* * * * FLASH TRAFFIC: WASHINGTON UPDATE * * * *
IS THE NEW HAMAS OFFER PROPHETICALLY SIGNIFICANT?
Note: I will be on The Glenn Beck Show on CNN Headline News each night this week discussing current events, Bible prophecy, and Dead Heat. On Friday, Glenn and I will do a one-hour special together.
By Joel C. Rosenberg
(Washington, D.C., April 22, 2008) -- At the end of last night's segment on CNN regarding former President Jimmy Carter's recent meetings with senior Hamas leaders, Glenn Beck asked me whether there was any Biblically prophetic significance to the meeting. It was an important question (and one not usually asked on CNN). While I only had 30 seconds to answer it, allow me to raise a few points.
First, Hamas's offer of a 10 year peace deal with Israel is a new and startling development. I personally don't believe Hamas really wants peace with Israel. What's more, the founding Hamas Charter explicitly rejects all comprehensive peace treaties with the Jews. This is simply a ruse to get Israel to stop assassinating Hamas terrorist leaders and lure Israel into a false sense of security. But that's not the point. The point is that this the first time in history that one of Israel's primary enemies has suggested forging not a comprehensive peace deal in perpetuity, but a peace treaty of a short and specific time frame. Israel's treaty with Egypt signed in 1979 was not a time-limited agreement. Neither was Israel's treaty with Jordan in 1994. The Oslo Agreements were never time-limited. Nor is President Bush's Road Map for Middle East peace. This is a new development. And I suspect the Hamas offer will eventually be taken seriously by the leaders of Israel, the U.N. and the E.U. (perhaps the U.S., too.)
Second, this time-limited peace offer by Hamas is fascinating in that it is completely consistent with Bible prophecy about the last days. In Daniel 9:27, the ancient Hebrew prophet tells us that in the End of Days, an evil leader will make a comprehensive peace deal or covenant with Israel and her many neighbors and enemies. That deal will seem firm, says Daniel, but it will not be forever. It will be for 7 years. According to the Book of Daniel and Revelation, Israel will accept the deal (fatally flawed though it is), but the evil leader will break the deal after 3 1/2 years, invade Israel, set up a global empire, and eventually trigger the War of Armageddon. Let me be clear: while Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al is without question an evil leader who seeks nothing less that the liberation of Jerusalem for radical Islam and the liquidation of all Jews and Christians in the Holy Land, I am not saying he is the evil leader of which Daniel writes. But Mash'al's proposal has now injected something new and Biblically significant into the Middle East peace process equation -- the element of a time-limited deal. Very interesting.
Third, in my new political thriller, Dead Heat, I write about this exact scenario of a time-limited peace deal between Israel and her enemies. On page 167, my fictional U.N. Secretary General says: We need to win the Israelis' confidence. We need them to lower their guard. Their Zionist ideology is exhausted. Their political leaders are feckless. Their diplomatic leaders are so desperate to be loved, to be accepted by the rest of the world, they're willing to give away almost anything. But we must not make the ridiculous mistakes of the past. We must not threaten Israel with war. We must invite them to make peace. We must not turn our backs to them. We must offer them an open hand. We must not boycott them....We must shock them. We must offer them a comprehensive peace treaty, the likes of which the world has never seen before. We must lure them into feeling safe and secure. We must lull them into trusting us, into trusting me...And then, when all this has been accomplished, when the time is right, you and I will make our move. We will seize Jerusalem. We will raze the Temple....But not now. We're not ready -- yet. Then, on p. 371 of Dead Heat, my fictional Israeli Prime Minister says: The world is suddenly very unstable and Israel, I'm afraid, is suddenly very vulnerable. [The U.N. Secretary General] is suggesting we go from Rome to Babylon and have some time alone with [the leader of Iraq]. He wants us to hammer out some kind of fast regional peace treaty -- even a temporary one, something that might last five or ten years, or so....To be honest, given all that's happening, I'm inclined to say yes.
