Showing posts with label commentary. Show all posts

Saturday, February 2, 2019

COMMENTARY: Israel's Forgotten Friend in Britain - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: Israel's Forgotten Friend in Britain

Friday, February 01, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

I confess that the article I am about to write was initially intended only to address the important issue of roots – both of Christianity and of Western civilization as a whole.

But I have been somewhat diverted along a different route, which I shall explain. So stay with me as I will eventually return to the roots of my story.

In looking up a verse from Isaiah, where he refers to the “root of Jesse” (one of many prophecies of the coming Messiah, Jesus), I was reminded of the fact that former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson had made much of a text from this passage in support of his Zionist views, spelt out in his book _The Chariot of Israel _and clearly inspired by his strong Christian faith. (I am reliably informed that both Harold and his wife Mary were Bible-believing Congregationalists to which he also owed his brand of Christian socialism).

The text in question, Isaiah 11.11, refers to a second return of Jewish exiles, which trumps the notion that such prophecies were all fulfilled with the return from Babylon so that modern Israel has no right to their ancient land today.

I believe this is very significant in light of the ongoing controversy over rising anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, of which Wilson was a long-time leader and the only occupant of No 10 Downing Street to have won four general elections.

By contrast, current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has openly embraced those who wish to destroy Israel.

Writing for the Jewish Chronicle on the 50th anniversary of Wilson’s first election victory, Robert Philpot dubbed him “the forgotten friend of Israel” who sprang to her aid in 1967 and 1973 and whose first overseas visit after leaving office in 1976 was to Israel, where he received an honorary doctorate and inspected a forest near Nazareth that had been named after him!

In Parliament he described the Jewish state “by any test…the only democracy in [the] region” and his book was described by his Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins as “one of the most strongly Zionist tracts ever written by a non-Jew”.

Tragically, however, his devotion to the cause of Israel contrasts sharply with today’s Labour left from whose ranks he originally hailed.

Which takes me back to my starting point, for the survival of our Judeo-Christian civilization will depend entirely on whether we remain connected to our biblical roots. If we cut ourselves off from our godly heritage, the ‘sap’ that gives us life, direction and purpose will no longer flow, with the result that our culture will wither and die like a tree pulled from the ground.

It’s that time of year when we begin to witness the shoots that produce flowers like snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils pointing the way to another springtime. These beauties come from roots (or bulbs) buried in the ground for many months.

Christianity was the new spring in the purposes of God that emerged from the roots of Judaism. According to St Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians, who had to be reminded that God was not finished with his chosen people, Gentile believers “now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root (of Israel) …You do not support the root, but the root supports you,” he thundered. (Rom 11.17f)

This should encourage us to put our trust squarely in the God of Israel, and his Son, the Jewish Messiah, Jesus, “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David” _(Revelation 5.5), also prophesied by Isaiah as _“the root of Jesse” (Isa 11.10) who will draw the nations (Gentiles) to himself.

In this respect it is also significant that there is a strain of Gentile ‘blood’ in Jesus, through his ancestor Ruth, the Moabitess, King David’s great-grandmother, a wonderful woman of virtue who threw in her lot with her Jewish mother-in-law Naomi.

Still on this theme, Isaiah’s discussion of roots is related to a springtime for the nation of Israel that surely speaks of today with its reference to a second return from exile, this time not just from Babylon but “from the four quarters of the earth” (Isa 11.11f) including “the islands of the sea” considered by some theologians to refer to the British Isles.

This passage also speaks of a coming millennial age of perfect peace when _“the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together…” _(Isa 11.6)

Something of a preview of this beautiful picture was sent to me by a friend the other day. It was a photo of an elephant crossing a road with a lioness and her cub, using its curled up trunk to protect the baby lion from the scorching heat. (Ed. note: The veracity of the photo is currently being disputed.)

