Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is off to visit Washington today. There are signs aplenty that it won’t be the friendliest meeting. The Christian Science Monitor reports,

The White House seems to be intentionally slighting Israel in advance of the summit, even as it raises the stakes. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones appear to have linked U.S. willingness to stop Iran’s nuclear program to receiving Israeli concessions regarding the two-state solution.

President Obama is unafraid of “breaking taboos” when it comes to Middle East policy, wroteSpiegel last week. He continues to make “it clear to the government in Jerusalem that he would not be continuing George W. Bush’s overly friendly policy.”

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller recently listed Israel among the world’s presumed nuclear powers while promoting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in an address to the United Nations. According to Spiegel,

Something that sounded self-evident was in fact breaking a major taboo in U.S. diplomacy. Washington had never before named Israel as a nuclear power. Every U.S. administration has ignored, at least officially, Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which it first produced in the late 1960s and has modernized and expanded ever since.An agreement between the governments of Richard Nixon and Golda Meir obliged the U.S. and Jerusalem to stay silent on the Israeli nuclear program. Every U.S. president since has agreed that this was the best way to protect Israeli security.

Not surprisingly, Gottemoeller’s comments sparked outrage in Israel, and several Washington think tanks interpreted them as a sign of the administration’s antagonism toward Israel.

The New York Times has also noted the “unsettled” relations between Jerusalem and Washington—exacerbated by their divergent policies on Iran. cia Director Leon Panetta recently met with Netanyahu on the issue. And although Israel has assured the United States it will not take military action against Iran without first consulting the U.S., “the Israelis are warning that they will not stand by while the Iranians build a nuclear bomb.”

The Obama administration has further alienated itself from Israeli officials by asking Congress to alter a bill that allows aid to flow to a Palestinian unity government—including members backed by Hamas—“a step away from a blanket refusal to deal with Hamas, which it labels a terrorist organization,” says the Times.

For some years, the Trumpet has drawn attention to a biblical prophecy suggesting a division between the U.S. and Israel. Events certainly seem to be highlighting the truth in that forecast.

Considering the friction in Israel’s relationship with the U.S., it’s little wonder that Israel is eager to look for allies elsewhere. Specifically, Europe. Witness:

Tragedy: Israel’s Unrequited Love for Europe

“Israelis are wild about Europe,” wrote Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post this past week. “A poll carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation last month showed that a whopping 69 percent of Israelis, and 76 percent of Israeli Jews, would like for Israel to join the European Union. Sixty percent of Israelis have a favorable view of the EU.”

But can Europe be trusted? Glick continues:

This poll’s most obvious message is that as far as Europe is concerned, Israelis suffer from unrequited love. A 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59 percent of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A poll taken in Germany the following year showed that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51 percent said that there is no difference in principle between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. …According to a 2008 Pew survey, anti-Semitic feelings in five EU countries—Spain, Britain, France, Germany and Poland—rose nearly 50 percent between 2005 and 2008. Whereas in 2005, some 21 percent of people polled acknowledged they harbor negative feelings toward Jews, by last year the proportion of self-proclaimed anti-Semites in these countries had risen to 30 percent. In Spain levels of anti-Semitism more than doubled, from 21 percent in 2005 to 46 percent in 2008.

The Trumpet has often reported the growing anti-Semitism in Europe (see “Anti-Semitism: Why You Should Be Alarmed” in the latest print edition, for example). However, according to Glick, Europe’s attitude to Israel and the Jews goes unreported in Israel.”

“There is no all-encompassing explanation for the EU’s popularity in Israel. It is a function of a number of complementary causes,” writes Glick. “The most important among them is the abject failure of the Israeli media to examine European anti-Semitism and its implications for European policy toward Israel in any coherent fashion.

“In light of the media’s refusal to tell the story of Europe’s hostility toward Jews and the Jewish state, or the story of the EU’s severe economic problems, it is not surprising that precious few Israeli politicians have a clear understanding of Europe,” she writes.

This failure by the Israeli media threatens Israel’s very survival. Both history and Bible prophecy show that Israel’s greatest enemy is not the Arabs, but the European nations, especially Germany. By not reporting the true situation, the Israeli media are endangering the nation.

