Standing in support of Israel, Jews, and believers in all the nations, in the name of Jesus (Yeshua). Sharing biblical truth, encouragement, news and prophecy.
Why does Esther deem it necessary to invite Haman to her banquet with Ahasuerus? As long as the Jews knew that they had Esther in the palace, they were counting on her to reverse Haman's evil decree. Esther wanted the Jews to fully repent. Inviting Haman made it appear that she was joining forces with him. At that point, the Jews gave up on Esther and called out to God with a new intensity that merited salvation. Throughout the ages, true redemption arrives when we realize that we have no one to rely on aside from the Lord. Next week is the festival of Purim when Jews around the world celebrate the miraculous events and powerful lessons recorded in the Book of Esther. Learn more about the festival and shop for everything you need to observe the holiday.
In a Sabbath sermon on Saturday, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef said that Israelis should not fear punishment in civil courts but obey Jewish law and kill terrorists outright in instances of knife attacks or other assault.
Touch biblical Israel with this scaled, topographically contoured map of Israel as it was in Biblical times. It is labeled with all of the towns, cities, regions, rivers and lakes mentioned in the Bible. See exactly where each tribe settled in the Land, the locations of the surrounding nations, and the roads that the patriarchs walked. Any place with special Biblical status, such as Cities of Refuge, is marked on the map. Feel the valleys and mountains of Israel under your fingers and understand the Bible in a totally new way!
Thank you for your Blessings in providing such an excellent daily coverage in 365 days. My wife and I support Israel in our prayers and Blessings. Wonderful photographs of all sorts of views and events in Israel. We have visited Israel for the Feast of Tabernacles, some years back (2008), and your daily issue of 365 days keeps our memories fresh, of the wonderful short time we spent in this Historic Holy Land. Keep up this good work. With all our thanks, Bob + Pat Tremlett from Adelaide, South Australia.
There is a real and growing and chilling concern among top intelligence officials that ISIS is steadily developing the ability to launch massive, genocidal attacks against its enemies using chemical weapons. Whether ISIS is planning such attacks inside the U.S., in Europe or only within the Middle East, is not yet clear.
Ghastly attacks of precisely this sort are the premise of my two most recent novels,The Third Target and The First Hostage. When I began researching and writing the series, however, there was no actual evidence that ISIS possessed -- or had access to -- weapons of mass destruction. But the situation is changing for the worse.
Recently, U.S. special forces captured ISIS's chemical weapons chief. "Sleiman Daoud al-Afari was snatched close to a month ago in the town of Badoosh, north-west of the Isis stronghold of Mosul," reported the UK Guardian. "A senior Iraqi official said he was an industrial engineer in former dictator Saddam Hussein’s military and had been a member of Isis throughout all its earlier incarnations." This week, U.S. forces handed overthe terrorist to the Iraqi government.
U.S., Iraqi and Kurdish forces have been attacking ISIS chemical weapons production facilities. It is likely that knowledge of these facilities came from intelprovided by al-Afari.
But the risk is increasingly high that ISIS is planning "enormous and spectacular attacks" in Europe, the U.S., in Israel or in a Sunni Arab country, as a top British security official recently warned.
The Islamic State group has launched two chemical attacks near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, killing a 3-year-old girl, injuring some 600 people and causing hundreds more to flee, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
Security and hospital officials say the latest attack took place early Saturday in the small town of Taza, which was also struck by a barrage of rockets carrying chemicals three days earlier.
“There is fear and panic among the women and children,” said Adel Hussein, a local official in Taza. “They're calling for the central government to save them.” Hussein said a German and an American forensics team arrived in the area to test for the presence of chemical agents.
The wounded are suffering from infected burns, suffocation and dehydration, said Helmi Hamdi, a nurse at the Taza hospital. He said eight people were transferred to Baghdad for treatment.
