Perhaps most intriguing is that epicenter issues matter significantly to Christians who describe themselves as Independents. A full 44% of Christian Independent men say they are more likely, while only 6% say less likely. The numbers are similar for Christian Independent women (44% to 11%).
APPENDIX 4: EZEKIEL 38–39 (NASB)
CHAPTER 38
And the word of the LORD came to me saying, 2“Son of man, set your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him 3and say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal. 4I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords; 5Persia, Ethiopia and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet; 6Gomer with all its troops; Beth-togarmah from the remote parts of the north with all its troops—many peoples with you.
7“Be prepared, and prepare yourself, you and all your companies that are assembled about you, and be a guard for them. 8After many days you will be summoned; in the latter years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the nations, and they are living securely, all of them. 9You will go up, you will come like a storm; you will be like a cloud covering the land, you and all your troops, and many peoples with you.”
10‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “It will come about on that day, that thoughts will come into your mind and you will devise an evil plan, 11and you will say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will go against those who are at rest, that live securely, all of them living without walls and having no bars or gates, 12to capture spoil and to seize plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places which are now inhabited, and against the people who are gathered from the nations, who have acquired cattle and goods, who live at the center of the world.’ 13Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish with all its villages will say to you, ‘Have you come to capture spoil? Have you assembled your company to seize plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to capture great spoil?’”’
14“Therefore prophesy, son of man, and say to Gog, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “On that day when My people Israel are living securely, will you not know it? 15You will come from your place out of the remote parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great assembly and a mighty army; 16and you will come up against My people Israel like a cloud to cover the land. It shall come about in the last days that I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me when I am sanctified through you before their eyes, O Gog.”
17‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Are you the one of whom I spoke in former days through My servants the prophets of Israel, who prophesied in those days for many years that I would bring you against them? 18It will come about on that day, when Gog comes against the land of Israel,” declares the Lord GOD, “that My fury will mount up in My anger. 19In My zeal and in My blazing wrath I declare that on that day there will surely be a great earthquake in the land of Israel. 20The fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the beasts of the field, all the creeping things that creep on the earth, and all the men who are on the face of the earth will shake at My presence; the mountains also will be thrown down, the steep pathways will collapse and every wall will fall to the ground. 21I will call for a sword against him on all My mountains,” declares the Lord GOD. “Every man’s sword will be against his brother. 22With pestilence and with blood I will enter into judgment with him; and I will rain on him and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire and brimstone. 23I will magnify Myself, sanctify Myself, and make Myself known in the sight of many nations; and they will know that I am the LORD.”’”
CHAPTER 39
“And you, son of man, prophesy against Gog and say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal; 2and I will turn you around, drive you on, take you up from the remotest parts of the north and bring you against the mountains of Israel. 3I will strike your bow from your left hand and dash down your arrows from your right hand. 4You will fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples who are with you; I will give you as food to every kind of predatory bird and beast of the field. 5You will fall on the open field; for it is I who have spoken,” declares the Lord GOD. 6“And I will send fire upon Magog and those who inhabit the coastlands in safety; and they will know that I am the LORD.
7“My holy name I will make known in the midst of My people Israel; and I will not let My holy name be profaned anymore. And the nations will know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel. 8Behold, it is coming and it shall be done,” declares the Lord GOD. “That is the day of which I have spoken.
9“Then those who inhabit the cities of Israel will go out and make fires with the weapons and burn them, both shields and bucklers, bows and arrows, war clubs and spears, and for seven years they will make fires of them. 10They will not take wood from the field or gather firewood from the forests, for they will make fires with the weapons; and they will take the spoil of those who despoiled them and seize the plunder of those who plundered them,” declares the Lord GOD.
11“On that day I will give Gog a burial ground there in Israel, the valley of those who pass by east of the sea, and it will block off those who would pass by. So they will bury Gog there with all his horde, and they will call it the valley of Hamon-gog. 12For seven months the house of Israel will be burying them in order to cleanse the land. 13Even all the people of the land will bury them; and it will be to their renown on the day that I glorify Myself,” declares the Lord GOD. 14“They will set apart men who will constantly pass through the land, burying those who were passing through, even those left on the surface of the ground, in order to cleanse it. At the end of seven months they will make a search. 15As those who pass through the land pass through and anyone sees a man’s bone, then he will set up a marker by it until the buriers have buried it in the valley of Hamon-gog. 16And even the name of the city will be Hamonah. So they will cleanse the land.”’
