🇮🇱 OCTOBER 7th: Two Years After

▶️ THE SPIRITUAL WAR OF OCTOBER 7TH

THE SPIRITUAL WAR OF OCTOBER 7TH

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t’s all a lie. The October 7th massacres were not carried out to create a ‘Palestinian’ state, to break out of an ‘open air prison’ in Gaza or any of the lies the media has systemically deluged us with. They did it to capture Jerusalem.

That’s why Hamas named the operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the victory mosque formerly planted by Muslim invaders on the site of the Jewish Temple. That’s why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh began his October 7 invasion speech with complaints about Jewish presence prayers at the Temple site near the Al-Aqsa mosque. That’s why the Hamas emblem features the Al-Aqsa mosque between two crossed swords. Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza reported seeing those same images in homes around Gaza after the Islamic Jihadist group had spent a generation riling up the Muslim population to launch a holy war to conquer Jerusalem.

And it’s not just Hamas. Arafat had constantly proclaimed his vision of “millions of martyrs marching to Jerusalem.” That line is still broadcast by Palestinian Authority media which declares it to be their great mission.

Muslims in Gaza are not dying to create a state that polls show most of them don’t believe will ever exist. They’re killing and dying in a religious Jihad to take over Jerusalem.

Every effort to create a ‘Palestinian’ state failed because a state was never the real goal, but a means to the real end, the capture of Jerusalem and its holy sites. The idea that the panoply of fake nationalism, flags, ministries, and an anthem, are just a false front for a religious crusade may be incomprehensible to secularized western nations, but Islam is religious, not nationalistic.

There is no ‘Palestinian’ cause, only a Jihadist cause that hides behind it, the way that it hides behind so many other facades, civil rights, social justice, political change, that are just masks.

Why do the Jihadist groups want Jerusalem so badly? For the same reason Islam wanted Constantinople, captured Athens and turned the Parthenon into a mosque and then wrecked it during the Great Turkish War, and why ISIS has repeatedly threatened to conquer Rome. Muslims have Mecca. Why do they need Jerusalem, Athens and Rome?

Islam is a great thousand year darkness obsessed with eliminating all light. Its followers are convinced that if they eliminate every religion and culture, seize its important sites or, like the WTC on 9/11 or the Buddhas in Afghanistan, destroy them, there will be no alternative to Islam. Unable to win a religious debate, Islam always turns to religious war as if murder were faith.

The real story of Oct 7 is not the one you have heard about in the media. It’s a spiritual war by an enemy determined to drown out the light of Jerusalem, the light of hope and faith, in murder, hate and moral inversion that transforms victims into perpetrators and terrorists into innocents, that inverts everything, replaces truth with lies, and convinces the world to worship evil.

The Jews have long been the canaries in the coal mines of civilization. Here is how that spiritual war between good and evil played out amidst the soldiers, civilians and hostages in Israel.

Keith Siegel, an American from North Carolina who had been kidnapped from his home along with his wife, spent 484 days as a hostage, and described turning to God. He didn’t know many prayers, but he began to say what he remembered including the words of ‘Shema Yisrael.’ “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One” which had been recited by martyrs about to die for their faith.

“There was a moment when I told myself, ‘I’m not going to pray to Allah,’” his wife Aviva recalled. “Even though I was forced to, they would pray in front of us, and it wasn’t clear who they were praying to. I moved my lips, but I wasn’t truly praying. They were so cruel to us, and I couldn’t understand it. How can you pray and be so evil? I just don’t get it.”

Agam Berger, another hostage, had her faith restored when she dreamed of a prayer book, a siddur, and then one came her way. “How do you explain that? That’s not chance. That’s faith,” her mother said.

The media and the woke left and woke right have launched an unprecedented propaganda machine to make Israel seem monstrous and its war senseless. And in the face of that, Israelis have turned to God, convinced that there is meaning and purpose even in the face of that evil.

“God, I speak to you now,” the father of Sergeant Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, said at his funeral:

“People who know me know my doubts, they know my fights. When you have grandparents who went into gas chambers and parents who had great sores and pains after the Second World War. We lost six million people. It is hard to sit down and say, ‘Yes, there is a God and I believe and I’m convinced.’ But I’m standing here at the moment where I have to make a decision, and my decision is: God, you’re above us, it all has a purpose, a much bigger purpose than we know about.”

“Like in the Book of Esther, where invisible threads are woven by a Master’s hand into a redemptive story – so too we have seen small parts come together into a great picture of miraculous victory: the beepers, the radios, Nasrallah, Assad’s collapse, Trump, Iran. A new biblical chapter is being written in our days. You will never be able to read it, my son, but you will surely be one of its heroes,” Rabbi Tamir Granot wrote to his fallen son Amitay: a platoon leader.

