Every August I take a small group of young people from North America to
Ghana, in West Africa, to help with an annual summer camp sponsored by
the United Church of God, the publisher of this magazine.
This year our journey was set to begin on Thursday, Aug. 10.
That evening we were all due to fly from various cities across the
United States to London's Heathrow Airport. From there we would all be
going to Accra, Ghana, on the same plane. There was only one exception, a
young lady who was already in Europe visiting family would meet us
in Ghana.
On that particular Thursday morning, I began my day by watching the world news on
BBC America, a cable channel available throughout the United States.
The first item of news immediately caught my attention. London's
Heathrow Airport was in chaos due to a terrorist scare. More than 20
suspected terrorists had been arrested, thought to be part of a plot to
blow up 10 to 15 passenger jets headed toward
U.S. cities, planes all set to depart from Heathrow.
If successful, the carnage could have been considerably greater than on
Sept. 11, with a death toll estimated to be in the thousands.
Historian Niall Ferguson wrote in the London
Sunday Telegraph
Aug. 27 that, if successful, such an attack could have triggered a
civil war in Britain (“Imagine the Bombs Had Gone Off: How Would Britain
Have Changed?”).
What it did trigger was chaos and confusion that continued for days.
Out of our group of five young adults from America who passed through
Heathrow, one was delayed for 24 hours while the other four did not see
their luggage again for 10 days or more. In the case of one, the luggage
was returned to the United States and never made it to Ghana.
Needless to say, the whole incident was a great inconvenience for us and for countless others.
Restrictions on the contents of hand luggage left tens of thousands of
businessmen and women unable to take laptop computers or mobile phones
on board with them. I knew I couldn't take any liquids on board with me,
but was surprised to have a magazine and newspaper confiscated.
Is history repeating itself?
Such is the age in which we live, one changed dramatically in the last
five years—and likely to change even more dramatically in the
years ahead!
The terrorist scare came only 13 months after the London terror attacks
on the city's transportation system, attacks that left 56 dead.
Around the time of the anniversary of those attacks, a number of
British papers polled Muslims. The results revealed that a significant
percentage of British-born Muslims, most of them children of immigrants
from developing countries,
are supportive of the goals and methods of radical Islamic terrorist groups.
Unsurprisingly,
The Sunday Telegraph's front page highlighted the fact that 53 percent of Britons now see Islam as a threat to their way of life. Not
radical Islam, but
Islam itself.
Winston Churchill
III, a member of the British parliament and grandson of the famous World War
II leader, warned on the
BBC
World Service on the anniversary of the July 7 bombings that this
threat from radical Islam is growing, not just in Britain but throughout
Western Europe. Demographic trends show a rapidly growing Muslim
population in many countries, including the United States, while native
Brits, Germans, French, Spanish and Italians are all in decline.
His stark warning reminds us of the first Winston Churchill, who 70
years ago persistently warned the British people of the growing threat
from Nazi Germany, a threat most people wanted to ignore.
While Germany rapidly rearmed as it built up its industrial might
following defeat in World War I and subsequent economic upheavals,
Churchill's was a lone voice across the English Channel warning that the
rise of Germany posed a grave threat to Britain and its empire.
Sadly, Churchill was proved correct. The Second World War was the
result, a war formally declared on Germany by British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain on Sept. 3, 1939. Less than a year earlier, after
meeting with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in Munich, Chamberlain had
infamously assured the world of “peace in our time.”
Although all the nations of the British Empire and Commonwealth, a
quarter of the world's people, entered the war on Britain's side almost
immediately, the United States stayed out of it until the Pearl Harbor
attack 27 months later. The Japanese attack on the
U.S. Pacific fleet on Dec. 7, 1941, brought America into the war as a combatant.
But in reality, this worldwide conflict actually began much earlier,
with the Japanese invasion of China in 1931. It could even be said that
the defeat of Germany in World War I and the subsequent peace treaty
made World War
II inevitable. The rise of fascism in Italy in 1922 was another stepping-stone toward war in Europe.
While Churchill kept up his warnings during his “wilderness years,”
most people remained oblivious to what was happening in the world around
them and to the growing threat to their peace and security.
As it was in the 1930s, so it is today, 70 years later.
Once again, huge numbers of people seem to be in denial of the growing
threat to their peace and security, this time from global jihadists who
are determined to bring about a clash of civilizations between the West
and Islam, with the ultimate goal of forcing everyone on the planet to
accept Islam. And
Islam, we might remind ourselves, means “submission”—submission to the will of Allah.