17“As for you, son of man, thus says the Lord GOD, ‘Speak to every kind of bird and to every beast of the field, “Assemble and come, gather from every side to My sacrifice which I am going to sacrifice for you, as a great sacrifice on the mountains of Israel, that you may eat flesh and drink blood. 18You will eat the flesh of mighty men and drink the blood of the princes of the earth, as though they were rams, lambs, goats and bulls, all of them fatlings of Bashan. 19So you will eat fat until you are glutted, and drink blood until you are drunk, from My sacrifice which I have sacrificed for you. 20You will be glutted at My table with horses and charioteers, with mighty men and all the men of war,” declares the Lord GOD.
21“And I will set My glory among the nations; and all the nations will see My judgment which I have executed and My hand which I have laid on them. 22And the house of Israel will know that I am the LORD their God from that day onward. 23The nations will know that the house of Israel went into exile for their iniquity because they acted treacherously against Me, and I hid My face from them; so I gave them into the hand of their adversaries, and all of them fell by the sword. 24According to their uncleanness and according to their transgressions I dealt with them, and I hid My face from them.”’”
25Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, “Now I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel; and I will be jealous for My holy name. 26They will forget their disgrace and all their treachery which they perpetrated against Me, when they live securely on their own land with no one to make them afraid. 27When I bring them back from the peoples and gather them from the lands of their enemies, then I shall be sanctified through them i
n the sight of the many nations. 28Then they will know that I am the LORD their God because I made them go into exile among the nations, and then gathered them again to their own land; and I will leave none of them there any longer. 29I will not hide My face from them any longer, for I will have poured out My Spirit on the house of Israel,” declares the Lord GOD.
APPENDIX 5: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS
The following interviews were conducted in 2007 for the Epicenter documentary film released for the fortieth anniversary of the Six Days’ War.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
Former Prime Minister of Israel
JOEL ROSENBERG: Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for spending time with us. First question I want to ask you: In your 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism, you said, “It’s only a matter of time before the U.S. gets hit by radical Islam.” You had talked about the World Trade Center and kamikazes. What is it you were able to see in the mid-1990s that so many analysts, like the leaders in the West, couldn’t see?
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I think the West misunderstood, and still misunderstands, the threat of radical Islam. It is a fanatic messianic ideology that seeks to have an apocalyptic battle for world supremacy with the West. It seeks to correct what it sees—its disciples see—as an accident of history, where the West has risen and Islam has declined. The correction is supposed to be done by the reselection of an Islamic empire and the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to obliterate Islam’s enemies, and to subjugate the rest.
This is a pathological ideology, much like Nazism was. And it poses a threat, in my judgment, in many ways bigger than Nazism because Hitler embarked on a world conflict and then sought to achieve nuclear weapons, whereas the leading radical Islamic regime, Iran, is seeking to first acquire nuclear weapons and then embark on a world conflict. And that is what is not yet understood in the West, and certainly, if it’s understood, it’s not acted upon.
ROSENBERG: [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad has an apocalyptic theory. . . . In your view, how is that driving Iranian foreign policy? Because that’s not something that Western analysts are talking much about. They’re starting to, but this seems to be animating where they’re headed and their timetable.
NETANYAHU: I think the world changes once Iran acquires nuclear weapons. With this fanatic regime, it’s almost akin to the Branch Davidians under David Koresh acquiring nuclear weapons. You know, it’s one thing if you have a crazy sect stuck up in some commune in Oregon or in a ranch in Waco, Texas. But when the wacko from Waco gets nuclear weapons and he wants to obliterate the United States and its allies, then you start worrying. And that’s what is happening in Iran.
You think that these people are normal; you think that Iran would conform to the conceptions of deterrents and careful calculation of cost and benefit. But in fact, it is part of that stream of radical Islam, in this case [the] Shiite stream, but you’ve already seen what the Sunni stream does, which is to smash into buildings in Manhattan with collective suicide, to smash into the Pentagon with collective suicide. And there’s no reason to believe that the militant Shiites, once they have atomic weapons, will not be suicidal. They say openly that they intend to remove Israel, the first position of the West, really “little Satan,” but remember that their goal is to get the United States, the “big Satan.” We’re just a station, one station, on the way to world conquest. And to have such a regime that believes in apocalyptic Armageddon with the West—in which millions will die on both sides, but the Muslim millions go to a Muslim heaven with all the trappings—to have that crazy ideology in charge of a country that is developing atomic weapons is unbelievably dangerous, and it should stop. Everything else is secondary to this.
