By Walid Shoebat
Christians worldwide are waking up to the reality that Islam is a menace. “Italy is SMART. Italy doesn’t legally recognize ISLAM as a religion” comments Mavis Johnson on Shoebat.com.
Christians are getting tired of the Islamic menace and Mavis’s sentiments are growing, especially after the latest Paris attacks and the flood of Muslim refugees into Europe.
And now, Fox News reported that Hungary’s prime minister says he believes a secret pact led by Germany to bring up to 500,000 Syrians from Turkey directly into the European Union will be revealed soon. The Germany Turkey secret pact,
Greece Minister for Migration Policy Ioannis Mouzalas says: “It’s true that our country [Greece] has come under intense pressure from some European Union member countries who mistakenly believe that the refugee flow can be controlled from Greece. As we’ve repeatedly stated and as Europe has belatedly understood, Greece is the start of the corridor. The door is in Turkey. Therefore if the flows are not controlled in Turkey, from the coast of Turkey, it is impossible to control the flows from Greece or any other European Union member.”
Turkey the dragon is spewing forth the flood of immigrants (Revelation 11-12) to pursue the Church.
What we see and will examine here is a repetition of history where the West collaborates with the Antichrist. While many believe that the Antichrist is a global control, it is also crucial to see how the forces of Antichrist will initially include western powers making the Muslim threat global.
This is the struggle between the righteous, the Christian with the unrighteous, the Muslim and the liberal. For Christians like Mavis, she was glad that in Italy, Islam does not get tax status nor has rights as a religion and Italy does not allow any new mosques to be built. There are 4 mosques in the entire country and Italians are even discussing closing these as well.
It was a war between Christianity and Islam where in the end, God sifts the sheep from the goats. Such sifting can already be seen where the anti-Islam sentiment is also growing in the U.S.
We see the divide between sheep and goats in the political sphere. Presidential candidate Donald Trump is making himself on the side of the sheep as he said on Monday there is “something definitely going on” between Islam and violence, and cited the attacks in Paris and World Trade Center.
John McCain is clearly a goat. Trump is correct and Christians are getting tired of the media coverup up for Islam. The U.S. does not exist for Islam and the soccer game in Turkey (unlike what the media says) had the entire crowd chant “Şehitler Ölmez Vatan Bölünmez” (Muslim Martyrs do not die) praising the Paris terrorists. Anyone can see and hear the massive numbers (00:50):
Westerners are becoming more aware of government and media political correctness rendering the media ineffective at silencing leaders like Trump. When Obama was against blowing up ISIS’s oil fields he claimed it would ‘harm the environment’ and advance ‘global warming’, few bought the nonsense and the laity understands that the “Martyrs do not die” stems right from the Quran Sura 2: “Those who are killed in the cause of Allah: Do not call them dead”.
There is a definite struggle in the U.S and Europe with Islam where there is a divide between the supporters of the Antichrist religion of Islam and against. There are approximately 1.55 million Muslims in Italy – 3.7% of the country’s population – but there are only four purpose-built mosques in the country – including the Mosque of Rome, which is the West’s largest mosque. In comparison, Germany has 140 mosques to serve 4.03 million Muslims and the UK has around 200 purpose-built mosques for 2.95 million Muslims.
In Catholic Italy, the building of new mosques in Italy is reportedly frequently prevented by local officials. Islam is not recognised by the Italian government. ISIS has stated that Italy, and specifically Rome, is a target for attacks. But such attacks on Rome are welcomed by many anti-Rome Protestants. This is due to a faulty prophetic interpretation by Protestant reformers. Historically, Catholic states fared better in resisting Islam’s infiltration than predominately Protestant states like Germany and England. In Germany, Protestantism is concentrated in the north and east and Roman Catholicism is concentrated in the south and west and Muslims in general are more magnetized towards the liberal and protestant areas.
The Antichrist religion of Islam is causing Europe to witness civil unrest caused by Muslim immigration. The German Interior Ministry reports 173 instances of attacks against accommodations for Muslim asylum-seekers during the first six months of this year alone, almost three times as many as during the same period the previous year.