When did World War III begin?
Military historian Max Boot sums up the sobering situation today, five
years after Sept. 11, 2001: ” Iraq is slipping deeper into the blood-red
waters of civil strife. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan.
Hizballah is crowing in the wake of Israel's inconclusive attacks. Hamas
runs the Palestinian Authority. Iran is drawing closer to acquiring
nuclear weapons. Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-awahiri,
continue to taunt the West with messages of defiance, as jihadist cells
from London to Lahore plot fresh attacks” (“It's Not Over Yet,”
Time, Sept. 11).
Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the
U.S. House of Representatives, wrote in the Sept. 7 issue of
The Wall Street Journal:
“Five years have passed since the horrific attack on our American
homeland, and, still, there is one serious, undeniable fact we have yet
to confront: We are, today, not where we wanted to be and nowhere near
where we need to be” (“Bush and Lincoln”).
Interviewed on
The Journal Editorial Report on Fox News Sept. 2, Amir Taheri, former editor of
Kayhan , Iran's largest daily newspaper, was asked if current developments were a prelude to World War
III.
His response was that World War
III actually
began in 1979, when the Iranian revolution overthrew the pro-Western
shah of Iran and replaced him with the anti-Western, theocratic Islamic
Republic of Iran. Ever since, Iran has devoted itself to the spread of
militant Islam and the defeat of “the Great Satan” (the United States)
and “the Little Satans” (Britain and Israel).
Prior to World War
II the world saw plenty of
warning signs of what was coming. These included the rise of fascism
from 1922 on, Japan's invasion of China in 1931, the Italian invasion of
Abyssinia in 1935, the German invasions of the Rhineland (1936),
Austria and Czechoslovakia (1938), government-sanctioned attacks on
Jews, not to mention the rising rhetoric of the antidemocratic forces in
the nations that would soon form the Axis Powers.
But people in the democratic West wanted to believe all would be well and ignored the warning signs.
We've seen the same pattern since 1979 with the rise of radical Islam. The 1979 seizure of the
U.S.
embassy in Tehran and the holding hostage of dozens of American
diplomatic personnel there for 444 days in direct contravention of
international law, the founding of Hezbollah and the blowing up of the
U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center 10 years later, attacks on
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the attack on the
USS Cole in 2000, and then the 9/11 attacks all clearly show the jihadists' intentions.
It certainly didn't end there. Since then attacks have killed or
injured more than 410 in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002; 2,200 in
Madrid, Spain, in March 2004; 340 in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004;
750 in London in July 2005; another 150 in Bali in October 2005 and
almost 1,000 in Bombay in July 2006. This doesn't include countless
smaller attacks or plots disrupted before they could be carried out.
When did World War
III begin? In the minds of the radical Islamists, the global jihadists, it clearly began a long time ago!
In this global conflict, the West remains at a disadvantage. One reason
for this is the deep cultural and political divisions that exist in
many Western nations. Jesus Christ observed in
Matthew 12:25
that a house divided against itself cannot stand: “Every kingdom divided
against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house
divided against itself will not stand.” With this in mind, clearly the
West as it is cannot win the current conflict.
America clearly divided over radical Islam
Mr. Gingrich observed that the United States has divided into three
factions. There are those who “try to find some explainable way to avoid
reality while advocating return to 'normalcy,' and promoting a policy
of weakness and withdrawal abroad.” A second group believes that the
threat is very real but that America can handle it.
Drawing a parallel with the crisis confronting Abraham Lincoln in the
Civil War, Mr. Gingrich shows that victory for the Union was not
achieved until President Lincoln chose the third course: “Lincoln
agonizingly concluded that a third faction had the right strategy for
victory. This group's strategy demanded reorganizing everything as
needed, intensifying the war, and bringing the full might of the
industrial North to bear until the war was won.”
In other words, Mr. Gingrich was saying the struggle against radical Islam should be the United States' number one priority.
Few in the West fully realize the religious element involved in this
conflict. As Karen Armstrong, a recognized expert on fundamentalism and
the author of a number of books on Islam, put it on a Canadian
television program last year, “In the 1960s everybody thought religion
was passé,” a thing of the past. “Now at the beginning of the 21st
century we see that nothing is more important!”