For more information, read our article “The Counterfeit Peacemaker.”

Pope’s Unapologetic Speech

“In the past, Pope Benedict xvi’s speeches have gotten him in trouble. Visiting the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem on Monday, it was what he didn’t say that irked his audience,” wrote Spiegel this week. “Israel is disappointed, as are Jews in Germany.”

Stephen Flurry wrote in his column on Friday that “the pope stopped “way short of actually apologizing—an audacious omission, when you think about it, given the fact that he is a German-born pope who fought on the wrong side of history.” In addition to this glaring omission, Spiegel criticized the pope’s passionless delivery as well:

They were powerful sentences, appearing in a manuscript that had been released in advance. Benedict remained true to his manuscript, reading it, word for word, in a quiet voice. But at the same time, he rattled off the sentences as if unaware of the impact of his words, swallowing and mumbling important words, as if he were reading a manuscript meant for someone else or, even more distressingly, as if he were unaware of what he was reading. It was not a powerful moment. There were no sparks.

As the article noted, when Pope John Paul ii spoke at Yad Vashem in 2000, he promised that the church would “never again” permit the persecution of Jews. According to Spiegel, “His successor has renewed the promise, but in a far more generalized form.”

As the Trumpet has observed, “The pope is a highly educated man. He has written multiple books and is respected for his scholarship. He is the spiritual leader of more than 1 billion people. Benedict does nothing—especially when it involves altering church policy or delivering public speeches—without deep contemplation and calculation.” See also our article, “Is Pope Benedict Ashamed of the Holocaust?”

Nuclear Authority: The World Is About to Get Much More Dangerous

Mohamed ElBaradei, the retiring head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that the number of states with nuclear weapons could more than double within the next few years.

He also warned of the rise of “virtual nuclear weapons states”—states that have the ingredients and technical ability to make a bomb but stop short of actually doing so. This way they obey the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while remaining just months away from deploying a nuclear weapon.

“This is the phenomenon we see now and what people worry about in Iran. And this phenomenon goes much beyond Iran. Pretty soon … you will have nine weapons states and probably another 10 or 20 virtual weapons states,” he said. “When you see a lot of concern about the Middle East, it’s a result of people feeling totally repressed by their own government and feeling unjustly treated by the outside world. This combination makes it a ticking bomb.”

He also pointed to the growing threat in Pakistan. “We are worried because there is a war in a country with nuclear weapons,” he said. “We are worried because we still have 200 cases of illicit trafficking of nuclear material a year reported to us.”

Yet at the same time, America seems more concerned with protecting Iran than with stopping the apocalyptic regime from getting nuclear weapons. The Times reported last week that President Obama had sent cia chief Leon Panetta to Israel to seek assurances that Israel would not attack Iran without first informing the U.S.

Nuclear proliferation threatens to destroy the whole world. Yet the U.S. refuses to face it. For more information, watch for the July issue of the Trumpet. Just completed, it will appear on the website shortly.

FBI Agent: Another 9/11 “Inevitable”

The Obama administration’s policies are making another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland “inevitable,” according to a former fbi agent. In an interview with Newsmax, John Vincent said the U.S. administration is repeating the mistakes of the past, leaving the country vulnerable. “I’m not exactly sure where the president is coming from, but all the signals he gives out is that the United States is prepared to talk peace, we’re not going to do anything to upset any of the people that are conducting all these terrorist acts, we’re going to back out of everything we’ve done before, we’re going to apologize for everything we’ve done in the past—what kind of signals does that send?” Vincent asked. “It sends a signal of weakness and: ‘We are not willing to try and stop what you have planned.’”

Vincent and Special Agent Robert G. Wright worked together from 1997 to 1999 investigating financial links between U.S.-based charities and terrorist groups abroad. They found “an octopus” of financial connections to terrorist groups including Hamas and al Qaeda. The investigation, however, was shut down by the fbi in 1999 out of concern it would interfere with ongoing intelligence gathering, said Vincent.

On May 8, the fbi lost a lawsuit aimed at stopping Vincent and Wright from speaking out in an effort to prevent a repeat of 9/11.

