By Walid Shoebat (Shoebat Exclusive)

As I sit here on my Sabbath rest and contemplate why is it that I know of no one who compared the remarkable resemblance between the biblical narratives that mention Christ’s second coming and His war expeditions to defeat the Antichrist and liberate Jerusalem, how rarely if ever they were compared to how this parallels history’s greatest Protestant crusader, the British General Edmund Allenby. The study will help us unlock much as to Christ’s expedition during His second coming to defeat the Antichrist!

It was Allenby, a Protestant, not a Catholic who conquered Jerusalem taking it from the Muslim Ottoman Turks.

General Edmund Allenby

It is quite remarkable how God chose a militant Protestant to carry out the mission to liberate Jerusalem and I know of no one in the Prophecy arena who even examines Scripture to see, that Christ’s military campaigns when He returns are very Crusader-like paralleling Allenby’s military expeditions:

1) both wars, Christ and Allenby is to repulse the Ottoman Turkish invasion of Jerusalem and Egypt.
2) both conquer Egypt (see Isaiah 19).
3) both conquer Bozra.
4) both defeat an Antichrist at Armageddon.

Allenby was a Christian militant and his victory against the Muslims later paved the way for the creation of a Jewish state despite British errors that was made against the Jews with the White Paper which was a policy paper issued by the British government under Neville Chamberlain in which, among several key provisions, the idea of partitioning Palestine was abandoned. Just as with Catholics, not all Protestants are equal. We all know who Neville Chamberlain was, he was anti-war with Hitler and is why we say, that if one is always anti-war, that person is also anti-ridding the world from evil tyrannies which is evil in itself.

Neville Chamberlain standing with Adolph Hitler

The story begins when the Ottoman Empire called for a military jihad against France, Russia and Great Britain in November 1914. While we know that Muslims say “first Constantinople then Rome” and while we expect the Antichrist to even attempt an invasion against Europe (which sadly the naïve paint Europe as Antichrist) and all of christendom. Daniel also tells us that Antichrist gets bad news from the north, which declares war against him in which he will ultimately be defeated. North of the Ottoman Empire’s headquarters, Turkey, is Russia (which is sadly painted by the naïve as Gog). There is no question as to why God ordained Russia to be converted to Christianity and despite what all dislike about Putin, Russia will be an intricate role in defeating Antichrist. Many believe that Christ defeats Antichrist on His own, but this interpretation excludes what Ezekiel declared (see Ezekiel 28:7-8, Ezekiel 30-32). God has always partnered with man in all the acts of redemption in which God does what God does and man through his obedience to God acts as God’s earthly vessel in whom He desires to mold and eventually perfect.

Many today while they see the threat of Islam and since they are unwilling to let Russia go from there decades old theme of being Gog, they combine a Russian-Turkic-Iranian coalition in reference to Ezekiel 38 unaware they are a-historic: the enmity between Russia and the Ottoman Turks never ended from time immemorial.

Map depicting the Russo-Turkish Wars.

Today Putin is pro-Bashar who is anti-Turkey and Russia taking over Crimea which sits north of Turkey removing the protective buffer zone for Turkey sets the Ukraine as the stage for a future invasion by Russia against Turkey to regain Hagia-Sophia, Christianity’s most remarkable temple and monument which a Turkish Antichrist will surely sit in as it is being reconverted to a mosque by Erdogan. It is perhaps why the Russian Cross is always mounted on Russian churches with the Cross stepping over the Crescent which is reminiscent to Russia will be the main nation that fulfills the end of Antichrist as Russia has finally become a sheep nation when Christ divides the nations sheep from goats.

It is perhaps why when the Christian League, an ad-hoc coalition of Catholic monarchies ships deployed in the shape of the cross which crushed the Ottomans at Lepanto in which their ships where in the shape of the crescent.

Finally the beginning end of this Islamic beast, the major threat to christendom, came in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire, the world’s greatest independent Islamic power, which is currently reviving again, abandoned its ambivalent neutrality towards the warring parties (as we see today Turkey’s face is neutral towards the west but this is changing) and became belligerent in the conflict, with the sultan declaring a military jihad (holy war) against France, Russia and Great Britain. Antichrist whom we explained for decades to come from the Ottoman Turkey also “declares war against the strongest fortresses” in Daniel 11 and similar to 1914, the strongest military-might today would be the U.S., Europe and Russia.

