Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Israel ex-spy warns against "messianic" war on Iran

By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A former Israeli spymaster has branded the country's leaders as "messianic" and unfit to tackle the Iranian nuclear program, in the strongest criticism from a security veteran of threats to launch a pre-emptive war.


Other retired officials have also criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, but the censure from Yuval Diskin, who stepped down as head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service last year, was especially harsh.

He was also unusual in using the language of religious fervor that Israelis associate with their Islamist foes.

"I have no faith in the prime minister, nor in the defence minister," Diskin said in the remarks broadcast by Israeli media on Saturday. "I really don't have faith in a leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings."

Government officials rebuked Diskin and questioned his motives, implying that he had his eye on a political career or was settling scores after Netanyahu denied him a promotion.

The catastrophic terms with which Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak describe the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran have stirred concern in Israel and abroad of a possible strike against its uranium enrichment program.

Iran says the project is entirely peaceful and has promised wide-ranging reprisals for any attack.

World powers, sharing Israeli suspicions that Iran has a covert bomb-making plan, are trying to curb it through sanctions and negotiations. Those talks resume in Baghdad on May 23, but Barak on Thursday rated their chance of succeeding as low.

Although Israel has long threatened a pre-emptive strike if diplomacy fails, some experts believe that could be a bluff to keep up pressure on the Iranians, making it harder to interpret the swirl of comments from the security establishment.

FALSE IMPRESSION


Commenting on Diskin's remarks, Amos Harel of the liberal Haaretz newspaper said the temperature was rising in anticipation of the nuclear talks.

"Nothing has been determined in the Iranian story, and the spring is about to boil over into another summer of tension," said Harel.

Diskin spoke days after Israel's top military commander, Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, told Haaretz he viewed Iran as "very rational" and unlikely to build a bomb, comments that apparently undermined the case for a strike.

The former Shin Bet chief was specifically damning of Netanyahu and Barak, who have often crafted strategy alone and whose rapport dates back four decades to when they served together in a top-secret commando unit.

"They're creating a false impression about the Iranian issue," Diskin told a private gathering on Friday, where the comments were recorded. "They're appealing to the stupid public, if you'll pardon me for the phrasing, and telling them that if Israel acts, there won't be an (Iranian) nuclear bomb."

Diskin said he was not necessarily opposed to an attack on Iran, though he cited experts who argue this risked backfiring by accelerating its nuclear program.

Netanyahu's former Mossad foreign intelligence director, Meir Dagan, last year also ridiculed the Israeli war option.

Diskin went a step further by saying that Netanyahu and Barak were not up to the job of opening an unprecedented front with Iran and, potentially, with its allies on Israel's borders.

Netanyahu is a second-term premier with solid public approval ratings and a broad conservative coalition. Barak, a former prime minister, is Israel's most decorated soldier. But they are both technically subject to security vetting by the Shin Bet, which added punch to their panning at Diskin's hands.

"I have seen them up close," he said. "They are not messiahs, the two of them, and they are not people who I personally, at least, trust to be able to lead Israel into an event on such a scale, and to extricate it."

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman dismissed Diskin's alarm as irresponsible speculation, telling Israel's Channel Two TV that such big decisions would be made at cabinet level rather than by the prime minister and defence minister exclusively.

Lieberman said Diskin, who was considered as a potential Dagan successor but was passed over, might be angry. One Barak confidant sarcastically wished Diskin "welcome to political life," implying he was angling for a slot in an opposition party ahead of an Israeli national election scheduled for next year.

WHY I AM NOT A DISPENSATIONALIST; John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. CHM popularised Darby more than any other Brethren author. As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham. I am not a dispensationalist; it is unbiblical and thoroughly evil.

The United Nations has failed to maintain peace in the world - it is not the World Government mentioned in the Bible Prophecies.


The United Nations is an outdated, corrupt institution fast losing its legitimacy as a peacemaker. Soon it will become defunct—to be replaced by a New World Order lead by the Antichrist. World War i was to have been the war to end all wars. The League of Nations was established at its close to ensure continuing peace. It failed.