Newsmax reports:

Vincent, a former Judicial Watch employee, says his primary concern today is that the leaders of the fbi and other counterterrorism agencies are taking their signals from the Obama administration, softening their approach to the war on terror, and leaving the country more vulnerable. …With the Obama administration’s threat of prosecutions and its “kinder, gentler” approach to the war on terror, Vincent predicts “That’s exactly what [agents’ supervisors] are going to do. They’re going to say, ‘Why should I put my neck on the line here? If I go out and do something I’m going to be second guessed for it later on?’ And I think that’s the message that’s being put out by this new Congress and this new president, which is: ‘Well, we’re going to play nice guys with them, don’t do anything to upset them.’ Meanwhile, they’re cutting your throat.”Vincent sees Obama’s approach to counterterrorism as less effective than the Clinton administration’s, because his willingness to negotiate will be seen as weakness in the Middle East. … Vincent, who speaks regularly with a network of former agents who are in touch with current agency employees, says Obama’s policies—from closing the Guantanamo prison, releasing memos on “enhanced interrogations,” negotiating with America’s enemies, apologizing internationally for Bush administration policies, and threatening of prosecutions—are inadvertently “emboldening the enemies” of America.

“And that’s where I think we’re headed,” said Vincent, “back to prior to the Clinton administration, prior to 9/11, to an area that we don’t want to go. Because … when you back off, and don’t keep doing what you think is the right thing to do, eventually you’ll have a bigger war on your hands—or a bigger catastrophe worse than 9/11.” Vincent added that his sources tell him “morale within the organization is probably the lowest it’s ever been.”

In a related story, Shimshon Issaki, a 44-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and other security agencies, spoke to the Middle East Forum about the same subject. The mef’s summary of his talk included this statement:

[H]e stated that Barack Obama’s release of documents on enhanced interrogation techniques has done “irreversible damage to security because [terrorists] are learning how to behave” during questioning.

Obama’s soft policies toward terrorism and terrorist-sponsoring nations are a perpetuation of a trend that was already in place before he came to power. In January 2006, we wrote in the Trumpet that America’s strategy to defeat Islamist terrorism was destined to fail, as it strove “not to eliminate but to ‘understand’ and appease the enemy.” The current administration, however, has taken America’s foreign policy to a whole new level of appeasement. Read our February 2 article “Obama’s Radical Foreign Policy” for more on the most dangerous aspects of that foreign policy.

What Young British Men Are Learning

So-called homegrown terrorists are a major problem in Britain. Young men who have lived in Britain all their lives are recruited and trained as terrorists. In a report in the Times today, a former terrorist recounts how the recruiting process works.

“A lot of people think that terrorists are recruited in special recruiting grounds, but the truth is that it actually goes on in mosques a lot of the time,” 15-year-old Adam told the Sunday Times.

Adam was the youngest of around 50 recruits who were shown videos encouraging them to travel to Pakistan and train to become martyrs. He was approached by Islamists at the Stockwell mosque in London by Islamists.

About a month after this, the men invited him to a meeting outside of the mosque. “It was here—and in similar buildings—that the real process of indoctrination went on, with exposure to violent videos, including footage of beheadings,” reports the Times.

“They would show us videos of people bragging about 7/7 and 9/11 and they made it clear that they approved of it,” said Adam.

“They weren’t as blunt as to say, ‘Yes, we did this’ or ‘We did that.’ They were more aware than anyone that there’s a chance that someone in that room could be recording them.”

Adam discovered that more advanced recruits were sent on training missions in the north of England, and also attended paintball sessions.

Another young man, Hammaad Munshi, received terrorist training in Britain over the Internet, also beginning at the age of 15.

Homegrown terrorists are a major problem in Britain today. There is something dreadfully sick in a nation that breads this kind of hatred in its midst. For more information, see our article, “The Sickness in Britain’s Heart.”

Business Is Booming for Ship Graveyards

A Spiegel article, “The Freighter Graveyards of South Asia,” gives startling evidence of the breakdown in global trade. The world’s merchant fleet is being scrapped at an alarming rate. It just doesn’t pay to keep ships afloat when no one is shipping anything.