Fourth, watch carefully to see if this concept of a time-limited Arab-Israeli peace deal gains traction. I wrote about a fictional deal like this in Dead Heat because it seemed like a plausible geopolitical scenario to get us to the Biblical prophecy of a 7-year Middle East peace deal. But until this week, no one in real life had ever talked seriously about a limited time frame for a peace deal with Israel. Now Israel's most dangerous immediate neighbor has, assisted by the architect of the Camp David Peace Accords. What's more, President Bush says he is optimistic that an Israeli-Palestinian deal can be struck by the end of 2008. Perhaps prophetic events are moving faster than most Americans think.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE GLENN BECK SHOW
CNN Headline News
Monday, April 21, 2008
BECK: Call me an optimist but honestly, I didn`t think the news could get any worse. And then Jimmy Carter showed up. Let me just remind you, Jimmy Carter, horrible president. But at least we only had to deal with his energy crisis, his Iran hostage crisis, and the -- oh, yes, the economic crisis for four years. Thank goodness for Ronald Reagan. I don`t think America could have survived a second Carter term. But now I feel Jimmy Carter may actually do more harm as a former president than he did as president. And that`s saying something.I think it`s great that Jimmy Carter likes to build houses for the poor. No, I really do. But when he stops being a carpenter and starts thinking, Hey, maybe I`ll be a peacemaker, I kind of feel like boycotting peanuts. How about you?Carter has just ended his Middle East peace trip. And he says now -- and he`s bringing home a souvenir, an agreement from the terrorist group Hamas, that says, they`ll accept a peaceful co-existence with Israel. Oh, that`s great. And I believe them. This is -- even though they refuse to officially recognize Israel as a nation. And they still proclaim that they want Israel wiped off the map, which is weird because it seems like the second part negates the first part of that. But I`m sure Jim has got that all figured out. So to sum up, Jimmy Carter is a stooge. Is this just another argument against him or is this a sign of what some people have been waiting for, for like, say, the last 2,000 years.Joel Rosenberg is the author of Dead Heat and the founder of the Joshua Fund. He`ll be joining me all week to answer some of these questions about the Middle East and the end of days -- Joel.
JOEL ROSENBERG, AUTHOR, DEAD HEAT: Hey, Glenn, how are you?
BECK: Very good. President/preacher boy, Jimmy Carter, doesn`t seem to understand a little something I like to call evil.
ROSENBERG: He doesn`t. This president is literally the worst ex- president we`ve ever had. And he displayed it this week. He literally doesn`t understand the difference between good and evil.And you know, look, Hamas is a terrorist organization. They`re a genocidal organization. You read the founding document of the Hamas charter, back in 1988, 89. Read it. It says, Under no circumstances will we allow a peace treaty between us and the Jews, the Zionists. We`re going to wipe them off the face of the planet.
BECK: Well, that`s 1987 -- 1988. Those are old details. Why do you keep bringing up the past like that?
ROSENBERG: Well, because just this year, Hamas television is running cartoons of Asud (ph) the bunny. Assud the Bunny is claiming he will eat all the Jews in Palestine in order to liberate the homeland of Palestine.
BECK: It`s a bunny.
ROSENBERG: This is just the type of examples of how they are inciting children, not to mention adults, for genocide. Genocide is what Hamas wants. Carter doesn`t understand this.
BECK: Joel, children know the difference that a cartoon bunny is not going to eat all the Jews.
ROSENBERG: Well -- and yet the Hamas leaders are raising terrorists, suicide bombers.I mean, look, the problem is. And I make this point in Dead Heat the central theme of my political thriller, which is to misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.
BECK: You know, the last time we failed to recognize evil, we failed to recognize evil in Germany. And we waited and we waited. And we said, Oh, well they don`t really mean that. They were very clear. Anybody who read Mein Kampf, you can`t deny that, you know -- look, I`m of German descent. I remember when I went in and bought Mein Kampf. Because I wanted to know if the German people really knew or not.If you read Mein Kampf, you have no excuse. He was extraordinarily clear on how he felt about the Jews. And it`s the same thing that`s happening now. And yet all of these people are just in absolute denial. Jimmy Carter, he`s got to be an anti-Semite.
ROSENBERG: You know, look, I think often of the Jerry Seinfeld episode where George Costanza -- where Jerry says, Look, George if every instinct you`ve ever had is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. And I look at Jimmy Carter. And any instinct that he has had in foreign policy has always been wrong.
BECK: No.
ROSENBERG: And we have to just do the exact opposite. I mean this is -- look, if you read Mein Kampf in 1939, and you said, Well, Hitler wrote that years ago. What does that have to do with becoming final solution? Come 1945, everybody understood that.
BECK: OK. So let me change gears real quick. Because we`re spending time with you, because I read Dead Heat, and it`s fantastic. And I know your other books have -- have, in a way, come true. Some of the things that you`ve written about, and 9/11 was one of them. You predicted the planes and everything else.I want to talk to you a little bit about. Jeez, and I`m getting a 30- second. Quick, let`s tie it into the end time. Any sign of the end times here in anything of this stuff with Hamas and peace deals?
ROSENBERG: Well, what`s weird about this right now is that Hamas -- what Carter is coming home is saying Hamas is allowing for a ten-year hudna, a 10-year truce. In other words, Hamas won`t say they recognize Israel. But for ten years, let`s cut a deal. Let`s create a Palestinian state, and we`ll have ten years of semi-peace.What`s interesting about this is this may set into motion -- I don`t know. But it may set in motion what the Bible talks about: a seven-year peace deal in which the leader that signs the deal with Israel then breaks the deal halfway through. This comes from Daniel, comes from Revelations.
BECK: OK. Joel, we`ll talk to you more about that later on this week. Every night, join us as he joins us. And again, Dead Heat is a phenomenal book.