Last summer, Rabbi Granot officiated at the wedding of his son’s fiance who had been introduced to her new husband by the mother of another fallen soldier. It’s not natural, he admitted, “but then ours is a people whose path often travels the supernatural. And when you take that into account, then, yeah, it’s pretty natural for us.”

The war as seen from Israel is very different from the way it is seen in the media and on social media. It’s not the story of endless internet squabbling, but as Rabbi Doron Perez of World Mizrahi, who lost one of his sons and whose other son was wounded on October 7, recently wrote:

“a young generation that many had characterized as a self-absorbed TikTok generation emerged as a remarkable generation of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment to our country and cause. A generation no less heroic than the defenders of 1967 and 1973, the founders of the State of Israel, the Maccabees, and perhaps even King David’s army.”

In Israel, the story isn’t about world opinion, it’s the story of volunteers cooking meals, soldiers returning to duty, mothers raising children on their own, and people living with the reality that they may have to run to shelter any moment, and yet believing that there is a purpose to all this.

They know that they are fighting another battle in an ancient war between good and evil. “We know that the power of life which we so deeply believe in will ultimately triumph over those who celebrate death,” Rabbi Perez said at the funeral of his son Daniel, after being left with nothing to bury other than his bloody shirt. “The blood of our son that we buried, this blood will overpower the spilling of blood. We know with certainty that those who believe we are all created in G-d’s image will defeat those who have lost any semblance of that image.”

Those who know history also know that this is not a new war and it has nothing to do with Gaza, the Six Day War in 1967 or even Israel’s successful fight for independence in 1948.

During the High Holy Days, among the penitential prayers that are read is a 13th Century liturgical poem by an otherwise unknown Jewish man writing about the Islamic occupation.

“Those who have made Moloch their king, rule over me,” he bemoans. “Those who serve abominations have befouled my lands.” The prayer goes on to describe how “I have wept and shed tears from the yoke of Ishmael’s children” who “call a prophet a man who never prophesied” while preventing me from “ascending to Jerusalem during festivals.”

“How can the enemies of all that is pure reside in Zion,” the prayer asks. “How came they to dwell in my temples and made themselves a dwelling there?” It prays, “remember us and recall us with your salvation from those who worship things that are not you. Hurl them out and swallow them up from your holy dwelling place. And I through your great kindness will at last enter your house.”

Hamas ascribed the leading cause of its assault on Oct 7 to Jews entering the former site of the Temple Mount which the Muslim invaders claimed as their own. Countless peoples of all religions visit the Vatican. Bethlehem operates under Muslim rule. And people of all religions visit Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. Non-Jews, including President Trump and the Pope, visit the Western Wall. Why is Islam obsessed with driving people away?

“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Isaiah 56:7 envisions the day when everyone will pray there. That is a vision that Hamas, the Muslim world and the UN are obsessed with blocking.

Why was Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood terror group, so obsessed with Jews entering the site of the Temple Mount that it launched a catastrophic war that claimed thousands of lives?

Under colonial rule, Jews were forbidden to even blow the shofar at the climax of Yom Kippur at the bottom of the Western Wall which had been reduced to a trash heap under Muslim rule.

“Eyewitness accounts told of a white-bearded Chassid in a black caftan running for his life, chased by a mob through an alleyway leading to the Western Wall. The pursuers brandished clubs, sabers, and daggers, and howled: ‘Death to the Jewish dogs!’ and ‘Allahu Akhbar!’” 67 Jews were killed in these Muslim massacres, not over Gaza, but over Jews praying.

This is not just a matter of ancient history. The Biden Administration repeatedly warned Israel not to allow Jews to enter the Temple Mount or to pray there.

“Some Jewish groups escorted by Israeli police at the Temple Mount performed religious acts such as prayers,” a more recent State Department report on religious freedom complained, while attacking religious freedom. “In most cases, Israeli police acted to prevent them from praying and removed them, but in other cases, some of which were documented on social media in photos and videos, the police appeared not to notice the acts of prayer.”

“Far-right Israeli minister prays at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site,” an outraged CNN headline stormed. What is it that evil and darkness fears the most? Beneath all the lies, it will always show us.

Hamas killed over 1,000 people and would have killed millions more to seize Jerusalem and stop prayers to God. It took hostages and then tried to pressure them into converting to Islam.