U.S. and Iraqi officials said U.S. special forces captured the head of the ISIS unit trying to develop chemical weapons in a raid last month in northern Iraq.
The U.S.-led coalition said the chemicals ISIS has so far used include chlorine and a low-grade sulfur mustard which is not very potent....
The coalition began targeting ISIS' chemical weapons infrastructure with airstrikes and special operations raids two months ago, Iraqi intelligence officials and a Western security official in Baghdad told the AP.
Airstrikes are targeting laboratories and equipment, and further special forces raids targeting chemical weapons experts are planned, the officials said....
"The evidence is in, and it’s chilling — the Islamic State is intentionally waging a war of genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria. The jihadists are systematically trying to exterminate the Christian population in both countries by forcing followers of Jesus Christ to convert to their brand of Apocalyptic Islam or enslaving them, murdering them, starving them, and/or driving them out of the region."
To its credit, the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday overwhelmingly approved a bipartisan resolution declaring it genocide. It passed 383 to zero.
"The House of Representatives on Monday unanimously passed a resolution labeling the ISIS atrocities against Christian groups in Syria and Iraq 'genocide,' a term the State Department been reluctant to use about the attacks and mass murders by the terror group," reported CNN.
Let us pray that the Senate soon follows suit, and the President, as well. Let us also pray that the U.S. government will demonstrate bipartisan resolve to strengthen our alliance with Sunni Arab nations like Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates and intensify military action to crush ISIS and liberate northern Iraq.
As I portray in The Third Targetand The First Hostage, the leaders of the Islamic State believe they are required by Allah to commit genocide to accelerate the coming of the Mahdi, the establishment of their Caliphate, and the End of Days. They must be stopped immediately before their savagery expands and they strike inside the U.S. homeland.
The House approved a resolution Monday that declares the Islamic State is committing genocide against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East -- putting even more pressure on the Obama administration to do the same ahead of a deadline later this week.
The resolution passed the House with a unanimous vote of 383-0.
The resolution came to a vote just days after the release of a graphic new report by the Knights of Columbus and In Defense of Christians on ISIS' atrocities. The report made the case that the terror campaign against Christians and other minorities in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East is, in fact, genocide.
“When ISIS systematically targets Christians, Yezidis, and other ethnic and religious minorities for extermination, this is not only a grave injustice—it is a threat to civilization itself,” Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., said in a statement. “We must call the violence by its proper name: genocide.”
The resolution was voted on ahead of a congressionally mandated March 17 deadline for Secretary of State John Kerry and the White House to make a decision on whether to make such a declaration. The measure is an effort to force the administration's hand on the issue, as the administration has so far declined to take an official position.
There is a similar measure in the Senate that has yet to be voted on.
“Christians, Yezidis, and other beleaguered minority groups can find new hope in this trans-partisan and ecumenical alliance against ISIS’ barbaric onslaught,” Fortenberry, who is co-chairman of the Religious Minorities of the Middle East Caucus and represents America’s largest Yezidi community, said in the statement.
The measure also received the backing of House Republican leadership, with Speaker Paul Ryan calling on the Obama administration to take action in light of recent attacks against Christians. “Last week, ISIS militants killed 16 people, including four Catholic nuns, at a retirement home in southern Yemen,” Ryan said in a statement Monday. “This is the latest in a string of brutal attacks committed by ISIS against Christian and other minorities. Yet the administration has still not called this what it is: A genocide.”.....
....In addition to the genocide resolution, the House also voted on a measure to create an international tribunal to try those associated with atrocities by the Assad regime, ISIS and related groups. The measure passed in a vote of 392 to 3. The no votes came from Reps. Justin Amash, R-Mich, Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii.
At least three presidential candidates -- Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz on the Republican side, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side -- have called on the administration to designate ISIS atrocities against Christians as genocide.....
