MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

Is this further evidence that the stage is being set for the fulfillment of Bible prophecy? …

Daniel 11:40-43, “At the time of the end the king of the South will engage him in battle, and the king of the North will storm out against him with chariots and cavalry and a great fleet of ships. He will invade many countries and sweep through them like a flood. He will also invade the Beautiful Land. Many countries will fall, but Edom, Moab and the leaders of Ammon will be delivered from his hand. He will extend his power over many countries; Egypt will not escape. He will gain control of the treasures of gold and silver and all the riches of Egypt, with the Libyans and Nubians in submission.”

By DAVID ROSENBERG – “The contrasts couldn’t be any more stark.

In a space of five days, voters in the Gulf emirate of Oman quietly went to the polls to elect members to the country’s Shoura Council, a quasi-legislature that the country’s absolute ruler has promised will be granted more power, while in Libya another autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi was dragged out of a drainpipe where he had sought refugee to be pummeled and killed by rebels, the denouement to a bloody six-month civil war.

Gaddafi is the third Arab leader to lose his job in the 11 months since the Arab Spring erupted while a fourth, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, announced Wednesday that he was ready to step down. The fate of another, Syria’s Bashar Assad, hangs in the balance. But other leaders faced unrest in the early days of the Arab Spring only to turn back the popular tide.

Besides Oman’s Sultan Qaboos bin Said Said, King Muhammed VI of Morocco has also succeeded in containing unrest as has King Abdullah of Jordan. At the outset of the Arab Spring, all looked ripe for revolution and experienced varying levels of unrest, but 11 months later all four leaders are still standing.

It pays to be a dynast rather than a dictator, or the son of a dictator. None of the region’s many royals has been toppled and only one – Bahrain’s Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Khalifa – has faced a serious challenge to his rule. All four autocrats to fall, as well as a fifth most likely to succumb, were dictators who made pretensions to democratic rule with rigged elections. Among non-royals, only Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has succeeded in restoring quiet.

The staying power of kings could be due to early-childhood training in statecraft or a traditional deference on the part of people to royalty, but Ibrahim Saif, a resident scholar at the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace suggests it is because royals rely more on their paternal image than on fear to maintain their rule.

‘They are more responsive to the demands of the street. Historically they have been more tolerant,’ Saif told The Media Line in a telephone interview from Beirut. ‘If you compare the monarchy in Jordan, for instance, to the regimes in Syria or Egypt, they try to respond to the demands of the people, like quality of education, social conditions.’

The kingdom of Jordan scores 0.698 on the United Nations Human Development Index (the highest score is a 1.0), compared with 0.632 for the neighboring dictatorship of Syria. Oman scores a higher 0.705. Morocco is a much lower 0.582, but over the last decades its score has jumped by 14.8 percent. Politically, the monarchies are also relatively liberal.

Morocco is one of the few Arab countries to enjoy a ‘partly free’ designation by Freedom House. In 2010, the human rights organization categorized Jordan and Oman as ‘not free,’ but they scored higher on political rights and civil liberties than Tunisia, Syria or Libya.” Read more.