This is a spiritual war in which evil uses the tools of moral inversion to make darkness seem like light and turn light into darkness, to make monsters into heroes, to celebrate the worst crimes, and to make the most horrifying atrocities into the moral high ground of mankind. What drives this war? Fear. And what is it that darkness fears above all else? Darkness fears the light.

Hitler’s Mufti, one of the allies of the Muslim Brotherhood before it officially spawned Hamas, justified his Jihad against the Jews by claiming that they were plotting the “rebuilding of the Temple that is called Solomon’s Temple.” In one poll, 52% of Muslims claimed that Israel was planning to rebuild the Temple even though the country had no intention of any such thing.

“Why Israel is closer than ever to building the Third Temple,” Middle East Eye, a Qatari propaganda site that often promotes Hamas, warned. Last year, an Al Qaeda bulletin also warned that Israel was about to “rebuild the third temple.”

In Judaism, the Temple can only be rebuilt by God, not by man. If Israel had wanted to build a temple, it had nearly 60 years in which to get it done

What do Hamas and its Islamic terrorist allies really fear? Evil fears our bullets less than it fears our faith. It does everything possible to convince us that evil is good and we are evil. Its greatest victory is when we come to believe it. As too many do.

However, when we reject evil and turn to God, it boils with rage and commits atrocities to terrify us. Underneath the crimes and lies, it is possessed by the terror of the day when “the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and they shall come to Zion with song” (Isaiah 51:11) and “So said the Lord: I will return to Zion, and I will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; and Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth, and the mount of the Lord of Hosts be the holy mountain” (Zechariah 8:3).

That is the fear and the hate at the heart of the Islamic Jihad. They don’t kill us, torture us and terrorize us because they believe they’re right, but because they fear they are wrong. ✪

▶️ WHATEVER HAPPENS IN GAZA, ONE OUTCOME IS CERTAIN

WHATEVER HAPPENS IN GAZA, ONE OUTCOME IS CERTAIN

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resident Donald Trump announced on Saturday afternoon that peace in Gaza was at hand: This followed his declaration on late Friday afternoon that “based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE.” Yet Trump’s call to “STAY TUNED” was just the opposite, as what will happen next is even more unpredictable than usual.

Hamas may indeed release the hostages and abide by the conditions of the peace agreement, at least initially. One outcome, however, is certain beyond any doubt whatsoever: Hamas will eventually break the agreement and resume its jihad against Israel. Whatever they may be telling Trump now about being ready for a lasting peace, and however much he may or may not actually believe them, there is no chance whatsoever that Hamas will lay down its arms and start telling its people that they’re just going to have to live in peace with Israel.

This is clear from Hamas’ founding charter, which quotes Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna saying: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” On the surface, it’s an odd statement: a religion, Islam, will supposedly destroy a nation-state, Israel. Yet that is exactly what the jihadis of Hamas intend to do, and why they are fighting. The war against Israel would rage on even if Israel were no larger than a postage stamp. It will never be solved by negotiated settlements, for its guiding principle is the Qur’anic command: “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191).

For a pious, believing Muslim, this command is no less divinely inspired, and no more subject to negotiation or alteration, than the Ten Commandments are for believing Jews and Christians. The command to drive the Jews out from where they drove the Muslims out does not depend upon the events of 1948, or the claims that Israeli forces at that time compelled at least some of the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes.

The land of Israel was once part of the Ottoman Empire, the last Islamic caliphate, and before that by the Abbasid caliphate. As such, by the lights of Islamic theology, it belongs to Islam forever, and Muslims have a responsibility before Allah to drive out those infidels who rule this land now. That responsibility cannot be negotiated away, no matter how skillful the negotiator may be, or how favorable the terms of the proposed agreement.

Although the fact that the war against Israel is a jihad is universally ignored among mainstream foreign policy analysts and policymakers in North America and Europe, Islamic leaders frequently mention the fact, and have done so for many years. As far back as March 1936, Sa’id al-Haj Thabit, the speaker of Iraq’s Parliament, visited Palestine and repeatedly called upon the local Muslims to wage jihad against the Jews.

Two years later, the Muslim Brotherhood proclaimed that such a jihad was an “inescapable obligation on every Muslim.” In 1943, Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, explained to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that there was “religious hostility…between the Moslems and the Jews from the beginning of Islam…which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews toward Islam and the Moslems and their prophet.” Accordingly, the king was happy to discuss proposals for peace in Palestine with “anyone of religion except (repeat except) a Jew.”

