MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

Nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to the amaurotic leadership of the Obama administration.  The “President’s” conduct is indicative of someone who is either woefully ignorant to the otherwise obvious agendas of the Islamist influence, or of someone who is purposefully turning a blind eye to a rising anti-Western tide.  It could even be argued, of course, that Obama knows exactly what he is doing. No matter which it is, however, dark clouds are gathering on the horizon and what will burst forth will not be life-giving rain …

Breitbart – “Beirut Arab news agency al Nashra reported on Saturday November 22, that [White House Muslim envoy] Dalia Mogahed has succeeded in canceling a meeting between the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon and President Barack Obama. Writing in al Nashra, the reporter said “an unnamed US source told the news agency, that those who sought canceling a visit of (the spiritual head of the Maronite Church) Patriarch Beshara Rahi to the White House are Dalia Mujahid (Mogahed), the highest adviser on Arab and Islamic Affairs in the State Department, who is from Egyptian origins. And that,” according to al Nashra, ‘heeding a request by the higher leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who consider that US Administration must support the Islamist Sunni current facing the Iranian current in the region.’

The al Nashra report, circulating now widely in the Middle East, but also in the United States and across the Lebanese Christian Diaspora confirms what was already known about the impact the so-called ‘advisors on Arab and Islamic Affairs’ in the White House on Middle East issues in general and on US policies regarding the Christians in the Middle East.

The anti-Middle East Christian lobbying in Washington, attributed to Muslim Brotherhood front groups and sympathizers is not limited to the Maronites, who form the bulk of the two million Lebanese Americans. According to research showing the links between Presidential adviser Dalia Mogahed and the Muslim Brotherhood, and to NGOs representing Middle East Christian groups in the US, blocking Middle East Christian meetings at the White House and the State Department have been associated with the work of the ‘advisors’ and their allies in the Islamist camp in Washington such as CAIR and MPAC.” Read more.

Flashback: Obama’s Christian Problem – White House Overlooks Christian Persecution While Pandering to Islam – “The United States has been wary to intervene in matters affecting Christians in the Middle East for fear of validating terrorist narratives that the West is engaged in a new crusade against Islam. The result of this passive policy has been to allow Islamic extremists increasingly to dominate the debate, often with tragic consequences… According to the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, the last Christian church in Afghanistan has been destroyed. The 500 to 8,000 Afghan Christians who wish to worship publicly can attend services at military bases, Provincial Reconstruction Team facilities and the Italian embassy, but there are obvious risks involved.” Read more.

Flashback: Muslim Brotherhood Gaining Foothold in U.S. Government? – “They were the first modern terrorists and the forerunner of al Qaeda. But these days, the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming mainstream not only in Egypt, but in Washington, D.C. While the final chapter of the so-called Arab Spring has yet to be written, it appears that radical Islamic forces could emerge as the big winners. None more so than the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Jordan, the Brotherhood has used unrest to increase its influence. The group is also making inroads closer to home, according to one expert. ‘Their goal is primarily deception, manipulation and intelligence gathering,’ former FBI Special Agent John Guandolo said. Guandolo said Brotherhood operatives have infiltrated the halls of power in Washington, D.C.” Read more.

Flashback: Obama Pulls Islam From All Terror Trainings – “Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole confirmed on Wednesday that the Obama administration was pulling back all training materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have claimed are offensive… The move comes after complaints from advocacy organizations including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others identified as Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial.” Read more.

By James Rosen – “From the first stirrings of change in the Middle East nine months ago, optimism at the prospect of 100 million young people rising up to seize their democratic freedoms has been tempered by fear in Western capitals that radical Islamists might also rise up and try to hijack the so-called Arab Spring.

And now, many analysts say, that fear has been realized.

In Tunisia, where the epic season of unrest began, last Sunday’s historic elections appear to have resulted in an Islamist group winning a governing majority.

In Libya, an ex-terrorist once jailed by the Central Intelligence Agency now runs the country’s foremost military organization, and new political leaders speak openly of enacting Sharia, the ultra-harsh code of Islamic law.

And in Egypt, where the world’s oldest civilization is bracing for elections next month, rioters have recently forced the evacuation of the Israeli embassy and waged vicious attacks on Coptic Christians.

Worrisome in their own right, these developments also raise difficult questions, in an already contentious political season, about the conduct of President Obama and his national security team…

‘Revolutions are unpredictable phenomena,’ Clinton replied. ‘I think a lot of the leaders are saying the right things and some are saying things that do give pause to us….We’re going to do all that we can within our power to basically try to influence outcomes. But, you know, the historic wind sweeping the Middle East and North Africa were not of our making.’

Jamie Smith, a former CIA officer who has made three fact-finding trips to Libya this year, warns that the sense of unity that bound the country’s disparate rebel groups during their eight-month revolt has evaporated since Muammar Qaddafi fell from power.

In the dictator’s place, Smith says, the oil-rich but woefully mismanaged North African state is relying on the Transitional National Council, made up of inexperienced ex-rebels, and the Tripoli Military Council, headed by Abdel Hakim Belhaj. The latter was once head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which the U.S. State Department classifies as a foreign terrorist organization.

It is unlikely that Belhaj’s loyalties to the United States run strong: Smith notes that the CIA captured Belhaj in 2004, briefly held him in Thailand, and ultimately returned him to the custody of Qaddafi in Libya, where the former LIFG fighter languished in prison until his release last year.

‘So now you’ve got a radical Islamist terrorist leader who is running the most powerful military group in Libya,’ said Smith, a veteran of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. ‘In that area of the world, the people with the biggest guns make the rules. And this guy has got the guns. And he’s going to make the rules.'” Read more.