Twenty-one years later, a worse global conflict ensued. At the close of World War ii, the United Nations was established to keep the peace. For 58 years, the primary purpose of the U.N., as stated in its charter, has been to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” Yet more than 250 local and regional armed conflicts have occurred since, and no world peace is remotely in sight. Instead, a new threat to peace exists—global terrorism.

“The United Nations is on the verge of demonstrating finally and fatally its moral bankruptcy and its strategic irrelevance,” wrote the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer. “Having proved itself impotent in the Balkan crisis and now again in the Iraq crisis, the United Nations will sink once again into irrelevance. This time it will not recover

Why has the United Nations so utterly failed?

All Bark, No Bite


The problem is that, akin to all of the great treaties, pacts and institutions created throughout mankind’s history with the noble intention of institutionalizing world peace, the U.N. contained within it, from its very beginning, the seeds of its own destruction.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the U.N. back in October 1995, Time magazine passed comment. “Never again would one country bulldoze a path of conquest over a neighbor. Never again would the great powers lock in a titanic death struggle ravaging the continents. More than that, the causes of war would be extinguished. Tyranny, injustice and deprivation would never again blot out the light of the world. Governments of good faith would band together under the universal benevolence of something called the United Nations.

“How beautiful. How brave. How naive” (Oct. 23, 1995).

How naive indeed! President John F. Kennedy, addressing the U.N. in September 1961, pragmatically recognized that if the U.N. vision failed to materialize, mankind would face dire consequences. “Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind. … Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. … The mere existence of modern weapons—10 million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on Earth—is a source of horror, and discord and distrust. … _Together we shall save our planet—or together we shall perish in its flames!”

Sir Anthony Parsons, British ambassador to the U.N. from 1974 to 1982, realistically appraised the organization thus: “The U.N. has been a disastrous failure …. It set the standards and adopted conventions on everything you can think of—torture, women, children, civil rights—but does nothing to enforce them” (Time, op. cit.).

And there is the central core of the U.N.’s failure. It simply lacks the vision, the motivation, the will and the power to enforce its decisions! Thus it has progressed not one inch, since its inception, toward its primary purpose of “[saving] succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” In fact, in certain instances, it has been cynically used as a platform upon which to further the prospects of that scourge.

No Justice


The impotence of United Nations leaders to enforce U.N. resolutions has led to the organization becoming a sounding board for the selfish goals of petty demagogues and tin-pot nations that realize they can hold the chief human benefactors of mankind, the English-speaking peoples, to ransom and work overtly for the destruction of their individual and collective power.

The cruel cynicism of European nations working in concert with Third World nations has ousted Anglo-Americans from key U.N. posts and committees. In 2002, the U.N. decided that the U.S. was unfit to serve on the Human Rights Commission, replacing it with Sudan! A brief look at Sudan’s record on human rights reveals it as one of the world’s prime offenders in this arena. Then this year, the U.N. managed to vote 33 to 3 in favor of electing the terrorist-subsidizing nation of Libya to chair its Human Rights Commission!

Such actions by this pretentious world body do not just render it an abject failure, but leave it a sad laughingstock to anyone with common sense.

To add to its sins, at a time when (despite all the liberal-socialist media and political comment to the contrary) the cia, mi5 (UK intelligence agency) and bnd (German secret service) all possess ample proof of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of biological warfare and mass destruction, the U.N. has elected Iraq to chair its disarmament committee!

But why worry? What does it matter? If all the U.N. is capable of is passing ineffective resolutions with no intent whatever of backing up their implementation, what does it matter whether it be Iraq, Saudi Arabia or outer Mongolia chairing these committees? After all, the U.N. has passed 17 resolutions over the past 12 years demanding the disarmament of Iraq, and had the current U.S. president not had the courage to step out and quell Saddam’s crazy cruelty, who knows where it all may have ended.

