By Theodore Shoebat
Italy’s foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, is now calling for military airstrikes strikes against the Libyan coast in order to protect Italy from Muslim terrorists who want to enter the country through the coastal border, or bombard Italy with some sort of attack. According to the report:
A massive influx of refugees from Libya, where ISIS extremists have been gaining ground, can be halted or at least reduced by extending “targeted ant-terrorist strikes” into the coastal area, said the Italian FM.
“We don’t have months and months [to sort this out]. The double risk of the advance of the Islamic State group in Libya and the waves of migrants means we are in a race against the clock,” Italian foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni told the Corriere della Sera.
Gentiloni said part of the solution could be “targeted anti-terrorist strikes” against the ISIS-controlled strongholds along the Libyan coast. “We need to take care of this emergency not as a single country, but as a union,” he said.
He also called for a tighter collaboration with partners in the regions “so that refugees can be welcomed in neighboring countries.”
The quest to reach the safe waters of Italy via the turbulent waters of the Mediterranean ended up in tragedy earlier this week, when Muslim travelers threw 12 Christians overboard during one of the crossings. The Italian authorities arrested 15 people believed to have been responsible.
Hundreds of Libyans died making the crossing this week alone. Just last Sunday 400 migrants drowned when their vessel capsized off Libya coast.
In the most recent incident, early Friday morning, the Italian Coast Guard saved 70 people off the island of Lampedusa. Traveling a long journey on a rubber dingy, the refugees had to be stretchered off to shore as they suffered severe burns in a gas cylinder explosion.
“[The refugees] told us that they were in one of the places where traffickers hold migrants and refugees before placing them on boats, and a gas cylinder exploded and killed several people and injured many others,” Barbara Moinario of the United Nations High Commission For Refugees explained. “The traffickers would not allow them to leave and reach the hospital so they didn’t get treatment for a few days, and then they were put on a boat, in fact a rubber dinghy.”
The ships of Chittim are getting prepared for the battle that is to come. Chittim is mentioned in the Bible where the Lord says, “For the ships of Chittim shall come against him” (Daniel 11:30), that is the Antichrist. ISIS and all of these Islamic terrorists are the acolytes of the Antichrist, and so Chittim — who are the sea peoples of the Mediterranean, that is, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks and Cypriots — will be amongst nations that will war against the Antichrist.
The Douay-Rheims translation makes this more conspicuous, since it renders the same passage of Daniel as such:
“And the galleys and the Romans shall come upon him, and he shall be struck, and shall return, and shall have indignation against the covenant of the sanctuary, and he shall succeed: and he shall return and shall devise against them that have forsaken the covenant of the sanctuary.” (Daniel 11:30)
When we read such passages of holy writ, let us not forget that such an event happened in providential history, in the Battle of Lepanto, in which the fleets of Italy and Spain were guided by destiny and they strengthened in God their Lord, to destroy the navy of the Antichrist Ottomans. Such a beautiful victory left one anonymous poet to write:
“High peaks of Leucadia, watch over that final day: you who saw the Roman fleet and the people of Christ taking their vengeance, and the brutal Muhammadan fall before sword and fire. You saw the Spanish youth return with a thousand ships, proud with his banners and his vast spoils.” (Anonymous, I will Now Sing of the Happy Deeds, 415-419, trans. Wright, Sarah, & Lemons)
And when we read from the Muslims, of how much they wish to destroy Rome, let us not turn away from a most obvious truth: that the devil wants to hinder the plan of God; he is working ever so connivingly and vigorously to make Rome Muslim, knowing what threat it poses to his plans. But most definitely he will not succeeded, even though Europe has gone the way of the heathen, for “If we are faithless, He remains faithful;” (1 Timothy 2:13) we cannot think that God is so unjust that He will forsake the nations that He brought into His Church, and from the prophecy of Daniel, we are certain that Europe will come back to holiness and combat the sinister forces of the Antichrist.