Amid the Arab rage after the UN partition vote late in 1947, the ulema (Islamic religious scholars) of Cairo’s venerable al-Azhar, the foremost institution in Sunni Islam, declared that “the liberation of Palestine” was “a religious duty for all Moslems without exception, great and small. The Islamic and Arab Governments should without delay take effective and radical measures, military or “otherwise.” They declared that any Muslim who dealt with Jews (even in such trivial matters as “buying their produce”) “is a sinner and criminal…who will be regarded as an apostate to Islam.” This would carry serious consequences: “He will be separated from his spouse. It is prohibited to be in contact with him.”

In April 1948, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, the mufti of Egypt, issued a fatwa stating that jihad against the Jews in Palestine was an obligation incumbent upon all Muslims, because the Jews were working “to take over…all the lands of Islam.”

This language about the “liberation” of Palestine from the Jews’ being an “obligation incumbent upon all Muslims,” an “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” was rooted in Islam’s theology of jihad. A manual of Islamic law certified by al-Azhar as conforming to “the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni Community” stipulates that “when non-Muslims invade a Muslim country or near to one,” then “jihad is personally obligatory upon the inhabitants of that country,” and indeed, obligatory upon everyone “able to perform it, male or female, old or young,” when “the enemy has surrounded the Muslims.”

The Jews may not have surrounded the Muslims in the military sense, but they could be found everywhere in Palestine, and Muslim leaders considered them to be hostile invaders. Hence every Muslim was obligated to wage jihad against them.

That obligation will remain in the minds of many Muslims as long as Israel exists, and as long as Islam exists. Thus the one outcome that we can be sure about amid all the prevailing uncertainty is that the jihad will go on. Hamas, or its successor, will sooner or later resume its efforts to destroy Israel. Allah demands nothing less. ✪

▶️ A MESSAGE OF HOPE FROM OCTOBER 7TH

A MESSAGE OF HOPE FROM OCTOBER 7TH

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wo years. Two long years since morning broke on Simchat Torah; the holy day whose name literally means “rejoicing in the Torah.” But instead of the sounds of worship and laughter, Israel’s skies were filled with sirens and synagogues were filled sheer terror and endless tears that the country was under attack.

To the south, smoke rose where children should have been awaking to the rising sun. Gunfire sounded, instead of music at a wilderness festival for young people or tractors working the Holy Land’s soil. The air carried cries no mother should ever hear…

And for the past two years, a silence has fallen heavy on every heart that loves Israel. October 7, 2023, is two years ago. However, it’s not that far behind us, more recent than a memory and more painful than a healed scar.

On that day, and every day in the two years since, God has been here. In the bomb shelters where prayers mix with fear, God is there. In the corridors of hospitals where the sounds of prayer and pain mingle, God is there. And in churches and synagogues and living rooms and bedrooms and classrooms across the globe, where prayers are lifted up to Him, God is there. For two years, through the grief and the war and the prayers for peace, God has made His loving presence known.

I have seen that love with my own eyes. As President and Global CEO of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, I walk the narrow streets of Israel and travel the wide roads of America, and I see His presence through the people of faith that I meet; Christians and Jews who see Israel not through the fog of newsprint or the blur of the screen, but through Scripture. They open the Bible and read of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and they know that to bless Israel is to love God’s people and to live out His Word.

And so, two years later, The Fellowship and our millions of supporters carry on this work of blessing God’s people. We build shelters to shield children from rockets. We build trauma centers where wounds are healed and lives are made whole again. We build new lives for refugees fleeing persecution, simply for their faith, and we welcome them to their biblical homeland. And we build bridges—of faith, of friendship, and of fellowship between Christians and Jews.

One of these bridges is adorned with flags. Flags of Fellowship is a global movement in blue and white. Outside churches and synagogues, and in yards and campus quads, tiny hands and wrinkled hands plant Israeli flags in the ground, each one remembering one of the 1,200 lives lost on that dark day two years ago, and each one a proclamation of God’s love.

In a world where flags are burned in anger and hatred, these flags radiate hope. And generosity runs like a river behind those flags. In these two years, The Fellowship has provided more than a quarter of a billion dollars of aid. We have raised up hospital wings that withstand missiles. We have delivered food to the hungry, medicine to the frail, shelter to the weary. And each of these gifts is a proclamation of this love; for Israel and for God’s people.

To every pastor, every grandmother, every college student, and every prayer warrior who love Israel with all their heart—Todah Rabah—Thank You. Your love is a lifeline. Your love changes lives. Your love saves lives. And your love reminds us, here in Israel, that we do not stand alone.

On this second anniversary of October 7, even as we remember the hatred, the desperation, the violence, and the darkness of that day, God’s call is clear. Answer hatred with love. Answer despair with hope. Answer violence with healing. And answer darkness with light. ✪

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