“They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isa 11.9)

As for Israel, the Lord speaks emphatically of final restoration through the prophet Amos, concluding with the words: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted…”(Amos 9.15)

Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; and A Nation Reborn, available from Christian Publications International

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Tuesday, January 15, 2019

COMMENTARY: What Do Abortion and Antisemitism Have in Common? - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: What Do Abortion and Antisemitism Have in Common?

Monday, January 14, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

Global

As London-based newspapers noted with horror that the new year had been marred by yet more fatal stabbings, it was another statistic that really shocked me. And it’s one that points to what lies behind the eruption of violence on our capital city’s streets.

While we remain obsessed with focusing on the symptoms, rather than the causes, of our problems, we will get no closer to a solution.

Knife crime has risen to frightening levels which have left London’s streets apparently now more dangerous than those of New York, long notorious for its gang warfare.

But this shocking dilemma is met only with cries for more police, and more funding for law enforcement generally.

And yet in the midst of this comes news that abortion remains the biggest cause of death by far in our blood-soaked world. Whereas 8.2 million people died from cancer in 2018, almost 42 million abortions were recorded. In other words, for every 33 live births, ten infants were aborted.

The connection is obvious: violence breeds violence. We slaughter babies in the womb by the millions – legally in most cases – and wonder why violence on an unprecedented scale has erupted on our streets. And I am aware that there are other, often related, factors such as broken homes causing lost and unloved young men to seek ‘family’ elsewhere.

At a time when there is a major focus on research into killer diseases – and there has undoubtedly been much success with discovering new cures for cancer – anti-abortion fundraisers would more likely be harangued or beaten up than receive open public support.

And yet the Bible says: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it?” (Proverbs 24:11-12)

While every victim of senseless knife crime is a tragic statistic, the mass slaughter of innocents that goes by the euphemistic name of ‘choice’ for women whose lifestyle is unsuited to raising children, is a blot on Western civilization in general, and British society in particular.

After all, there was a time when we led the way with missionary zeal in proclaiming the efficacy of a Judeo-Christian culture based on the Ten Commandments, one of which states with the utmost clarity: “You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20.13)

But as soon as we jettisoned our commitment to those values, many of the nations we have influenced followed suit.

Our only hope as a nation is in returning to the God-given laws Moses was given on Mt Sinai – laws that Christ subsequently enabled us to follow through his Spirit in our hearts.

The slaughter of innocents is essentially a mark of rebellion against God – and the devil himself is behind it.

In anticipation of the birth of Moses, the Egyptian pharaoh tried to prevent God’s will from being fulfilled by murdering every male Jewish infant (Exodus 1.22). Moses was a ‘type’ of the Messiah to come in that he led God’s people out of slavery towards new life in the Promised Land. Jesus went further by redeeming all who trust him from slavery to sin.

But when Christ arrived on the scene some 1,500 years after Moses, King Herod ordered the slaughter in Bethlehem of every child under the age of two. (Matthew 2.16)

In both cases, God was about to usher in a wonderful new era – and Satan tried to stop it.

In more recent times, when six million Jews were mercilessly slaughtered in the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, one-and-a-half million children were among them.

Once again, God was about to introduce a glorious new epoch for Israel, with Jews back in their ancient land and many recognising Jesus as Messiah. Satan tried to stop it in an unspeakably monstrous way. Yet, even so, he failed in his ultimate objective, but at a terrible cost of precious lives because so few who were in a position to do so lifted a finger to help.

It’s interesting that the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967 happened to coincide with a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the old established churches. Whenever God wants to do something special in revealing his presence and power to sinful humanity, Satan seeks to spoil his plan.

Ultimately, however, the devil is doomed to defeat and will take all his allies with him into the pit of everlasting fire known as hell. (See Rev 20.7-10)

St Paul writes: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” (Romans 16.20)

My new year message to abortionists, and all who support them, is: Stop this Satanic slaughter!