The sandy beaches north of Chittagong in Bangladesh look like giant steel graveyards. Ships line the banks ready for dismantling. Others are so far disassembled that their hulls are all that is left protruding morosely from the water ….The wrecks are remnants of a disappearing world. Once they sailed the oceans as flagships of globalization. Now they’re symbols of an order that threatens to sink with them.

It is a perverse indicator of the severity of the economic crisis: As the global economy deteriorates, business booms in the ship graveyards of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. In Karachi, ships are stacked three vessels high in the demolition backlog. Ships as big as the Titanic disappear in 40 days.

According to Anil Sharma, owner of Global Marketing Systems, the world’s largest buyer of scrap ships, the demolition of the world’s merchant fleet is still accelerating.

Lying to Fix the Economy

In the Times today, economist Irwin Stelzer analyzes the effect of President Obama’s policies on the economy. The outlook does not look promising.

One of the many negative effects that he points out is that “the government decided that contracts can be broken.”

He continues: “The Obama administration demonstrated in the Chrysler bankruptcy that it has no regard for the contracts that have in the past protected lenders who made their money available on the assumption that they would have a preferential claim on the borrowers’ assets. Nor does it believe that contractual pay deals should withstand a raised voiced in Congress. This weakening of the sanctity of contracts increases lenders’ risk, which leads to a demand for an offsetting higher interest rate.”

People will be less willing to invest in America, because the U.S. president has decided that the government can force companies to go back on their word.

The Trumpet has often pointed out that America’s economic problems largely come from breaking the Tenth Commandment, you shall not covet. Americans borrow to buy what they cannot afford. Yet the solution to this mess is not to go back and break the Ninth Commandment about not lying.

Stelzer also pointed out how America’s debt problem can only get much worse in the future. “We are also certain to see take-home pay decline significantly,” he writes. “The debt that Obama is running up will have to be repaid. Already, there are grumblings in the market about the future of the dollar, with the Chinese not the only one of our creditors worrying that we will inflate our way out of our obligations. Run the presses, make dollars cheaper, and use the debased currency to repay debts. But that is not the only possibility. Instead, politicians, remembering the fate of Jimmy Carter when he allowed inflation to climb towards 20 percent, will try to restore fiscal sanity by raising taxes.”

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the U.S. must increase taxes by $1.9 trillion over the next decade. That’s $1,900,000,000,000—over $6,200 for every man, woman and child in the country.

With a massive socialized healthcare project on the horizon, the government won’t be cutting spending any time soon.

The “Richest” State to Employees: Take a Pay Cut, or Lose Your Job

America’s “richest” state is on the edge of debt default. The private sector is hemorrhaging jobs, and the state’s revenues are plunging. But the debts still must be paid. Facing a budgetary mess, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made the difficult decision to cut unionized government workers’ salaries. He asked them to sacrifice with the rest of the state. But Schwarzenegger picked a fight with the wrong union, and now the Obama administration is threatening to withhold billions in stimulus money.

Federal health officials advised Governor Schwarzenegger’s office last week that unless California lawmakers rescind the wage reduction by July 1, the federal government would withhold $6.8 billion in stimulus funds.

Schwarzenegger was attempting to save the state $74 million by reducing salaries to health-care employees who belonged to the Service Employees International Union (seiu). Under the plan, the maximum wage that these workers could receive would drop from $12.10 per hour to $10.10 per hour—a painful cut for employees living in one of the more expensive states in the union. These workers provide care for some 440,000 low-income disabled and elderly Californians.

“Neither the legislature nor I make decisions to reduce wages or benefits lightly, but only as a last resort in response to an unprecedented fiscal crisis,” Schwarzenegger wrote.

The seiu, however, asked the Obama administration to intervene on its behalf, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Unfortunately, rescinding the wage cuts might not be so easy. It would require a two-thirds vote in the legislature, meaning that Republican support would be needed. But Democrats only gained enough Republican support to pass the budget in the first place when they agreed to rein in the rapidly growing multibillion-dollar state Home Supportive Services.

Schwarzenegger has sent the Obama administration a letter urging the federal government to reconsider.