Posted: 14 Mar 2016 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
If Americans are so happy, then why do we consume 80 percent of the entire global supply of prescription painkillers? Less than 5 percent of the world’s population lives in this country, and yet we buy four-fifths of these highly addictive drugs. In the United States today, approximately 4.7 million Americans are addicted to prescription pain relievers, and that represents about a 300 percent increase since 1999. If you personally know someone that is suffering from this addiction, then you probably already know how immensely destructive these drugs can be. Someone that was formally living a very healthy and normal life can be reduced to a total basket case within a matter of weeks. And of course many don’t make it back at all. According to the CDC, more than 28,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2014. Incredibly, those deaths represented 60 percent of all drug overdose deaths in the United States for that year…
A report released by the US Centers for Disesase Control and Prevention (CDC) in January revealed that drug-overdose deaths reached a new high in 2014, totaling 47,055 people. Opioids, a type of powerful painkiller that requires a prescription, were involved in 60% of those deaths.
Many Americans that start out on legal opioids quickly find themselves moving over to heroin because it is often cheaper and easier to obtain, and the U.S. is now facing a tremendous epidemic of heroin abuse as well. In fact, the number of Americans that die of a heroin overdose nearly quadrupled between 2000 to 2013. Finally, the federal government has started to take notice of this crisis. A bill was recently passed to spend more than a billion dollars over the next two year fighting this problem. But as long as doctors are writing thousands upon thousands of new prescriptions for these painkillers each year, this crisis is not going to go away any time soon. In the Appalachians, these prescription painkillers are commonly known as “hillbilly heroin“, and all of the attention that the New Hampshire primaries received focused a lot of attention on how this crisis is destroying countless numbers of lives up in the Northeast. But one survey found that the states with the biggest problems with painkiller addiction are actually in the West…
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a survey of approximately 67,500 people across the United States, found that the states with the highest rates of narcotic painkiller abuse were in the West – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.
Unless you are about to die, I would very strongly recommend that you resist any attempt by your doctor to put you on these “medications”. Just consider what happened to one stay-at-home mother named Norah Mangan…
I am an educated, suburban wife and stay-at-home mother of four. Life had been good to me until a fateful visit with an orthopedic physician, my chief complaint being mild arthritic pain in my toes. My physician handed me the first of many monthly prescriptions for Oxycodone and what followed that appointment was a rapid descent into hell. Within six months, I had become a raving drug addict.
Before too long, Norah had to turn to means that were less than legal in order to keep fueling her addiction. Her life was turned into a complete and utter disaster by drugs that were legally prescribed to her…
It wasn’t long before my legal monthly prescription fell woefully short in terms of keeping my life altering pain at bay. In the interest of not incriminating myself, I’ll simply share that when procured through other means, Oxycodone generally sells for one dollar per milligram. I was draining our savings and was out of my mind. I was so tortured that I didn’t care about the deterioration of my moral values, in fact, I didn’t even notice.
It’s hard to imagine that in such a short period of time I had morphed from a Mrs. Cleaver, baking hot cinnamon buns in anticipation of my children’s arrival home from school, to Scarface crushing pills on the glass top of the executive desk in our home office while thinking to myself as I heard them arrive from school…why oh why are they home already?
You can read the rest of her amazing story right here… The truth is that we are the most drugged people on the face of the planet. It has been estimated that 52 million Americans over the age of 12 have used prescription drugs in non-medical ways, and this problem gets worse with each passing year. According to research that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are currently on at least one prescription drug, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs. And the numbers are far worse for older Americans. The following statistics come from one of my previous articles… –According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month. –There is an unintentional drug overdose death in the United States every 19 minutes. –In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined. –According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs. –The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world. –Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are. –A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered that approximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug. –A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs. We are a deeply unhappy nation that has been trained to turn to pills as a “quick fix” for our hurt and our pain. Yes, there are medical situations that call for prescription pain relievers. But what we are seeing in America today goes far, far beyond that. We are a nation of addicts that is always in search of a way to fill the gaping holes that we feel deep in our hearts. This prescription pain killer crisis is just another symptom of a much deeper problem. So what is the solution?