The Ottoman Empire had recently been humiliated by setbacks in Libya (which Daniel 11 tells us Antichrist also enters) and the Balkans. Participation in what had begun as a European war by the Ottomans to have been suicidal, but key elements in the Turkish government, impressed by German industrial and military power and motivated by dreams of imperial Ottoman glory, just as we see the Turks today, was then greeted by the expanding war as an opportunity to regain Ottoman lost territories and incorporate new lands and nationalities into the Ottoman empire. We already see Turkey interested in Syria and aiding the Muslim Brotherhood to re-invade Egypt.

With Germany as an ally, the Ottoman Empire represented a serious threat to the British Empire, so in a pre-emptive strike, London immediately landed an Anglo-Indian force at Basra (biblical Bosra), near the estuary of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This was done to protect the Anglo-Persian oil pipeline, which was vital to the British navy, and to show the Union Jack in this strategically important area in the Persian Gulf. Christ also comes out victorious from Bosra: “Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson? Who is this, robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength? “It is I, proclaiming victory, mighty to save.”” (Isaiah 63:1)

Within weeks the Central Powers struck back with a surprise attack against Britain’s ‘jugular vein’, the Suez Canal. This attempt, in early February 1915, to breach British defenses on the Suez Canal and raise an Islamic revolt in Egypt, failed however, and resulted in heavy losses for the Muslim attackers. Convinced that neither side had the means to achieve victory in France in 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George sought to make Allenby’s theatre the focus of his country’s military effort. Germany’s massive offensives closer to home during the first half of 1918, however, forced the government to recall most of Allenby’s British soldiers to France. Allenby, who retained his cavalry, received replacements for his infantry in Egypt from many sources, predominately from India but also from many other diverse nations ranging from Burma to the West Indies. In Egypt, too, British forces gained a new commander, General Sir Archibald Murray, and additional resources.

Similarly, Christ in Isaiah 19, goes to war in Egypt: “See, Jehovah rides on a swift cloud and is coming to Egypt. The idols of Egypt tremble before him, and the hearts of the Egyptians melt within them” (Isaiah 19:1).

We all know that Zechariah 14 is about rescuing the Jews and converting them to Him, but Isaiah 19 should shock some folks and get us to ask, who and why is Christ coming for in Egypt: “And it will be for a sign and for a witness to the LORD of Hosts in the land of Egypt; for they will cry to the LORD because of the oppressors, and He will send them a Savior and a Mighty One, and He will deliver them.” (Isaiah 19:20)

Here we have the “Mighty One” is the Messiah who fights on the day of the Lord to fight “the oppressors”. Here, Christ comes to rescue the Copts of Egypt from Muslim persecution, our brothers and sisters in Egypt who are currently suffering from the oppressors and calling for Jesus to come down and save them. This will intensify when Turkey invades Egypt under Antichrist (see Daniel 11).

Continuing with the Protestant crusaders, the British, unwilling to commit all of its emerging military resources in 1915 to the Western Front, where trench warfare prevailed, the British leadership embraced a naval offensive against Istanbul to force the Ottoman Empire out of the war. When the Royal Navy in February and March was unable to fight its way through the Dardanelles to place the Ottoman capital under its big guns, the military authorities hastily assembled an expeditionary force to land on the Gallipoli peninsula.

Christ also directly goes and fights Turkey in Zechariah 9: “I will rouse your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Yavan.” In this passage, Israel is seen fighting against Ionia or Yavan led by Christ Himself after their conversion. This in itself debunks the claim that Antichrist is the European Union. In several Bibles, this word is correctly translated as “Greece” but this is ancient Greece (Asia Minor) and “Ionia” or “Yavan” in Hebrew was a province that was located on the western coast of modern Turkey. This is crucial because the clear context of this battle is the return of Christ: “Then Jehovah will appear over them (Israel)” and fight on their behalf “going with the whirlwinds of the South”. He is heading to Ionia (Turkey) and Pergamum which is the seat of Satan (see Revelation 2:13).