Meanwhile, economic problems in the Golden State continue to intensify. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called on the city’s council to declare a fiscal emergency last Tuesday. “The gravity of the fiscal emergency that we face is enormous,” he said. “Unless we act with urgency, the city will face a cash flow crisis, raising the prospect of running out of cash between November and February.”

Negotiations with the Coalition of L.A. City Unions broke down earlier last week.

Los Angeles is facing a $529 million budget deficit this year. Villaraigosa said the worsening economy and plunging city tax revenue left “very few options.” The budget shortfall is expected to reach $1 billion in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, in part due to underfunded pensions the city is responsible for. If the council agrees to declare a fiscal emergency, Villaraigosa says he will begin furloughing city employees within 30 days. State Treasurer Bill Lockyer is also scrambling for more federal money. On Wednesday, Lockyer officially asked U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for assistance from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (tarp) bailout funds.

According to Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, “California is going $2 billion more in the hole every month like clockwork.”

“If we cannot obtain our usual short-term cash-flow borrowings, there could be devastating impacts on the ability of the State or other governments to provide essential services to their citizens,” Lockyer wrote in a letter. He also said California may have trouble accessing the long-term bond market, which could put a halt to infrastructure construction programs.

It is unclear, however, by what authority Geithner could distribute the funds to California, even if it is within the federal Treasury’s ability to do so. The tarp money was approved by Congress for the purpose of buying problematic over-valued assets from Wall Street to keep banks from failing.

With all the economic problems, droughts and fires, you might wonder if California is under a curse.

For the one solution to California’s economic crisis, watch Gerald Flurry’s Key of David program “The Key to Financial Success.”

Britain’s Solution for Family Problems: Destroy Family

The sad state of marriage and family in Britain is destroying the nation. Over the past few months and years, Britain has witnessed many cases of shocking and disgusting cases of child abuse. Yet each time this happens, the government, far from solving the problem, actually makes matters worse, writes Peter Hitchens, in the Daily Mail:

Our justified disgust at child abuse is being used to defraud us.One after another the little faces gaze out at us from beyond the grave—Maria Colwell, Victoria Climbie, Baby Peter—and each time our raw emotions are manipulated by the very liberal revolutionaries who are largely to blame for the hell of combined neglect and abuse in which so many modern children live.Again and again, we draw the wrong conclusions and commemorate these deaths by handing more power to the liberal state, which in two generations has destroyed marriage, the best protection against abuse ….We also absurdly imagine that more social workers, or better-trained social workers, will somehow stop this happening again. You might as well fight the Atlantic with a bath sponge. We pass laws that give the state ever increasing powers to interfere in the home, and treat responsible parents as suspects.

Hitchens proposes a much more responsible solution to the problem. “We would do much more good if we admitted that we had been mistaken when we first weakened and then swept aside the institution of marriage, now dead on its feet in Britain,” he writes.

Research in Canada and Britain shows that non-married households, where there is a series of boyfriends who are not the natural fathers of the children, are startlingly more likely to be the scenes of abuse than are stable married homes. The Canadian figures show that a child is 50 to 100 times safer with natural parents than with a step-parent in the home. The British research found married homes were 33 times safer than those with serial boyfriends. Stable marriage safeguards children.

The evidence makes it obvious: Encouraging stable, loving marriages in Britain is the only way to solve the child abuse catastrophe. Why are so few willing to acknowledge it?

The reality is, the solution to the problem is an exalting of the biblical model for marriage and family. And that’s because the Author of the Bible is also the Author of marriage. Following His laws on marriage and family is guaranteed to work. For more information, read our booklet Why Marriage! Soon Obsolete?

And Finally …

The White House’s budget director just joined the list of federal officials who see “green shoots” in the economy emerging. According to Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, the economy has almost bottomed out and will improve in the immediate months ahead.

Unfortunately, Mr. Orszag will now have to be added to the growing list of government officials to consistently have gotten it wrong about the economy. Robert Morley’s column this coming Tuesday will address whether all the talk about “green shoots” is warranted.

Mr. Orszag also said that President Obama is committed to revamping the health-care system this year. However, he says that the president’s plan to provide health care to millions of uninsured Americans would not add to the federal deficit in the short term, and actually reduce it in coming years.

Mr. Orszag really is an optimist!