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Sunday, January 6, 2019

COMMENTARY: Europe's Migrant Crisis & the Jews - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: Europe's Migrant Crisis & the Jews

Sunday, January 06, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

Christians

Among the incidents reported over a Christmas period during which I was largely preoccupied with the death of my dear mum were the illegal immigrant crisis and the potential disaster of a rogue drone that brought Gatwick Airport to a standstill.

And there is a poignant connection between the two that has an important message for Britain in the new year.

Jews trying to escape the gas chambers were once prevented by the British from entering their own fatherland, a nation that has now come to our rescue by providing the technology used to ground the unmanned flying machine.

Before, during and immediately after World War II, British soldiers were ordered to deal with ‘illegal immigrants’ to Israel, and the grossly insensitive way in which they handled it still reverberates in the hearts of those who experienced it and their descendants.

The greatest injustice of that tardy episode in our history was the fact that Britain had been charged by the League of Nations to prepare the Holy Land for re-settlement by Jews who had been scattered and persecuted among the nations for almost 2,000 years.

It was thus an obvious refuge for Jews desperately trying to flee Nazi-occupied Europe. But in order to appease the region’s Arab population, who used violence and intimidation to discourage Jewish repatriation, we disgracefully limited the quota of immigrants.

Although we had recognised, finally, that you couldn’t negotiate with fanatical dictators like Hitler, we failed to apply the same lesson to our dealings with the Arabs of the Middle East.

The story of one particular family, as told by Aliza Ramati in Where are you my child?(published by Zaccmedia), is especially harrowing and helps to bring the current migrant crisis into perspective. Theirs was a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire – escaping from the Fuhrer’s claws only to be crunched by the jaws of the British lion.

After fleeing Czechoslovakia in November 1940, they eventually joined 1,800 refugees boarding a rickety old ship designed to carry only 300 people.

Because they didn’t have the necessary papers, the crew were reluctant to press on with any haste for fear of incurring the wrath of the authorities themselves, so the desperate passengers kept bribing them with jewellery and other gifts. But the journey was perilous, with much sickness and death. And when, after some months, they finally caught sight of Haifa, they were surrounded by the British navy who treated them like dogs before re-routing them to detention camps in the faraway Indian Ocean island of Mauritius as well as in Atlit, near Haifa.

Some were transferred to a bigger ship, the SS Patria, which was subsequently blown up and sunk with the loss of 250 lives.

The Haganah, an underground Jewish movement fighting the British, planted a bomb on the vessel with the apparent intention of only disabling it in order to prevent the deportation of its passengers, but the plan went horribly wrong.

As a result, the family at the centre of this true story got separated in the chaos following the explosion – husband from wife, and wife from baby, feared drowned. Another described swimming to safety through a sea of blood. But a Viennese man had saved the child, who was reunited with his mother some time later.

The family somehow survived their ordeals to realise their dream of settling in Israel, though it took a circuitous route via Mauritius where, with the help of the Czech consulate in South Africa, the storyteller’s grandfather enlisted as a Czech soldier fighting the Germans and was eventually posted to Israel, where he deserted in order to join the Haganah.

His wife, however, was treated with compassion by one British officer, who paid for it with imprisonment and who wrote: “I joined the British army with the intention of fighting the Nazis… To my sorrow, I was not sent to the battlefield, as I had hoped. Instead, I was sent here to assist in taking care of the Jewish illegal immigrants… I’m a soldier, and I must obey orders, but I am doing everything I can in order not to lose my humanity…”

The book is the product of a school ‘Roots’ project undertaken by 13-year-old Roni, who successfully traced the tortuous and heroic path of her ancestors with the aid of cassette recordings of her great-grandparents.

Family tree searches have become quite fashionable – and that’s a good thing as knowledge of our roots helps us appreciate the positive influences of past generations.

In the same way, it is vitally important and hugely enriching for Christians to explore the Judaic roots of their faith, which adds clarity and insight to the great truths of Scripture which, of course, came to us through the Jewish people and patriarchs.

A better understanding of our roots might well have prevented much of the persecution suffered by Jews at the hands of ‘Christian’ Europe.