So in the End-Times, at the time when Jesus returns, the Jews (Zion) which at the time becomes Christian will unite with other Christian nations to engage in the defining battle in all history, the Battle of Armageddon which also includes Christ’s expedition against Turkey itself (Yavan) after their armies are destroyed at Armageddon in Israel.

By stages the mission of the British forces evolved from a defense of Egypt to an invasion of Jerusalem.

After the British expeditions in Egypt, first, they had to cross the Sinai Desert, with its sand storms and searing temperatures, had to be crossed, a test of endurance heading towards Israel to liberate Jerusalem.

Allenby heeded good biblical advice when he faced the Turks at the biblical village of Michmash mentioned in 1 Samuel 13 ‘And Saul, and Jonathan his son, and the people that were present with them, abode in Gibeah of Benjamin, but the Philistines encamped in Michmash.’

Major Vivian Gilbert of the British army relates the story of an unnamed brigade major who was reading his Bible while contemplating the situation against the Ottoman forces. The brigade major remembered a town by the name of Michmash mentioned somewhere in the Bible. He found the verses, and discovered that there was a secret path around the town. He woke the brigadier general, and they found that the path still existed and was very lightly guarded. The British forces used this path to outmanoeuver the Ottomans, and so took the town.

Christ as we all know, similar to Allenby, crusades against the Turks and takes Jerusalem from the Antichrist and marching into Jerusalem captured from the Turks in 1917, the British general, Sir Edmund Allenby, proudly declared “today the wars of the Crusaders are completed,” and the British press celebrated his victory with cartoons of Richard the Lion-Hearted looking down at Jerusalem above the caption “At last my dream come true.”

The golden rule is that God is no respecter of persons, be it someone who grew up Catholic or grew up Protestant, it is the theology that counts and the Catholic crusading spirit was godly and righteous. We will always find an Abel and we will always find a Cain, regardless that even both were “believers” one of the two “Cain” will end up in hell. Its the same in christendom, it is not who say “its all about Jesus,” but “its all what Jesus is all about” and who obey Him with action wins in the end. Always reverse the mottos of the fool and you will find the nugget of the wise.

In the days of Great Britain, they did not all hate the crusaders as we see today which this will be healed in the coming future and is why we support militancy. When Protestants supported the Muslim Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 that amongst the Ottoman forces were to be found Lutheran and Calvinist allies from Holland and England who were defeated by the Catholic Alliance, to later the Protestants rejoiced only when they realized that the Ottomans threatened them as well. It took wars to heal and learn that not everything militant was wrong.

The colonial powers glorified the Crusaders as their ideological forebears when during December, 1917 Allenby had moved upwards from Egypt and captured Jerusalem. As the first Christian conqueror of the Holy City since the Crusades, Allenby ordered his troops to dismount as a mark of respect when they entered the city. The difference between Allenby and Christ is that Allenby refused to ride an entourage with a Rolls-Royce or even a horse since Christ is known to have rode an ass and will be the One coming victorious riding on a white horse. So Allenby chose to walk on foot as Christ’s humble servant.

General Edmund Allenby victory march against the Muslim Ottoman Empire in Jerusalem

The following year Allenby defeated the remaining Turkish Army in Israel. A final and conclusive strike at the Battle of Megiddo where Armageddon will take place when Christ returns. Allenby also returned to the offensive at the Battle of Megiddo, on 19 September 1918. With a decided advantage in manpower, artillery, air power and morale, he quickly destroyed the Ottoman/Turkish armies facing him. The victory at Megiddo happened in September 1918 which left the road to the invasion of Damascus open for the crusading British empire. Once the enemy front was broken, the British cavalry dominated the campaign. Damascus fell on 1 October, Aleppo, the last city to fall in the campaign, on 26 October. Five days later an armistice with the Ottoman Empire came into effect. Since 19 September Allenby’s forces had advanced hundreds of miles and netted over 75,000 prisoners.