Has God called you to be a leader? Ministry Today magazine is the source that Christian leaders who want to serve with passion and purpose turn to. Click here to subscribe and to receive a free leadership book.
The seemingly endless 5-year-old Syrian civil war has presented Israel with a number of complex threats, including the rise of the Islamic State terror group. Yet most Israeli leaders believe that the Iranian-funded Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah remains by far the Jewish state's most formidable enemy to the north.
At the same time, during the last several years, Hezbollah has been preoccupied with supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his fight against rebels and other Islamic terror groups. Has the Syrian civil war, which is viewed as one of the bloodiest conflicts on Earth, taken a serious toll on Hezbollah? Or has the war actually turned Hezbollah into a more potent threat to Israel?
"I think it cuts both ways," Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank who counts Hezbollah among his areas of expertise, told JNS.org.
"Hezbollah has lost a significant amount of experienced fighters on the battlefield in Syria. All of their vigor, youth, expert knowledge and battle experience—which, according to Hezbollah, should have been used against Israel—has been wasted in Syria," Ottolenghi said.
Indeed, Hezbollah has seen significant causalities in Syria, with more than 1,000 fighters being killed in battles against rebel groups and Sunni Muslim terror groups such as Islamic State and the Nusra Front.
Yet Hezbollah has also "gained an unprecedented amount of battle experience [in Syria], including urban warfare, which they will benefit from in any future conflict against Israel," Ottolenghi said.
"They have also benefited from fighting in an increasingly integrated fashion with Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the Russians," he added. "They have access now to better weapons and have gained with Iran a new front in southern Syria, which they can use to open a new battle against Israel in the Golan Heights, if they wish to."
Hezbollah has significantly bolstered its weapons arsenal since its last conflict with Israel in 2006. According to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hezbollah went to war with Israel in 2006 with around 13,000 short-range and medium-range rockets, but "today it could have over 100,000 rockets and missiles, including a number of long-range systems as well as systems with improved accuracy, allowing it to strike throughout Israel and with increased precision."
Hezbollah is also believed to have made significant improvements in its air and coastal defense, including long-range surface-to-air missiles that could pose a threat to Israeli aircraft.
Consequently, Israel has stepped up its military preparedness in the north. In late January, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Northern Command held a major two-week drill on the northern border to simulate concurrent wars in Lebanon and Syria against Hezbollah and other Islamic terror groups.
"We simulated vast maneuvers, substantial fire power and the attack of thousands of targets in all combat areas, with high efficiency, including residential areas exploited by the enemy," Aviv Kochavi, head of the IDF Northern Command, said at the time.
While tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have been simmering for years, the assassination of Hezbollah-affiliated terrorist Samir Kuntar—who was involved in the murders of an Israeli family in 1979 and was later released from an Israeli jail in a 2008 prisoner swap for the bodies of dead IDF soldiers—has ramped up threatening rhetoric even more.
In mid-February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the terror group has the ability to unleash widespread destruction on Israel that would be comparable to an atomic bomb by targeting strategic sites in Israel such as an ammonium plant in Haifa.
"A few missiles on a few ammonium plants equal the same amount of death as an atomic bomb ... you (Israel) can destroy Lebanon and Dahiyeh (a Hezbollah stronghold neighborhood). You have the strongest air force, you have missiles and you have other means by which to do it. But we can do the same thing to you with only a few missiles aimed at a few ammonium plants," Nasrallah said.
A senior IDF official recently told the London-based Arabic newspaper Elaph that Israel could "put Lebanon back 300 years" if Hezbollah attacked, but that the political echelon in Israel would not allow it.
"The organization (Hezbollah) and its leader know very well what Israel's reaction will be, so it will not set out on such an adventure," the IDF official said.
