Israel’s Northern Border: The Threat of Radical Islam - II&ET

Israel’s Northern Border: The Threat of Radical Islam    Oct. 30, 2015

ISRAEL’S northern border has seen many changes during the past year. Between the threat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Syrian Civil War just across the border, the IDF cautiously observes a vulnerable and deteriorating security situation.

HEZBOLLAH: IRAN’S PROXY AT ISRAEL’S BORDER

Hezbollah is one of the world’s largest, most sophisticated, wealthiest and most militarily capable terrorist organizations. Created, trained, funded and deployed as a proxy of the Iranian government, with operations spanning across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Shi’ite group has effectively taken over the many regions of Lebanon, launched thousands of rockets at Israel, and murdered hundreds of innocent civilians.

On August 14, 2006, Resolution 1701 ended the 2nd Lebanon War and prohibited Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon. 9 years later, Hezbollah’s stronghold on the region not only remains intact, but more dangerous than ever.

Armed with an arsenal of 100,000 rockets capable of reaching every point on Israel’s map, Hezbollah is one of the main threats to the country. As recently as June 2015, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, declared:

“I clearly say to Israel: Hezbollah threatens to displace millions of Israelis in the next war.”

The January 28, 2015 attack on an IDF patrol near Mount Dov, with the use of state-of-the-art Russian manufactured anti-tank missiles, proves the threat Hezbollah continues to pose.

Recently, footage showing the group’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War has emerged. This footage documents Hezbollah’s use of modern military equipment such as advanced UAVs for offensive and intelligence-gathering means.

Benefiting from Iran’s financial and military help and using the Syrian battlefield to gain combat experience, Hezbollah and its weapons arsenal menace the lives of millions.

THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR: GLOBAL JIHAD ON THE BORDER

Four and a half years into the Syrian Civil War, the situation across the border is more volatile than ever. Occasional spillovers of the conflict have seen rockets and mortars fall into Israeli territory, and the sound of the ongoing fighting can be heard on a daily basis at the border. But in the midst of the chaotic situation in Syria, radical Islamist groups funded and armed by Iran have recently attacked Israel and threatened the lives of millions of Israeli civilians.

Just last August, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization present both in the Gaza Strip and in Syria, launched rockets against Israel’s Golan Heights and Galilee.

The PIJ’s headquarters are located in Damascus, Syria, but it also maintains bases in Beirut and Tehran. This terrorist organization has on numerous accounts revealed where it receives its training and funding.

In reaction to July’s attack, the IAF neutralized the terrorist cell responsible for the rocket fire.

In July 2014, at the beginning of the Israeli-Gaza conflict, they declared:

“We especially want to thank our brothers in the Islamic Republic of Iran (…) we won’t forget to send our gratitude to the brothers in Hezbollah, the Islamic resistance in South Lebanon. Particularly Hassan Nasrallah, for their stance and support, be it financial, military or moral support.”

However, despite the security situation, the IDF has continued to provide medical aid to over 1,700 Syrians fleeing the war-torn areas adjacent to Israel.

Israel’s northern front is undergoing an unprecedented change. The deteriorating security situation in both Syria and Lebanon allows Iranian-sponsored terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah or the Islamic Jihad to be virtually present on Israel’s border. But as always, the IDF is ready to face these threats and to protect Israel’s civilians.

Islamic State Planning Mass Attack On Britain, Warns Head Of MI5 - II&ET

Islamic State Planning Mass Attack On Britain, Warns Head Of MI5 

Oct. 30, 2015 II&ET

ANDREW Parker says current level of threat from homegrown jihadis the highest he has seen in a career spanning 32-years


Islamic State terrorists are planning mass casualty attacks in Britain the head of MI5 has warned.


Andrew Parker, director general of the security agency, said threats from homegrown jihadis who want to fight for the militant movement showed no sign of abating.


He also publicly admitted for the first time that MI5 had to carry out computer hacking attacks against terror networks to crack their communications.


Delivering the Lord Mayor of London’s annual defence and security lecture, he said the current level of threat was the highest he had seen in a career spanning 32-years. In the past 12 months his agency has thwarted six terror plots in the UK and another seven abroad.


Mr Parker said four fifths of the 4,000-strong agency’s resources were directed at stopping terrorist attacks, with an increasing proportion of them linked to Syria and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).


He said: “More than 750 extremists from this country have travelled to Syria, and the growth in the threat shows no sign of abating.

“We are seeing plots against the UK directed by terrorists in Syria; enabled through contacts with terrorists in Syria; and inspired online by Isil’s sophisticated exploitation of technology.”

Britons are being rapidly radicalised online and then encouraged to carry out low tech but deadly attacks.

He said: “On top of that, in a range of attacks in Europe and elsewhere, this year we have seen greater ambition for mass casualty attacks.”

While the rise of Isil had dominated the headlines in the past 12 months, he said there was still a threat from al-Qaeda terrorists who are also planning massive attacks in the UK.

He said: “All of this means that the threat we are facing today is on a scale and at a tempo that I have not seen before in my career.”

He went on: “We have thwarted six attempts at terrorist attacks in the UK in the last year, and several plots overseas.

“It may not yet have reached the high water mark, and despite the successes we have had, we can never be confident of stopping everything. The death of 31 British nationals in the Sousse attacks in June was an appalling reminder of the threat.”

The scale of the threat meant MI5 had to update its “toolbox” of methods to fight terrorists, including using computer attacks.
He said: “This includes the ability to conduct operations online and to mount IT attacks (known as equipment interference), under a warrant authorised by the Home Secretary, against terrorist networks, so that we can access their communications.”

Defending the agency’s ability to access communications data, he said: “We use these tools within a framework of strict safeguards and rigorous oversight, but without them we would not be able to keep the country safe.