What is more, there exists no world body to hold the U.N. to account. So this toothless tiger, this moribund mass of self-congratulatory, cynical fat cats representing the world’s aspirations for peace, continues on as not more than a gravy train for the world’s diplomatic corps, fiddling away while the world burns in the brushfires of local wars that soon will join in the greatest of conflagrations ever witnessed by man!

A Providence Journal-Bulletin (Providence, R.I.) editorial that described the U.N. Security Council as a “hypocritical and ineffectual debating society,” commented, “We hope that some way might be found to make the United Nations … much more effective in dealing with its original core mission—protecting world security …. If such repairs aren’t made, the United Nations will go the way of the League of Nations, whose failure to deal seriously with fascist aggression paved the way for World War ii” (March 18).

That’s a scary statement. Scary—but real, oh so real! And this is not just an isolated view.

Here is international security affairs analyst Stephen Blank’s view: “[T]he U.N.’s role (or lack of a role) in the Korean crisis indicates its essential uselessness at keeping the peace either there or in Iraq. …

“Thus the U.N. validates Winston Churchill’s observation that each of the appeasers of the 1930s sought to appease Adolf Hitler and the other dictators in the hope that others would be eaten before their turn came up. …

“If appeasement of those who would rip apart international security continues, something will indeed turn up, but it will not be peace” (Asia Times, Feb. 14).

This astute critic compares the time we are in now to the great time of appeasement in the 1930s that led to the world’s greatest war. Like its old progenitor, the failed League of Nations, the U.N. has been constantly tested and challenged by petty tyrants, with the same results. In respect of Iraq and North Korea, Blank comments, “Certainly it is obvious to any unbiased observer that the U.N. is utterly unwilling and unable to confront either of these aggressors of its own accord so it is a useless reed insofar as the defense of peace is concerned” (ibid.).

 

World’s Last Chance


“I attended the San Francisco Conference in 1945, where world leaders attempted to form a world organization of nations. They called it ‘The United Nations.’ There I heard chiefs of state ring out the warning that this was the world’s last chance.

“But it has failed. The United Nations has no power over the nations. It has no power to settle disputes, stop wars or prevent wars. The so-called United Nations are not united. This effort has degenerated into a sounding board for Communist propaganda. Man has failed his last chance!

“Now God must step in—or we perish!”

Such was the summation of renowned religious leader Herbert Armstrong when reflecting on mankind’s best efforts to obtain world peace. In the final year of his life, Mr. Armstrong, an unofficial ambassador for world peace who visited more world leaders in the decades of the 1970s and ’80s than any other person, was present at the 40th anniversary celebrations of the United Nations. He was one of the only four in attendance on that occasion who had personally witnessed the founding of the U.N. in San Francisco in June 1945. This wise, articulate and visionary apostle of God looked beyond the inevitability of the failure of the U.N. to a far better age: “This 40th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations may trigger events to bring on the world’s last colossal world violence and trouble, and usher in at last, after 6,000 years of human trial and error and woes and sufferings, a united one world, and world peace at last—a world truly to be built by the Lord Eternal” (Plain Truth, October 1985).

We are 17 years on beyond that 40th anniversary of the U.N. It has passed its 50th anniversary. Looking back, we would have to admit that the intervening time has witnessed some of the most dramatic of U.N. failures.

 

“Except the Lord Build the House”


In the north garden area of the United Nations building in New York City rests a sculpture by Russian artist Evgeniy Vuchetich called “Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares,” a gift from the then-Soviet Union presented in 1959. The bronze statue, based on the age-old message of Isaiah 2:4, depicts a man forging a sword into a plowshare, representing mankind’s desire to utilize the materials and energy once used for war for the purpose of benefiting all men.

Worldly governments have constructed a towering building to house a world organization to produce and preserve peace. But there is an underlying reason why this structure can never succeed.

Christ said, “Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up” (Matt. 15:13).

