Obama will be a good president, that he will bring real change to Washington, and that he will make the right decisions on the economy, Iraq, dealing with the conflict in the Middle East and protecting the country from terrorist attacks.
Those are lofty expectations, which leaves us wondering how long the honeymoon will last.
Change is certainly coming to Washington, but it won’t fix America’s ruined economy or bring victory in the war against radical Islam. As Joel Hilliker recently wrote, “We can expect events swiftly to expose the fact that no mortal man—even one assuming the highest office in the world’s most powerful country—could ever fulfill the hope that people have invested in this individual.”
Jeremiah 17 says it is a curse when we place our faith and hope in men. God says there is no hope in man.
But there is, in fact, hope for a better tomorrow! Read The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like and learn about the new world government that will soon be established on Earth.
Arab World “Cripplingly Divided”
Israel’s three-week war with Hamas has shed additional light on the deepening division that exists across the Arab world. One reason Arab governments were unable to reach a general consensus on the Gaza war, the New York Times wrote yesterday, is this (emphasis mine throughout):
Most Arab regimes are terrified of Islamist movements like Hamas, which represent the greatest threat to their legitimacy. Many, including Egypt and Jordan, face challenges at home from their own popular versions of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s ideological parent. Most Arab leaders are also reluctant to provoke the United States and Israel (with which Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties).
As we have written before, Psalm 83:1-8 and Daniel 11:40-42 show that there will be two distinct camps in the Islamic world in these latter days. One is headed by the Islamic Republic of Iran—the number-one state sponsor of terror. The other camp stands against this Iran-led “king of the south” and later forms an alliance with the German-led European Union.
Iran, in other words, is the principle cause of division. Inter-Arab tensions, the Times continues,
are not just about Gaza, or relations with the West, or even personal disputes. Many Arab leaders believe that Iran is aiming to become the dominant power in Middle East, and is using the Palestinian issue to batter its rivals through Hamas, its client.”What’s happening in Gaza is dangerous on its own, but also dangerous in its implications,” said a Jordanian official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue. “Iran is interested in prolonging the violence, because that would help it to mobilize the Arab street and turn people here against their governments.”
This is why Iran has repeatedly ordered Hamas not to agree to a ceasefire with Israel. At the Iran-led summit in Doha on Friday, Hamas’s Damascus-based exiled leader Khaled Meshaal said, “I assure you, despite all the destruction in Gaza, we will not accept Israel’s conditions for a ceasefire.”
Yesterday, after Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire, Hamas said it would keep fighting until Israel left Gaza and opened all the border crossings.
Meanwhile, Arab governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan—all of which refused to attend the Doha summit—are worried that Hamas will now enjoy a surge of popularity throughout the Arab world, not unlike Hezbollah after the Second Lebanon War. That war, the Times continued,
strengthened Hezbollah politically, and the group now seems likely to win a majority in the parliamentary elections later this year, a pivotal development. Many people in Lebanon fear that the current war could bring similar new strength to Hamas, even as it inflicts political damage on its foes in the Arab world.”It may take some time, but Hamas will take over the West Bank,” said Sarkis Naoum, a political columnist for the Beirut newspaper Al Nahar.
We have been saying these things for years. For our most recent analysis, read Friday’s column, “Israel’s Gift to Hamas.”
Hamas’s Dead Baby Strategy
The Hamas “dead baby” strategy of causing as many civilian casualties by firing rockets and taking cover behind human shields, often in densely populated places like schools and hospitals, is producing understandable outrage around the world, wrote Alan Dershowitz Friday.
Problem is, the “outrage is directed against Israel, which is a victim of this strategy, rather than against Hamas, which is its perpetrator.”
It’s a simple strategy: Surround yourself with old men, young children and pregnant women; set up a launcher; fire a rocket into Israel; then hope and pray Israel retaliates by bombing the site from where the rocket was launched. After that, the bbc and its mainstream media counterparts will complete the strategy, spreading images of the dead Palestinians around the world, inciting the Muslim street and duping the Western world into lambasting Israel for its “war crimes” against “innocent” Gazan civilians.
It’s a successful strategy. So successful, in fact, as Dershowitz notes, that it has also been employed in southern Lebanon and by the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Unless the “dead baby” strategy is exposed and rejected, Dershowitz says, “it’s coming to a theater (or school or hospital) near you.”