Attacks on hostels for asylum-seekers in 2014 and 2015.
arson attack was perpetrated against a building intended to provide accommodations for asylum-seekers in the city of Tröglitz in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
A burned out asylum-seekers home in the city of Remchingen in the western state of Baden-Württemberg.
So as we see today, we must learn from history. To understand the western-Muslim collaboration, it is crucial to examine how the Bible speaks of two beasts, one was wounded and then it revives which is the same old wounded beast. This is not exclusively Europe, but is the sick man of Europe, the Ottomans who were the greatest menace to Christianity in all of history. A “beast” is a threat to the Church of Christ.
In Europe, Islam entered during the 16th century, at the hight of Ottoman conquest and in a time when Reformed (or Calvinist) Protestantism grew. In Hungary and Transylvania Protestantism coincided with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans where both, Muslim and Protestants were united in conflict with the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor and his Catholic allies. There were numerous exchanges between Protestants and Muslims exploring religious similarities and the possibility of trade and even military alliances.
Where theology undermined militarism, and promoted actionless faith, it was similar to what we see in liberalism’s anti-war agenda where coexistence and tolerance of social abnormalities becomes the norm. Similarly in our generation, today we see military alliance between NATO, U.S. and Muslim Turkey against Russian interest. Russia today, like Rome is viewed by many Protestants as the land of Gog and Magog. For example, Joel Rosenberg collaborates with Mormon Glenn Beck on the Russia-phobia on one CNN interview:
Mormon Beck: Let me — I just want to go through a laundry list of a couple of things. First of all, Putin, is it possible he`s Gog?
ROSENBERG: It`s possible. There — Ezekiel 38 says that a dictator with an evil intent will rise to power in Russia and form military alliances all throughout the Middle East. That`s certainly what Putin is doing. Is he Gog? Too early to say. He`s certainly Gog-esque.
BECK: OK. He`s Gog-esque. Very nice.
“Ezekiel 38” never “says that a dictator with an evil intent will rise to power in Russia”. This is an interpretation. In other words, when the interpretation becomes the “Thus says the Lord” or “God says” its as if the interpreter becomes the mouth of God when in reality he is a mouth of Satan.
It is rather bizarre to see Christian nations stand with Islam, but such is the prophecy when Christ divides the Church between sheep and goats (Matthew 25).
And this is what it was (the goats joined Islam) when the first beast arose. For example, in 1853, Britain and France fought and defeated Russia in the Crimean War in order to protect Turkish control over the Holy Land. Russia’s insistence on being the protector of Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land was objected by France, preferring the area to be under exclusive French Catholic protection.
Nothing changed from historic times. Today the West cares more about ousting pro-Russian governments in the Middle East and cared less about the catastrophic results for apostolic-succession churches throughout the region. In other words, the very anti-Russia sentiment feeds into the propaganda that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of countless churches.
There is nothing new under the sun. Again, the problem was not only the Protestants, Catholic France was a menace making a military cooperation between the Ottoman Empire with the Franco-Ottoman alliance of 1535.
The alliance with the Muslim Turks was a catastrophe for Christians just as we witnessed in Iraq and Syria where NATO (the U.S. and France were the leading powers) preferred the Muslim revolutions of the Arab nationalists which was a catastrophe for Christians enslaved by ISIS.
Likewise in June of 1544, the Turkish fleet arrived at the island of Lipari thirty kilometers north of Sicily. The Muslim Ottoman admiral Khair-Eddin Barbarossa threatened that he would lay waste to the island and enslave its Christian population unless the Lipariotes rendered to him two hundred boys and two hundred girls along with a large sum of money. The Lipariotes refused, resolving that the entire populace of their city should either remain free or be enslaved. In response to the defiance of the people of Lipari, the Turks proceeded to attack the island. The Ottoman forces showered barrages of cannon shots during a several-day siege before they eventually took the island, enslaving its entire population.
While certain smaller Christian princes and states, in Spain and Italy for example, had occasionally maintained close relationships and even alliances with Muslims, the Franco-Ottoman alliance was a blatant and unprecedented challenge to the dominant norms of the time.