“When hundreds of Tunisians drove through the capital sounding their horns and waving scarves this week to celebrate the election victory of an Islamist party, there was little jubilation in the Ennasr neighbosrhood.

With its chic boutiques and upmarket cafes, this suburb is a bastion of a segment of Tunisian society left feeling marginalized and even a little fearful by the election result.

Areas like Ennasr are home to middle-class, urban professional women who for decades have been living a lifestyle that in many ways has more in common with Europe than the Arab world. Now they worry that that is going to change.

In Sunday’s election, Tunisia, birthplace of the “Arab Spring” uprisings, handed the biggest share of the vote to Ennahda, a moderate Islamist party that was banned under decades of autocratic, secularist rule.

‘We’re afraid that they’ll limit our freedoms,’ said Rym, a 25-year-old medical intern sitting in ‘Gringo’s’, a fast-food outlet in Ennasr.

‘They say they won’t but after a while they could introduce changes step by step. Polygamy could come back … They say they want to be like Turkey but it could turn out like Iran. Don’t forget, that was a very open society too.'” Read more.

The Ennahda Islamist Party says that it wants to be like Turkey.  And how is that a good thing exactly? …

Flashback: Young Muslims in Turkey Murder Three Christians – “In a gruesome assault against Turkey’s tiny Christian community, five young Muslim Turks entered a Christian publishing office in the southeastern province of Malatya Wednesday and slit the throats of the three Protestant Christians present. Two of the victims, Necati Aydin, 36, and Ugur Yuksel, 32, were Turkish converts from Islam. The third man, Tilmann Geske, 46, was a German citizen.” Read more.

Flashback: Turkey’s Protestant Christians Face Wave of Attacks – “A Protestant pastor in the Turkish industrial city of Izmit woke up one morning last month to find a huge red swastika painted on his apartment door, with a handwritten hate letter shoved underneath… ‘Your efforts to wear us down—as the inheritors of a great race—and alienate us from our values will come to nothing,’ the writer declared… The Izmit Protestant Church was targeted in a violent attack the night after Christmas last year, when someone started a fire next to the outside wall of the building. ‘The aim was to burn the church down,’ Hade told Compass Direct… Simultaneously, the Turkish media has fanned intense criticism of Christian missionary activity. Even government ministers have spoken out, claiming that foreign missionaries had political motives aimed at ‘damaging the social peace and unity of Turkey.'” Read more.

Flashback: Turkey: One of the world’s earliest Christian cultures totters on the edge of extinction – “Syriac-speaking Christians in this area have persisted through more than a dozen centuries of Muslim, Ottoman, and now Turkish rule. They languish between the secularizing government of the Republic of Turkey and an Islamic culture that views them as heathen outsiders… In short, the government would be pleased to see the Christian communities quietly disappear altogether. Christians have been caught in the middle of a war between the government and the Kurds. Now it matters little to the government that the Hezbollah as well as the Kurds are harassing them. Christians abroad, meanwhile, know little of their life-and-death struggle.” Read more.

Matthew 24:22, “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”

Colossians 3:12, “Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering …”

Acts 14:22b, “… we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.”

To all ‘pre-trib’ believers, it is time to think again …

By ELWOOD MCQUAID – “Christians are being killed by radical Islamists because of their beliefs. Why then, while the world celebrates revolution in the Arab world, are we standing silently while these atrocities are taking place in these democratically-liberated lands?

Israel has long been like the canary in the mineshaft. If the canary succumbs to the odorless, lethal gases of the depths below, the miners know it’s time to get out of the mine. Anti-Semitic militancy, like the canary in the mine, warns the rest of the world of what lies ahead. Now, however, there is strong evidence that there are two types of ‘canaries’ in the mine. Long-suffering Christians in the Middle East are being ravaged by merciless assaults that threaten their very existence.

Liberal elitists in Western politics, academia, and the news media collectively swooned when the mobs in Cairo’s Tahrir Square swept Western ally, Hosni Mubarak, out of the Egyptian presidency and into a prison cell to await trial. In the minds of so-called progressives, the ‘Arab Spring’ was precisely the balm of freedom for which the downtrodden had long been yearning. Democratic reforms were supposedly around the corner, swinging everyone into an era of prosperous camaraderie. That’s how delusional Western leaders saw things…

In America, Muslims are protected, much more so than evangelical Christians. Protecting Muslim citizens is an honorable pursuit that raises America’s standards far above those in so many other parts of the world. Yet why are the same leaders who so passionately protect Muslim rights in America doing nothing for Christians who are dying in record numbers? Why do so many of our leaders hold their tongues as the world turns a blind eye?

And there is another question—one we must all ask ourselves: Why has the church been virtually silent about the suffering of our brethren? We will meet them one day. What will we answer when they ask us, ‘Why?'” Read more.

Christians Under Threat as Radical Islam Spreads in ‘New Middle East’ – “Attacked by mobs and terrorists, repressed by the growing popularity of fundamentalist Islamic law and cut off from crucial business ties, Christians are fleeing the Middle East in an unprecedented exodus. More than half of Iraqi Christians — an estimated 400,000 people — have left that country over the last decade as power has fallen in the hands of increasingly hostile Shi’a Islamic leaders. In Egypt, home to at least 8 million Copt Christians — a number that exceeds the populations of Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Tunisia — at least 95,000 Christians have emigrated since March 2011. The number could reach 250,000 by the end of this year, reports the Egyptian Federation of Human Rights.” Read more.