European Members Shirking NATO Duties
Britain’s defense chief John Hutton criticized nato’s European members last week for not pulling their weight in Afghanistan and warned that nato could risk irrelevance. According to the Washington Post, Mr. Hutton said, “The campaign in Afghanistan is evidence of the limited appetite amongst some European member states for supporting the most active operation nato has ever been tasked with. … Freeloading on the back of U.S. military security is not an option if we wish to be equal partners in this trans-Atlantic alliance.”
It was “the most outspoken a senior British minister has been in the row threatening to tear nato apart,” according to the Sun.
The U.S., which has repeatedly petitioned European members to increase their contributions to the effort in Afghanistan, has contributed the bulk of the soldiers and funds—with the strongest support coming from nations like Britain and Canada. According to the New York Post, “nato likes to advertise that it has over 50,000 troops in Afghanistan, but more than 30,000 of those are U.S. forces.”
In November, the Telegraph wrote, “Success in Afghanistan is now the principal test of nato’s relevance in post-Cold War age.”
The New York Post indicated that the commitment of the Germans, Italians and French needs to match their rhetoric—and that Germany, in particular, needs to take a more active role in the future.
As we have repeatedly warned, Germany will soon take a more active role in world affairs—but definitely not to the advantage of nato. It won’t be long before natois irrelevant—replaced by a much more aggressive Euroforce, with Germany at its helm.
Germans Worried About Future
Germans are more worried about the future than their European neighbors according to a new Eurobarometer study. As reported by Spiegel, the survey found that
57 percent of German citizens believe the economic situation in their own country will get worse, compared to 51 percent of Europeans as a whole. Regarding the economic prospects for the European Union, 47 percent of Germans believe the situation will worsen. Forty-one percent of Europeans as a whole share their view.
When asked if they thought the lives of their children would be harder than their own, 73 percent of Germans said yes, compared to 62 percent of Europeans. Interestingly, the survey was taken just before Germany was hit hard by the global economic crisis.
Germans were optimistic about a couple of things—namely, their trust in the German system and the European Union. There is a 64 percent approval rate for the EU in Germany as compared to the average among other EU nations of 53 percent. European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen believes this shows that Germans believe they have “a special responsibility for Europe because of its history and because of its role as the largest and economically strongest member state.”
Germany has long had a “reputation of being an angst-ridden nation,” wrote Spiegel, and the “new European Union-wide survey has confirmed that the stereotype does have some basis in reality.”
We have previously quoted author Luigi Barzini, long-time observer of Germany, who asked, “What is the German mood? Are they happy, as happy as human beings can reasonably be? (It is when they are disconcerted and fretful that they can be most dangerous).”
The Little-Known World of Forced Abortions
According to a new study, many women are being pressured by husbands, boyfriends, parents, employers, health-care professionals—even pastors—to abort their babies. The Washington Times reports,
45 percent of men interviewed at abortion clinics said they urged abortion, including 37 percent of married men …. Women are often threatened by male companions who take them to their abortion appointment, according to eyewitness accounts at abortion clinics. And women are also encouraged to abort their fetus by the staff at these clinics who have a vested interest in selling the procedure.Pressure to abort can consist of badgering a pregnant woman until she concedes, intimidation, blackmail and even violence. An astounding 64 percent of women say they were intensely pressured to abort their fetus ….
Abortion in America, like in much of the world, has come to be seen as a run-of-the-mill procedure, a form of contraception—especially, it seems, by parties other than the mother carrying her unborn child. “Yet, despite the growing body of evidence on the issue of forced abortions,” the Times says, “little headway has been made in protecting women.”
For God’s perspective on the subject of abortion, read what Ron Fraser wrote here. Also, download Herbert W. Armstrong’s The Missing Dimension in Sex.
Paying a Heavy Price in Ireland
“What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland?” runs a joke in European financial circles. The punchline: “One letter and about six months.” Iceland’s economy collapsed several months ago, and now many fear that Ireland is going the same way. In September, Ireland became the first EU nation to officially enter recession. Standard & Poor’s downgraded Ireland’s debt rating from stable to negative last week.
Proposed spending cuts have brought teachers and pensioners onto the streets in protest, and the government’s popularity has sunk to an all-time low.
What went wrong? Irish President Mary McAleese has a very good explanation: “Somewhere along the line, we began to think that we weren’t happy with deferred gratification. We had to have it now and in this moment, and I think we have paid a very, very big price for this radical shift.”
The European Central Bank (ecb) could be ready to step in and help. This week the ecb slashed interest rates to try and help the eurozone’s economies. It could do more, according to the Financial Times, but only if eurozone governments surrender some of their powers to the ecb.