Aside from Hezbollah's expanded arsenal and defense capabilities, Israeli officials have also expressed concern in recent years that Hezbollah may attempt to invade northern Israel and occupy towns or villages in the region.
"In the next war, Hezbollah won't stay on the borders, and the Israeli settlements in the north will not be protected from this," a source close to Hezbollah recently told Foreign Policymagazine. "Hezbollah will bring the war to them, and Israel's biggest concern is over Hezbollah's experience in Syria, as it now has the experience to be offensive rather than just defensive."
FDD's Ottolenghi suggested that even briefly entering Israeli territory and controlling a village would be a huge success for Hezbollah.
"From their perspective, if they could take territory away from Israel, even for a brief period of time, they would view that as a success and an incredible propaganda stunt," he told JNS.org.
"For Hezbollah, it is not a matter of having moral constraint, it is a question of capability more than anything else," he added.
While Hezbollah's military buildup, support from Iran, and battlefield experience in Syria may pose an increasing risk for Israel, the terror group has also seen its domestic and external support erode in recent years.
"Hezbollah has to some extent seen its relatively popular stance in Lebanon eroded by its involvement in Syria, and it has been blamed in some corners in Lebanon as responsible for plunging the country back into sectarian conflict," Ottolenghi said.
The Lebanese terror group has faced increased opposition within the Arab world, especially from Sunni Arab leaders who are increasingly fearful of Iran's regional ambitions.
On March 2, the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—formally designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
The GCC's secretary general, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, declared that the six countries "consider the actions of Hezbollah militias in GCC countries, and the terrorist actions and incitements it conducts throughout Syria, Yemen and Iraq ... incompatible with the moral values, humanitarian principles and international law, and [the actions] pose a threat to Arab national security."
"We have gone a long way since the summer of 2006, when Nasrallah and [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad were so popular in the Arab world as a result of the Second Lebanon War. The GCC now views Iran and its proxies as the biggest strategic threat that they confront," Ottolenghi said.
For Israel, the GCC designation was a welcome sign of potential cooperation between the Jewish state and Sunni Arab states.
The changes in the Arab world, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said, "have great potential to change the diplomatic reality in the region. They give hope for a better future for all nations in the Middle East. I hope these ties will help advance our relations with the Palestinians, or at least the Palestinians who want to live with us in peace."
Yet Ottolenghi cautioned, "I'm very wary of reading into this [GCC decision] as a sign that friendship has blossomed between Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. [Sunni Arab states] are looking out for themselves because they see Iran as the principle threat to their stability and survival."
At the same time, Israel and the Gulf states have a mutual fear: Iran's growing influence in the region as a result of the Islamic Republic's nuclear deal with world powers, which lifted powerful international sanctions against Iran. Both Israel and the Gulf states also feel abandoned by the United States on the Iranian issue.
"They don't feel like they can rely on the U.S. to do their bidding anymore. I see a U.S. administration hedging and probably betting on détente with Iran," Ottolenghi said.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, President Barack Obama said the Saudis "need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood [with Iran] and institute some sort of cold peace."
Backing the Gulf states against Iran, said Obama, "would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East."
Nevertheless, Hezbollah will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the regional disarray.
"Hezbollah is benefitting from America's retreat from the region and its reluctance to confront Iran head-on in Syria," Ottolenghi said. "The reluctance of the [Obama] administration to have a Syria policy and also to go against Iran's interest in Syria, [in order] to not undermine the nuclear agreement, has benefited Hezbollah."
While the Syrian conflict has taken its toll on Hezbollah through losses of both manpower and popularity, the Lebanese terror group's new battlefield experience and stepped-up support from a resurgent sanction-free Iran promise to make Hezbollah's next conflict with Israel a costlier affair for the Jewish state.
"They have dramatically improved their fighting skills and access to more advanced and heavier weapons," Ottolenghi said. "I think the next war with Hezbollah will be bloodier, more intense and destructive than the last one."
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