“As I have said before, we do not, and could not, go browsing at will through the lives of innocent people.”

Obama’s Former Pastor: I Helped Obama Accept Christianity Without Having to Renounce Islam - II&ET

Obama’s Former Pastor: I Helped Obama Accept Christianity Without Having to Renounce Islam 

Oct. 26, 2015 - Israel, Islam & End Times (II&ET)

IN a stunning interview, NY Times best selling author Ed Klein said Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright helped Obama accept Christianity without having to renounce Islam.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. was like a second father to Barack Obama and helped shape his political philosophy, author Ed Klein explains based on his interview with Wright.

In his book “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House,”, Klein interviewed Wright for three and a half hours. Wright told him of Obama’s secret efforts to keep him quiet during the presidential campaign. But the more significant material spotlights how important Wright was to Obama’s thinking even before the future president began going to Wright’s church in 1988.

“It’s one thing for Obama to sit in the church and listen to the Rev. Wright spew his hatred against whites, Jews, and America,” Klein says. “But in my view, having spoken to the Rev. Wright, that paled by comparison with the personal relationship that Obama had that went way beyond his simply being a member of the church listening to all this stuff.”

Obama began his relationship with Wright, whom he has called a mentor and sounding board, three years before he began attending Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“Obama went to the Rev. Wright at every stage of his career whenever things went wrong,” says Klein, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and a former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine.

“For instance, when he lost the 2000 congressional election for the seat that Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, holds from the South Side of Chicago,” Klein says. “He was in a state of terrible depression, and he owed a great deal of money, and his marriage was on the rocks. Who did he go to? He went to the Rev. Wright for marriage counselling. He went to the Rev. Wright about what shall I do next, Rev? Every step of his career, every step of his development as a political figure was made in conjunction with conversations that he had with the Rev. Wright personally.”

As revealed in the book “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,” just before Wright spoke at the National Press Club, Obama secretly met on April 4, 2008 with Wright at Trinity’s parsonage where Wright then lived.

So that they would not be noticed, agents made a point of driving Obama in a mini-van instead of the usual Suburban. They parked their other vehicles a block away. Obama spent an hour with Wright and then left.

“At this secret meeting with him, Obama practically begged him not to go on and speak any further,” Klein says. “This was after one of Obama’s best friends had sent an email to a member of the church saying that he was prepared to give the Rev. Wright $150,000 if he would shut up. The Rev. Wright told me that he has saved that email.”

In the recorded interview, Wright says he basically could not afford to shut up for $150,000, Klein says.

“Wright explained he had expenses that he had to pay,” Klein says. “He had a child and a couple of grandkids in college that he was paying for. And so he goes around the United States giving sermons and making speeches, and he gets paid for that.”

Klein says Obama originally sought out Wright to discuss community activism.

“Quickly the conversations turned from picking up garbage on the street and getting streetlights put up on street corners to political matters and religious matters,” Klein says. “And the Rev. Wright turned into really a substitute father figure, who guided Obama in the two major areas of his life.”

The first area was Obama’s identity — just who was he?

“Obama was steeped in Islam, he knew a lot about Islam, but knew nothing about Christianity,” Klein says.

Klein asked, “Do you think he [Obama] ever thought of himself as a Muslim?” To which Wright replied, “Yep, yep, yep, and that was this thing, I’m sure he got some grief, not proselytising grief, but grief from that part of his family, just from, and I say that based on my wide range of Muslim friends.”

Klein asked Wright if he converted Obama from being a Muslim into a Christian. He said, “I don’t know about that. but I can tell you that I made it easy for him to come to an understanding of who Jesus Christ is and not feel that he was turning his back on his Islamic friends and his Islamic traditions and his understanding of Islam,” Wright said.

The second area was Obama’s political philosophy. Wright introduced Obama to Black Liberation theology.

“Black Liberation theology is based essentially on the Marxist belief that there is an oppressor class and an oppressed class,” Klein says. “And in the case of Black Liberation theology, the oppressor class are the whites, and the oppressed are the blacks. And there is a ‘maldistribution’ of wealth in this country, a quote from Black Liberation theology.”

The point is that wealth should be redistributed.

“This is quite close, if not identical, to Marxist beliefs,” Klein says.

Happier times: Rev. Wright was considered as a ‘Second Father’ to Obama.

As noted in the story “Media Blackout on Rev. Wright Started in 2007,” for three months during Obama’s primary campaign, the mainstream media ignored Newsmax stories reporting on Rev. Wright’s hate-filled sermons; his denunciations of America, whites, and Israel; and the fact that he gave an award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan.

By the time the media picked up the stories, Obama was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the primary elections.

According to a Hillary Clinton aide quoted in David Remnick’s “The Ridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” if the media had run the Wright story just two months earlier, Obama’s candidacy “would have been over.”

“Everybody says Obama sat there for 20 years listening to the Rev. Wright spew his anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-American tirade in church,” Klein says. “The fact of the matter is that his relationship with the Rev. Wright goes back further than his membership in the church and sitting and listening to the Rev. Wright.”

Klein says it was clear from his interview with Wright that he felt abandoned and stabbed in the back by Obama.

“For many, many years, Wright was Obama’s single most important intellectual and spiritual guide, and when things got rough, Obama threw him under the bus,” Klein says. “Wright was still stinging from that experience.”

About II&ET

Providing news and commentary regarding issues surrounding Israel, Islam and the Middle East in the context of Biblical End Times teaching. Posts are from a Christian evangelical, premillennial and pro-Israel perspective.

The general editor of Israel, Islam and End Times is Daniel Secomb. Daniel is also a Bible teacher who specializes on topics to do with End Times, Israel, the Jewish People, apologetics, creationism, systematic Bible studies, atheism, Islam, the left-wing agenda, social issues and Christian living.