Last weekend my heart bled for those who were victims of the great tragedy in Australia. It now appears that around 200 lives may have been lost in the inferno that engulfed parts of rural Victoria, with more than 1,800 homes destroyed and some 7,500 people displaced by the effects of those massive fires.

The fiery inferno in the state of Victoria completely eclipsed the news of devastating floods covering 60 percent of the northeastern Australian state of Queensland.

As anticipated with any story that involves deep emotion from the nation suffering it, we received quite a number of responses to our story on the subject last week, with an even split between positive and negative. The most vitriolic in the negative were those who completely missed the point of the prophetic declarations made by Herbert W. Armstrong in relation to the application of the prophecies of Amos for these times.

But that was expected. In fact, we would have been most surprised had it been otherwise, which is why we mentioned in the article that we anticipated there would be few who had the vision to make that connection—who did show the true compassion for their fellow man in the same spirit as that shown by Jesus Christ, who groaned inwardly at the lack of faith shown by those who failed to believe the saving power of a genuine prayer to the one true God (John 11:33-40).

Yet there’s one overarching reality playing out as floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, record freezes and similar phenomena increasingly plague the Anglo-Saxon nations, caught as they are, at the same time, in the grip of an economic tsunami of yet-to-be-fully-admitted epic proportions.

Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham, got close to that reality in an interview with Jane Clayson of the cbs Early Show after September 11: “I would say … for several years now Americans in a sense have shaken their fist at God and said, God, we want you out of our schools, our government, our business, we want you out of our marketplace. And God, who is a gentleman, has just quietly backed out of our national and political life, our public life. Removing his hand of blessing and protection.”

As it says in Job 4:8, “[T]hey that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.”

An unfashionable view, but the truth nonetheless.

Australian newspapers reported overflowing crowds in some churches on Sunday as many attended to show their solidarity with those who suffered loss in the worst bushfires in Australia’s history. A similar phenomenon occurred during a great wave of sympathy that swept the U.S. following 9/11. The spike in church attendance lasted barely three weeks on that occasion before people returned to the normalcy of their self-centered lives. Few, it seems, grasped the nettle of truth that Anne Graham Lotz voiced: We reap what we sow.

Fiery Jihad

It is suspected that at least some of the fires that have ravaged southern Australia were set by Islamist terrorists or their sympathizers. Various reports have surfaced as a result of the cia warning Australia of this possibility, which that agency had detected from monitoring Islamist terrorist Web traffic. Yet, still we Anglo-Saxons bend over backward to defer to the followers of a religion foreign to our own tradition, the latest case being that of the refusal by the British government to allow a parliamentary representative from the Netherlands access to the country to air information significant to the attachment of terror to the Islamic religion.

In a letter to the Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders, chairman of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the British government opined, “[T]he secretary of state is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The secretary of state is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.”

In her usual style, Melanie Phillips went for the jugular on that one. Cuttingly, she challenged, “So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the West, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the West from religious fascism” (Spectator, February 11).

Geert Wilders is simply guilty of airing a truth that appeasing politicians of the West dare not, that “The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is jihad.”

British political economist Rodney Atkinson was just as scathing in comments he made to the Trumpet:

The government has stopped a Dutch mp Geert Wilders from entering Britain to address a House of Lords meeting on the dangers of Islam.This is certainly what we would expect from a government which passed a law on religious hatred but excluded from it the most dangerous religious book ever written—the Koran. The slaughter of thousands in New York, the 52 British deaths on the London underground, the deaths of hundreds of Spanish citizens and the many similar plots stopped by our intelligence services were all instigated by those who believe in the words of the Koran.

Three months prior to the Australian summer, under the headline, “Islam Group Urges Forest Fire Jihad,” the Melbourne daily newspaper The Age issued the following warning:

Australia has been singled out as a target for “forest jihad” by a group of Islamic extremists urging Muslims to deliberately light bushfires as a weapon of terror.U.S. intelligence channels earlier this year identified a website calling on Muslims in Australia, the U.S., Europe and Russia to “start forest fires,” claiming “scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands.”The website, posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law ….

One alleged arsonist has been caught in Australia. Whether or not he has extremist Islamist connections remains to be proven. Other arsonists apparently remain at large in Australia, unless they have skipped the country.

Were a number of the fires in southern Australia set by Islamist terrorists? Whether or not they were, Australia has been warned from the highest levels of the international security community that it is Islamic extremists’ stated intention to do so. This makes for a terrible connection between the statement by Prime Minister Rudd in relation to the Victorian catastrophe, of which he declared, “Hell … has visited … Victoria,” and a verse from the Koran which incites the followers of Mohammed to “cast terror into the hearts of the infidels” and declares of Christians and other “unbelievers” that they shall “burn for ever in the fire of hell.”

While extending our deepest sympathies to those who suffered grave loss in both fire and flood in Australia, we remind all within our hedonistic, self-serving, increasingly godless Anglo-Saxon societies of that which it says in the book of Job: We do reap what we sow!