Echoes in Eternity

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! - Isaiah 5:20

I rarely mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since there is little new under the sun in regards to that topic, but this made my blood boil just a little. Brian McLaren pretends to be "generous" toward those he disagrees with (if you can get him to be honest about his disagreement, that is), but then he goes on "fact-finding" missions to Israel and only talks to those stuck in the same echo chamber as himself.

McLaren learned that Palestinians do not want a “two-state solution” but instead desire to “live in peace with Israelis” and want “Jews, Muslims, and Christians to learn to live together as neighbors.”

Really?!?! I suggest that next time McLaren visits Israel, he should visit the widow of Danny Haran and mother of Einat and Yael. She can tell him what happened to her family at the hands of those peace-loving Palestinians.

We live in a time where obvious evil is rare. Then again, evil has almost always been subtle. Few people recognize evil for what it is when it's occurring. Slavery, Nazi Germany, Soviet communism, abortion-on-demand, etc. "World opinion" supported all of those before it denounced them (it still hasn't quite done so with abortion). So it's easy to get lackadaisical about fighting evil when it isn't readily apparent. But that is actually when it is most important to fight evil. In hindsight, everyone agrees that the Rwandan genocide was terrible, but how many spoke up against the daily hatred of Tutsis going out over the radio waves in the months and years prior to the 1994 genocide? A few prophetic voices would have gone a long way then. Likewise, we need to stand up against false teachers and evil prophets like McLaren before we find that through our silence, we have aided and abetted the destruction of Israel and the murders of thousands of innocents.

As the late Richard Weaver would say, ideas have consequences.

This is a few months old, but it bears repeating since it is unlikely that many Americans know much about the situation and it helps us better understand what is going on over in Israel and the Middle East. Last summer, Samir Kuntar and four Hezbollah militants (along with a couple hundred bodies of dead Palestinian and Lebanese militants) were traded for the two dead bodies of the Israeli soldiers killed in the lead-up to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War.

Mr. Kuntar had spent nearly 20 years in Israeli prison (where he earned a degree in Social Studies and married and divorced, so not exactly a Turkish prison) for four murders during a 1979 raid on the Israeli town of Nahariya. With several other men, he broke into the home of the Haran family. The mother and two-year-old daughter Yael hid in a crawlspace while Kuntar led the father and four-year-old daughter away at gunpoint. In her desperation to conceal herself, the mother suffocated her daughter while trying to keep her quiet. Kuntar took the man and his daughter to the beach, where he then executed the father in front of her and then literally bashed in her skull with his rifle. The picture above shows Kuntar's three victims.

Last November, Samir Kuntar met Syria's president, Bashar Assad, who awarded him Syria's highest medal, the Syrian Order of Merit. Sickening, huh?

Oh, and before I forget, former president (but current moral imbecile) Jimmy Carter met with President Assad a couple weeks AFTER Assad gave Kuntar the Order of Merit medal in supposed furtherance of human rights.

Next time you start wondering if Israel is the good guy or the bad guy, remember Einat Haran.

Psalm 28:4

Israel is going completely insane.

[Israel] approved the release of 250 convicted Arab terrorists from prison, as a goodwill gesture to PA chief Abu Mazen.
...
Some of the terrorists being freed attempted to murder Israelis but missed their targets.
...
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted at the cabinet session that releasing the 250 terrorists will not convince Hamas and Hizbullah terrorists to free their IDF hostages. He explained that the move was a “good will” gesture to support Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s new government.