And likewise, Christ destroys Damascus as has been written Damascus will become a “heap of ruins. The cities of Aroer will be deserted and left to flocks” (Isaiah 17:1–2). Christ also is spoken of in the Psalms: “Gird Your sword upon Your thigh, O Mighty One,” (Psalm 45:3) and that “Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One” in Isaiah 10:34 will be Christ’s expedition to remove all of Islam from Syria and Lebanon and destroy this revived beast empire of the Ottomans.

So what should we learn? It is crucial to understand always, that Prophecy has multiple layers and the story of Allenby is a hint of what is to come, a war with the Ottomans. We must never seclude Prophecy for only the end-times: does Christ not care about the past flock to warn them as well?

For example, the prophecy of Isaiah 17 may date from 735 BC when Damascus and Israel were allied against Judah. Tiglath-Pileser took Damascus in 732. Indeed, while this prophecy had a type of fulfillment, this campaign never reduced the city of Damascus to rubble and there is an ultimate future fulfillment, but God wrote these prophecies so the scoffers can scoff that the Bible is only a historic manuscript. The depiction of Damascus as a “heap of ruins” has not been fulfilled. This is why one needs to beware of scoffers who make the Bible only a historic reference. We need to also beware of all the hype that always make prophecy about the study of end-times only. “Alone” and “only” are words which are usually used as a method to isolate and deceive. The rule of thumb is that The Bible is a study for all times.

Likewise, when Daniel spoke of the King of the North invading Egypt, we can find in history a layer, when the Ottoman Sultan Selim I invaded Syria then marched into Egypt depicting a similar invasion by Antichrist which today we see ISIS are attempting to do at Dabiq. History and Prophecy intertwine in the most amazing ways and the sooner we learn from history the better we are prepared to face the future.

ANSWERING THE JEWISH PERSECUTIONS BY THE CRUSADERS

Crusaders who all departed from different countries were supposed to meet in Constantinople and then head to the Holy Land together as one massive army. However, contrary to what the pope commanded, two small bloodthirsty brigands, spearheaded by Walter the Penniless and Peter the Hermit, left early of their own initiative. They led their rebellious armies down the Rhineland to kill the Jews there.

But the charge that the Crusades produced widespread anti-Judaism or were by their nature anti-Jewish has little basis in historical fact. Furthermore, the claim that the Crusades were a rehearsal for the anti-Semitic genocide of the Holocaust is completely without foundation. Those who promote such a view do so to further their agendas, ideologies, and book sales.

To assess the claims of these popular works, a closer examination of the Jewish pogroms during the First Crusade is in order. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Urban II called for an armed expedition to the East to aid fellow Christians and liberate Jerusalem. The pogroms of 1096 were perversions of crusading zeal; they were definitely not the normal response. Emicho’s contingent and the other anti-Jewish crusading bands did not comprise the major armies, which advanced east in the summer of that year. The anti-Jewish crusaders either dissolved after perpetrating these heinous acts or were destroyed during their march through Hungary. Robert Chazan, one of the foremost scholars on the medieval Jewish experience –particularly the massacres of 1096–believes that “the combination of radical thinking and weak discipline accounts for both the eventual failures of these bands and their anti-Jewish excesses.” (1)

The noted Crusades historian Jonathan Riley-Smith has recently said, “We know it to be a myth that the crusaders targeted the Jewish community in Jerusalem.” The Hebrew populations of Acre, Hebron, and Haifa met with a fate similar to the community in Jerusalem. Again, the brutality was the result of the resistance by these cities to the crusader forces–not because there were Jews in these places. Such tactics were brutal, but typical of both Muslim and Christian armies in the region. The Jewish communities in Tyre and Ascalon, on the other hand, were not harmed when these cities were taken since the leaders chose surrender instead of resistance. (2)

Ironically, the success of the First Crusade actually facilitated wide scale Jewish migration from Europe to the East. Most importantly, there were no anti-Jewish pogroms in the Levant during almost two hundred years of crusader rule. While life in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was certainly no utopia for the Jews, these examples contradict the notion that the Crusades were inherently anti-Semitic. The evidence indicates that the Latin rulers in the Levant were more lenient than their European counterparts, and in some instances, than the previous Muslim rulers (who were well known for their tolerance).