It is precisely because the West does not take religion seriously that
it is at a distinct disadvantage. There is a failure at the deepest
level to understand radical Islam.
Historical continuum of conflict
Pope Benedict
XVI caused a furor when he
touched on this during a visit to his Bavarian homeland on Sept. 14. He
quoted a 14th-century emperor who said, “Show me just what Muhammad
brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and
inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith
he preached.”
The Byzantine emperor's words turned out to also be quite
prophetic—Muslim forces destroyed the Byzantine Empire in the following
century, taking control of the capital city of Constantinople in 1453,
extinguishing the Roman Empire in the East.
Islamic forces continued to expand after that conquest. In the
following century they reached the gates of Vienna in the very heart of
Europe. In two attempts to take the city they were repulsed by a
multinational force of Europeans united by a common Catholic faith.
This was not the first time that the Church of Rome was a significant factor in fighting Islamic expansionism. In
A.D.
800 the pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman emperor. Charlemagne's
grandfather, Charles Martel, had defeated Muslim forces at the gates of
Paris in 732, exactly 100 years after the death of the prophet Muhammad.
Only a revived Western Roman Empire seemed able to unite the Catholic
nations of Europe against both internal and external threats. Three
centuries later another pope, Urban
II, called
on the Catholic countries of Europe to launch a “crusade” to recapture
the Holy Land from Islam, a massive effort that led to two centuries of
conflict between Catholic Europe and the Islamic world.
No country or organization on earth has had more experience battling against Islam than the papacy!
Following the pope's comments in Bavaria, a spokesman for the Pakistani
parliament warned of a “clash of civilizations” between the West and
Islam along the lines of earlier clashes between the two that have taken
place down through the centuries.
A world-shaking conflict to come
Believe it or not, the Bible also warns of this, a coming clash between
a revived Roman Empire, a military and political alliance that
Scripture refers to as “the Beast,” and “the king of the South,” a
leader who from all appearances will emerge from the Islamic world.
Revelation 17 shows that the Beast power, a successor to the ancient
Roman Empire, will come about very rapidly: “The ten horns which you saw
are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive
authority for one hour as kings with the beast. These are of one mind,
and they will give their power and authority to the beast” (
Revelation 17:12-13).
The same chapter shows that the Roman church will be heavily involved in this final revival of the Roman Empire (verse 9).
In the Old Testament book of Daniel, we read of a clash between this
power, called “the king of the North,” and “the king of the South.”
Daniel 11:40
reveals that “at the time of the end the king of the South shall attack
him; and the king of the North shall come against him like a whirlwind,
with chariots, horsemen, and with many ships.”
In the same month that the pope made his comments on the nature of
Islam, a significant European presence was once again taking shape in
the Middle East at the request of the Israeli and Lebanese governments.
Following their recent monthlong conflict, a
UN-sponsored
peacekeeping force is being deployed in southern Lebanon with the aim
of preventing Hezbollah from attacking Israel and averting another
conflict between Israel and Lebanon.
“It's Europe's moment in the Arab-Israeli arena,” says former
U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who now heads a Washington, D.C., think tank (“Just a Moment, or Possibly More,”
The Economist, Sept. 2).
In a further sign of a buildup toward greater conflict, “the
extraordinary buildup of European naval and military strength in and
around Lebanon's shores is way out of proportion for the task the
European contingents . . . have undertaken: to create a buffer between
Israel and Hizballah . . .
“It is linked to the general anticipation of a military clash between
the United States and Israel, on one side, and Iran and possibly Syria
on the other” (“'Lebanese Security' Is the Pretext for the Naval Babel
Around Lebanon's Shores,”
www.debka.com, Sept. 4).
Implicit in this commentary is the fact that Europe and America continue to be in disagreement over the Middle East.
Clearly there is great danger of the continuing conflict between the West and Islam worsening yet further.
Christians know that the prophesied end-time events center on the
Middle East. They can also be reassured by the fact that ultimately
there will be peace in this area and throughout the world. A central
focus of Bible prophecy is the coming Kingdom of God (
Mark 1:14). Jesus Christ is set to return to save humanity from itself (
Matthew 24:22).
The “Prince of Peace” (
Isaiah 9:6)
will return to firmly establish His Kingdom. He will “judge between
many peoples, and rebuke strong nations afar off” and “they shall beat
their swords into plowshares” (
Micah 4:3). In the coming Kingdom of God, we will see an end to the constant conflict between Islam and the West.
GN