As countries like Ireland struggle to gain their financial footing, watch for the ecb to seize its opportunities for grabbing power. See our article “Did the Holy Roman Empire Plan the Greek Crisis?”
Elsewhere on the Web
“A suicide attack in the heavily patrolled diplomatic district of Kabul has killed two people and rattled nerves at the German Embassy and U.S. military base Camp Eggers,” reported Spiegel today. This attack is not only a reminder of the renewed presence and power of Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, it reveals their willingness to attack every Western opponent, not just American forces.
Iranian cleric Ahmad Jannati, personally selected by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as head of the Iranian Council of Guardians, called for Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s head during prayers Friday: “Every time the picture of this woman is shown,” he said, “I really wish that somebody would expend a bullet on her.” He also took a preliminary swipe at President-elect Obama: “The world is on a slope of collapse. One is shocked when a president sits, smiles and says, My concern is to find a dog for my daughter. Shame on you and those who voted for you.”
Federal prosecutors say the Islamic Society of North America has ties to Hamas. Still, its president, Ingrid Mattson, spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and will again speak at the inaugural prayer service for President-elect Obama at Washington’s National Cathedral.
The UK government is set to announce its biggest bank bailout yet tomorrow. Prime Minister Gordon Brown believes some banks have deliberately concealed the scale of their bad assets. According to the Daily Mail, taxpayers will be left exposed to an additional £200 billion in potential losses under the biggest government bailout yet for Britain’s banks. Vicky Redwood from Capital Economics said: “We’re going to face a staggering amount of bank losses over the next two or three years as the full impact of the recession is felt and we see household defaults on their debt rise, unemployment rise and corporate debt defaults rise too. And so, in total, banks could be facing billions of pounds of bad debts.”
On January 16, Italy’s rabbis declared they would not attend the annual celebration of Judaism organized by the Catholic Church in the Vatican the next day. The chief rabbi of Venice, Elia Enrico Richetti, cited the pope’s decision to restore a prayer for the conversion of Jews deemed offensive to Jews in Easter Week services of the old Latin Mass. “If we add to this the recent positions taken by the pope about dialogue, said to be useless because the superiority of the Christian faith is proven anyway, then it’s evident that we’re heading toward the cancellation of the last 50 years of church history,” he wrote.
Zenit has some good information here about the many benefits in a traditional family.
And Finally …
As noted at Power Line, Minority Leader John Boehner recently circulated an e-mail about the House Democrats’ incomprehensible $825 billion spend-your-way-out-of-bankruptcy package. Boehner listed 12 “fun facts” about the bill:
1. The House Democrats’ bill will cost each and every household $6,700 additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.
2. The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.
3. President-elect Obama has said that his proposed stimulus legislation will create or save 3 million jobs. This means that this legislation will spend about $275,000 per job. The average household income in the U.S. is $50,000 a year.
4. The House Democrats’ bill provides enough spending—$825 billion—to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700.
5. $825 billion is enough to give every person living in poverty in the U.S. $22,000.
6. $825 billion is enough to give every person in Ohio $72,000.
7. Although the House Democrats’ proposal has been billed as a transportation and infrastructure investment package, in actuality only $30 billion of the bill—or 3 percent—is for road and highway spending. A recent study from the Congressional Budget Office said that only 25 percent of infrastructure dollars can be spent in the first year, making the one year total less than $7 billion for infrastructure.
8. Much of the funding within the House Democrats’ proposal will go to programs that already have large, unexpended balances. For example, the bill provides $1 billion for Community Development Block Grants (cdbg), which already have $16 billion on hand. And, this year, Congress has plans to rescind $9 billion in highway funding that the states have not yet used.
9. In 1993, the unemployment rate was virtually the same as the rate today (around seven percent). Yet, then-President Clinton’s proposed stimulus legislation only contained $16 billion in spending.
10. Here are just a few of the programs and projects that have been included in the House Democrats’ proposal:* $650 million for digital tv coupons.* $6 billion for colleges/universities—many which have billion dollar endowments.* $166 billion in direct aid to states—many of which have failed to budget wisely.* $50 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts.* $44 million for repairs to U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters.* $200 million for the National Mall, including grass planting.* $400 million for “National Treasures.”
11. Almost one third of the so-called tax relief in the House Democrats’ bill is spending in disguise, meaning that true tax relief makes up only 24 percent of the total package—not the 40 percent that President-elect Obama had requested.
12. $825 billion is just the beginning—many Capitol Hill Democrats want to spend even more taxpayer dollars on their “stimulus” plan.