Finally, the late Israeli scholar Joshua Prawer did the most thorough examination in his The History of the Jews that when Jews were on the receiving end of crusader brutality–as at Jerusalem in 1099 or Acre in 1104–it was within the context of total warfare directed at the resisting population as a whole, of which the Jews were a minor element. (3)

The negative arguments against the Crusades is as if one speaks of how the United States came to be. While there was the Trails of Tears, regarding the mass expulsion of native Indians, there will also be someone who will denounce the United States from its right to exist harping about the Trails of Tears!

Hilaire belloc said regarding such criticism of the Crsaders that he will not waste his time refuting these. One can find all sorts of bad on anything good to denounce it. So here is the question to all Christians who hate the Crusaders: do we condemn King David for what he did to Uriah and say that everything King David did was evil? To answer “yes” would make one a heretic and to answer “no”, in itself refutes the argument including exposing the foolishness of the one who makes it.

Obviously, killing Jews was not part of the Crusades intent and was never authorized, a thing which all the critics will always fail to obtain from original sources. Even when it comes to Peter the Hermit and others, the Catholic Bishops of those provinces in fact tried to protect the Jews by hiding them, even at the risk of their own lives. This line alone has tremendous history which will take pages to fill. Those acts by certain brigands were rightly condemned by the pope. Yet the critics usually fail to mention this because the issue is always an agenda.

But the critics abound in their slander against the Crusaders. In each post we make, in our comment section, we find the lazy, the uneducated, the unwise and the outright slanderer. When Theodore Shoebat wrote an article praising the Crusaders, I had one object on the comment line saying “…Jesus said Jerusalem would be trampled underfoot until the times of the Gentiles were complete. That trampling definitely includes your beloved crusaders …”

To this Protestant, the Crusaders, and just because it was carried out by Catholic was “bad” makes Allenby the Protestant bad as well.

The fools are the ones who can and always post short comments that are void of research and it takes libraries to refute them. It is as we say in the Middle East: “it takes one fool to throw a rock in the well but it takes ten wise men to pull it out”.

Fools always say that “God will always answer prayers” and that “it is not all about knowledge”, yet God clearly says of such simpletons, these fail to read the first instructions in Proverbs chapter 1: “Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord.” God was clear and here it is in full context:

“Out in the open Wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square; on top of the wall she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech: “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?”

God sent Wisdom and here is what He says to these folks that are simpletons and do not acquire knowledge:

“I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you—when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. “Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me, since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord.” (See Proverbs chapter 1).

“They will look to Me” seems to be speaking about “believers” who seek God and believe but are foolish and God will not respond to fools. Today we live in a culture that when someone speaks of militarism, they say “its all Old Testament”. It is as if the Old Testament is now obsolete altogether. If so, is the proverb then reversed and God all of the sudden loves also the fools? Even all this talk of the “power of prayer,” will be rendered obsolete to the fool, yet many today argue by even using Scripture to say that all gentiles going to Jerusalem as liberators as “bad”, since the Crusaders were Catholic, so they try to fit any biblical verses to point fingers forgetting that not all Protestants were as naïve as some of the comments I usually get on my blog from anti-Catholic diehards which historians will usually dismiss these arguments outright–and often rightfully so, for these histories are regularly riddled with errors. An even bigger problem, however, is the widespread effect that these deceptive popular narratives have on the historical consciousness of the reading public. That besides working on trying to Rescue Christians from physical danger, we need to also Rescue Christians from all these mental disorders in which Theodore asked “Dad, at times I feel that we are running a mental asylum” in which I responded with “Indeed, but I am by brother’s keeper”. While he knows history, I as a father have to teach him ancient holy-land wisdom.

SOURCES
Were the Crusades Anti-Semitic by Vince Ryan
(1) Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096: the First Crusade and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jerusalem Publication Society, 1996), p. 55.v

(2) Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Rethinking the Crusades,” First Things (March 2000), pp. 20-23.

(3) Details concerning the Jewish experience under crusader rule can be found in many of the works by the late Israeli scholar Joshua Prawer. For the most thorough examination see his The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).