And like Erdogan of Turkey, who set his eyes on Syria and proclaimed animosity for Russia and Egypt, sultan Selim I (1512-1520) achieved the important defeat of the Mamluke Sultanate, resulting in the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt in 1517. These victories made Selim (as Erdogan today desires as well) to become the undisputed master of the Eastern Mediterranean. In addition, by gaining the submission of Mecca and Medina, the Ottoman sultans proclaimed a new Islamic caliphate which is exactly what Erdogan wants to do. In Daniel 11, Antichrist enters Egypt, Libya and Sudan.
Prior to the Protestants working out alliances with the Muslim Ottomans, it was Pope Pius II (1458-64) who was particularly active in his efforts to mobilize Christianity against the Muslim Turkish menace which he believed threatened to bring about the complete destruction of the Christian religion. In 1463 Pius declared that:
“the necessary war against the Turks is imminent and if we do not take up arms and do not meet the enemy, our religion is finished.”
In an act of desperation, the same pope even drafted a letter to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II refuting the errors of Islam and promising the sultan that if he converted to Christianity the pope would recognize him as emperor. (1)
In fact, the Ottomans tolerated Protestant missionaries within their realm, so long as they limited their proselytising to the Orthodox Christians. (2)
The reason for such tolerance was the rejection of images in worship, although more prominent in Islam, is a common point in Protestantism and Islam. This was already extensively recognized from the earliest times, as in the correspondence between Elizabeth I of England and her Ottoman Empire counterparts, in which she implied that Protestantism was closer to Islam than to Catholicism. (3) This is also a point developed by Martin Luther in On War against the Turk, in which he praised the Ottomans for their rigorous iconoclasm:
“It is part of the Turks’ holiness, also, that they tolerate no images or pictures and are even holier than our destroyers of images. For our destroyers tolerate, and are glad to have, images on gulden, groschen, rings, and ornaments; but the Turk tolerates none of them and stamps nothing but letters on his coins.”
Rich Protestant Transylvanian Saxon merchants traded with the Ottoman Empire and often donated Anatolian rugs to their churches as a wall decoration more according to their iconoclastic beliefs than the images of the saints used by the Catholics and the Orthodox. Churches like the Black Church of Brasov still hold collections of such rugs.
Relief statues in the Cathedral of Saint Martin, Utrecht, attacked in Reformation iconoclasm in the 16th century
The destruction of icons at the Kaaba by Muhammad, inL’Histoire Merveilleuse en Vers de Mahomet, 11th century.
Without a doubt, Protestantism and the Wars of Religion played a major role in the destruction of Christian unity and, by extension, the bases for the Christendom ideal. Church divide and liberalism are the main reasons for Islam’s infiltration. In 1520, when Selim was succeeded by perhaps the greatest Ottoman conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), he took advantage of internal division among Christian rulers to conquer Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes (the base of the Knights of St. John) in 1522; seized Hungary in 1526; laid siege to Vienna in 1529; and conquered Baghdad in 1534 forcing Catholic Europe to recognize the Ottoman threat, leading many to invoke the Christendom ideal with greater urgency.
History is simply repeating itself. France was the leader in bringing down Middle Eastern governments who were anti-Islamist during the Arab Spring and with the rise of Turkey, it will be the same as the Franco-Ottoman alliance established by Francis I (February 1536) with a series of capitulations granted by the sultan to the French king. This alliance was the culmination of diplomatic exchanges which began when Francis I initially sought the aid of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1525 after the French king’s defeat at Pavia.
And today, what do we see? A similar alliance to that when NATO (Europe and the U.S.) campaigned against Bashar Al-Assad and Russia. Erdogan capitulated and allowed the U.S. to use the Incirlic airport in Turkey to supposedly launch attacks on ISIS when the goal was to undermine Russia as did the French and British in 1853. The West needed Turkey and through diplomatic process Turkey allowed the U.S. to use its air base.
At the same time the Protestant Reformation was taking place in numerous areas of northern and central Europe, in harsh opposition to Papal authority and the Holy Roman Empire led by Emperor Charles V. This situation led the Protestants to consider various forms of cooperation and rapprochement (religious, commercial, military) with the Muslim world, in opposition to their common Habsburg enemy.