Western civilization itself is based on the framework of biblical teaching perfectly reflected in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, and if we cut ourselves off from its influence, we will lose the sap that gives us life, light, wisdom and compassion – and will wither and die as a tree does when cut off from its roots (see Romans 11.17f).

The future of our civilization depends on remaining connected to these roots. Those who oppose Israel need to understand that we cannot do without them. Even the technology that brought down the drone at Gatwick was developed in Israel, whose expertise in dealing with terror is proving beneficial to all.

As for the Iranian and other migrants risking their lives trying to cross the channel, there is a need for compassion, mixed with wisdom.

Above all, we must not repeat the shameful response of the British to the Jews trying to escape the gas chambers.

Jesus famously said: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” – the so-called ‘golden rule’ – “for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7.12)

PHOTO: A scene at the Atlit detention camp, complete with barbed wire, conveys something of the brutal way the British treated those fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. (Charles Gardner)

Sunday, November 25, 2018

COMMENTARY: Anti-Semitism Doesn't Pay - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: Anti-Semitism Doesn't Pay

Sunday, November 25, 2018 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

Anti-Semitism

Proof, if it were needed, that it doesn’t pay to be anti-Semitic has come with the rejection of Roald Dahl’s image for British coins.

The Royal Mint, responsible for such decisions, has ruled him out for his virulent anti-Semitism, which should be taken as some consolation at a time when British society is rife with anti-Jewish sentiment – even a Kristallnacht 80th anniversary vigil at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner was broken up by men shouting “Kill the Jews” in Arabic.

Dahl’s views on the subject were apparently not widely known in spite of the fact that the immensely successful children’s author made no secret of it.

But as Tony Rennell put it in the Daily Mail, his dark side was brought to light with the Royal Mint’s decision against honouring his achievements by dedicating a British coin to him – the honour going instead to one William Shakespeare “whose caricature of a Jew (Shylock) in The Merchant of Venice fed anti-Semitism for centuries.”

I think that’s a little unfair as the Bard did not make a habit of such sentiment.

Dahl, on the other hand, was quoted in the Independent newspaper as saying: “I’m certainly anti-Israel and I’ve become anti-Semitic.” And he told the New Statesman: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them (the Jews) for no reason.”

Rennell lists several other nauseous instances of Dahl’s anti-Semitism that might have had him arrested today (he died in 1990, aged 74). And while acknowledging that he remains one of the greatest children’s storytellers of the 20th century, he suggests that the dark side to many of his tales is a fair commentary on his life, with much evidence of cruelty and unpleasantness.

Yet not even Jewish Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, when he shot the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) film, had any idea of his rank anti-Semitism.

What really bothers me is that there is so much that is dark and gloomy in today’s literature, especially for children, as well as in TV drama. In fact, it’s an absolute obsession, reflected by the way in which Halloween is rapidly challenging Christmas for our kids’ attention as an increasing number of homes are decorated with various aspects of occult paraphernalia.

There is surely an urgency as never before to point our children to the “light of the world” (John 8.12).

Dahl’s rejection for our coins reminds me of how America’s famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, fell spectacularly from hero and zero as soon as his Nazi sympathies were made public on a national radio broadcast.

He ended his life in relative obscurity and even a star-studded movie about his magnificent flying exploits was a flop at the box office.

In other words, he brought a curse on himself. For the Word of God says of Abraham’s seed: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” (Gen 12.3)

Whatever anyone may think of the Jewish people, the Bible tells us quite plainly that they are God’s chosen people, with several references to them being his “treasured possession”. (See, for example, Deut 7.6)

Anti-Semitism is thus the rotten fruit at the end of the dark road of rebellion against our Creator. Hitler went all the way down that path, and not only destroyed himself, but also brought his country down with him, along with much of Europe.

A massive battle for the soul of our nation continues today – between good and evil, light and darkness, God and the devil.

Jesus warned: _“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” _(Matthew 7.13f)

Choose life!

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Saturday, February 2, 2019