Think about it: God did not build the U.N. These world leaders have not sought His guidance. Their meetings are not opened by prayer to Almighty God, but by a moment of silence. (Prayer might offend some of the atheistic members.) God has not planted this organization. It shall, therefore, be rooted up. All human efforts to prevent World War iii, apart from God, will prove futile.

A little over 4,000 years ago, men organized to build a high tower to coordinate world domination. God intervened and broke up their building (Gen. 10:8-11; 11:1-9). At the end of this “last hour” of human rule on Earth, God will have to intervene, with force, to save man from the horrifying end to which his failed attempts at world government would ultimately bring him (Matt. 24:21-22).

The U.N. was doomed from its genesis because it left God out of its plans.

This is the bottom line: No man or organization built by man can ultimately bring about peace. Only man’s Creator can and will! That is the reason the U.N. is sinking into “irrelevance.”

The good news is that following the ultimate disintegration of the United Nations—which has failed dramatically to guarantee global peace—the united family of God is destined to impose, under the King of kings, Jesus Christ, a NEW WORLD GOVERNMENT AND PEACE AT LAST.


WHY I AM NOT A DISPENSATIONALIST; John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. CHM popularised Darby more than any other Brethren author. As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham. I am not a dispensationalist; it is unbiblical and thoroughly evil.

Israel's Netanyahu is an extremely brutal man - and the Polls now indicate that if he were to have an early election he would win - unfortunate but true.

(Reuters) - Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would win an election were it held now, an opinion poll showed on Monday, as he weighs his strategy towards Iran's nuclear program and speculation grows that he will seek a renewed public mandate.

The next parliamentary election in Israel is not due until October 2013, but Netanyahu signaled on Sunday he was considering moving up the ballot.

On Saturday, a former Israeli spymaster branded the country's leaders as "messianic", in the strongest criticism yet from a security veteran of threats to launch a pre-emptive war.

But an opinion poll conducted on Sunday night and published in the popular Yedioth Ahronoth daily showed Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party winning 30 of 120 parliamentary seats if a poll were held now, up from the 27 it currently holds.

A slew of commentators, citing cracks in the governing coalition over formulating a new law that could force ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the conscript military, said Netanyahu may opt to set the election date as early as August or September.

Such a result would make him the leader of the largest faction and the likely candidate to form the next government.

According to the poll, Israel's main opposition Kadima party, currently the largest in parliament, would drop from 28 seats to 11. Kadima, a centrist party, recently replaced its leader, former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, with ex-defence chief Shaul Mofaz.

The survey showed the Labour Party, widely expected to gain strength from a wave of social protests that swept Israeli cities last summer, taking 18 seats, a steep rise from its current 8, and becoming the second largest faction.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's party Yisrael Beitenu, Netanyahu's biggest coalition partner, would capture 13 seats, down from its current 15, the poll showed. The poll surveyed 500 people and has a margin of error of 4.5 percent.

In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth's website, Ynet, Lieberman described an early election as a done deal. "It's now just a matter of (setting) dates," he said.

Lieberman has been a leading advocate of imposing military service on ultra-Orthodox Jews - most Jewish men and women are subject to the draft at the age of 18 - and requiring Israeli Arabs to perform national service outside the armed forces.

Ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition have said they would fight such a move. The current conscription law expires in August and the government has to decide the issue soon.

Netanyahu has also been under pressure from pro-settler coalition partners and some outspoken Likud party members who have questioned his commitment to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians seek a state.

Netanyahu's government has pledged to evict or raze numerous settlement outposts put up without official sanction, drawing warnings from some political allies that his coalition could collapse as a result.

WHY I AM NOT A DISPENSATIONALIST; John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–1896, with his popular style spread Darby's teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. CHM popularised Darby more than any other Brethren author. As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the "secret rapture" theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because "God is able to graft them in again," and they believe that in His grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, His purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as He has shown unmerited favour to the Church, He will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham. I am not a dispensationalist; it is unbiblical and thoroughly evil.