During the development of the Reformation, Protestantism and Islam were considered closer to each other than they were to Catholicism: “Islam was seen as closer to Protestantism in banning images from places of worship, in not treating marriage as a sacrament and in rejecting monastic orders” (Goody P. 42)
In On War against the Turk, Luther is actually less critical of the Turks than he is of the Pope, whom he calls an anti-Christ, or the Jews, whom he describes as “the Devil incarnate”. He urges his contemporaries to prefer the Turks over the Catholics, and refers as evidence to some Germans who were more favorable to the Ottoman Empire over Catholic Europe: “who actually want the Turk to come and rule, because they think that our German people are wild and uncivilized – indeed that they are half-devil and half-man”. (Goffman. P. 109-110)
Luther’s sentiments has little difference from Hitler. During the rise of Nazism Germany never targeted Muslims. Adolf Hitler had a favorable view of Islam and Muslims. He repeatedly expressed the view that Islam would have been much more compatible to the “Germanic races” than “meek” and “feeble” Christianity:
Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers […] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.
( Hitler, Adolf (1953). Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations. Translated by Norman Cameron. p. 667.)
Hitler’s confidant Albert Speer reports a similar statement made by Hitler:
“The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
( Speer, Albert (1970). Inside the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster. p. 96.)
Where Atheism spread in France (35%) so did Islam and just like liberalism in the U.S. which exists in major cities, Islam also spread. 17% of French Catholics (who comprise 52% of the population) didn’t believe in God.
This is also true in the U.S. and the whole of Europe. It is as a disease, the weaker the immune system the more the viral disease spreads.
It is crucial to understand that God is in control. In Ezekiel 28, it even confirms that the most powerful nations (strongest fortresses) on earth will annihilate the Antichrist:
“Behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness. They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the deaths of [them that are] slain in the midst of the seas.” (Ezekiel 28:7-8)
“They” pertains to these powerful nations and the term “terrible” implies to being “terrible in battle,” “most powerful,” “strongest fortresses” which are obviously Russia and the West.
Historically, tyrannies are destroyed by alliances of nations that were not friendly as we have seen the U.S and Europe finally allied with their enemy: Russia.
The key is the revival of historic Christianity which is like aged wine: the older the vintage, the better the quality, regardless of the label. Historically, Christianity was a religion of action not just pulpit words and sharing Scripture verses. In Christianity, we share sacrifices, trials, tribulations, joy, victories … as Solomon said, “To every [thing there is] a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up [that which is] planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance”.
Christianity today says that its always a “time to laugh,” a “time to dance,” while the time to “kill” has simply been abrogated by the New Testament.
This is a lie.
It is sort-of the same deception Muhammad made in his Quran where he too abrogated his ‘old-testament’ Meccan chapters. The only problem with Islam is that its war verses are predominately in the Quran’s ‘new testament’ (Medina) while the war chapters in the Bible are in the old.
But God is not the God of abrogation, He is the God of fulfillment. What was done with in the Old Testament was simply the levitical laws and it was not simply ‘abrogated‘ but fulfilled in Jesus Christ. All the rest remains intact and the previous wars simply prophesy as a type of the future wars. It was people like Hitler who abrogated the Old Testament.
Abrogation is of the devil and the whole of Scripture is of God. When someone asks “show me where this or that is in the New Testament” realize that this is the devil speaking and is an attempt to abrogate. Counter it with, “the whole Bible is the word of God”. The Bible which includes books that were abrogated by the Puritans and Luther way before them. These books too are “Bible”.
SOURCES
(1) Géraud Poumarède, “L’Europe de la Renaissance et l’Empire ottoman de la chute de Constantinople à la bataille de Lépante, Aspects culturels et politiques,” La Renaissance: Bulletin de la Société des historiens modernistes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), P. 52, 67)
(2) The Crimean war: A holy war of an unusual kind: A war in which two Christian countries fighting a third claimed Islam as their ally, The Economist, September 30, 2010.