I find it hard saying this, because I said in the early nineties that the radical Muslims would bring down the World Trade Center and the response was no response at all. And I am saying here, now, in the beginning of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that the world faces an enormous danger, should Ahmadinejad’s Iran acquire atomic weapons. It is not merely a danger to my own country—and for the reasons of full disclosure I tell you, yes, it is a danger to my own country—but it’s a danger to my own country the way Hitler was a danger to the Jews. Yes, of course, he went after the Jews, but then he went after everyone else. And that’s exactly what you have with Iran. It has to be stopped. Now.
ROSENBERG: Can you negotiate with, or even successfully deter, someone who believes that it is his God-given mission to eliminate millions of people?
NETANYAHU: No, it’s very hard to rely on deterrents. It is not the same as Soviet Russia. It is not the same as China, or India, or any one of the nuclear powers today, that you’re fairly comfortable understanding what they think in terms of cost and benefit. In the case of an extreme religious cult, that has no such calculations. You could, in fact, face a suicidal regime. Therefore you can’t rely on deterrents; you should work on prevention, that is, preventing them from acquiring the weapons and mass death.
ROSENBERG: How much time does the West have to make a decision to act decisively to stop Iran?
NETANYAHU: Not much. We are running out of time. I can’t tell you if it’s a period of months or a few years. It’s certainly no more than a few years.
ROSENBERG: When you were prime minister, both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. As I understand from my research, Western intelligence agencies—I don’t know about the Mossad—were startled that they were ready at that moment. What was your assessment at the time?
NETANYAHU: Well, the first thing I did, or among the first things I did, after I was elected prime minister, was, I think some three weeks later, to speak before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. And I said at the time that the greatest danger that the world faces is the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons. What was true ten years ago is doubly true today—not doubly, triply. I couldn’t get the leading powers of the world, including the U.S. administration at the time, to focus on this danger and to stop the shipment of nuclear and ballistic technology to Iran from many countries, including Russia. I could not get the U.S. to focus on this. I think today people understand the danger. It’s much more advanced. It has moved forward.
Could we be surprised tomorrow? Well, we were surprised by the extent of Libya’s advancement in its nuclear program, and happily it was dismantled, probably as a result of the deterrent effect of [Mu’ammar] Al-Qadhafi’s seeing Saddam [Hussein] at the end of a hole—realizing that he too could hang by the end of a rope. But no such deterrent necessarily works on the true believers in Tehran. And therefore, our focus should not be on deterrents, which may not work, but on prevention, which can obviate the need for deterrents.
ROSENBERG: Natan Sharansky was telling me a story a couple of years ago when I was working with him, about how you sent him back to Moscow, to meet with then KGB chief Vladimir Putin to talk about this specific threat. And he repeated it, of course, for the cameras, a couple days ago. Why? Why did you send him? What message were you trying to send Putin and the leaders of Russia? Because this relationship—Russia and Iran—takes this thing to a new level.
NETANYAHU: I think there is a fundamental contradiction in Russia’s policy. On the one hand, it gives free rein, or almost free rein, to Iran; giving it political support, giving it antiaircraft weapons, and so on, vetoing stiff measures in the Security Council. But on the other hand, it’s building, inadvertently, a powder keg that could explode the soft underbelly of Russia, its own Muslim populations, and the Muslim republics, former Soviet republics, that gird Russia’s southern belly. So I think this is a big mistake. I think that nuclear weapons in the hands of an Iranian, fervently Islamic regime is a danger to Russia. But Russia is perhaps acting on short-term gains at the cost of long term-interest, and this is something that I wanted to bring to their attention when I asked Sharansky to go there. And something that I sought to deal with by getting the U.S. administration at the time to apply sanctions on Russian companies, and
the Russian government itself, for selling ballistic and nuclear technology to Iran.
We were unsuccessful then because the U.S. did not focus on this. And the question is, what will the U.S. do today? It has probably in Washington today, I think, a clear understanding of the dangers. But . . . there are really [three] steps here: One is understanding . . . the danger. Two is preparing a response to it. And third is acting. And of all the things that are difficult for statesmen and political leaders, preemption is the hardest because you can never prove what would happen if you don’t preempt. So had the West preempted against Germany in the 1930s, there would have been a lot of controversy and a lot of argument against excessive violence. But of course, millions, tens of millions of people, let alone the six million Jews, would have been saved. And it’s the same thing today; to take strong action against Iran, first in the form of sanctions, and second, if those don’t work, using other means, is something that would be criticized, perhaps severely criticized, by some of the rest of the Arab or Muslim world. They just want it to happen; they are begging it to happen. . . . In the West you’d be criticized, but you’d be saving the world, and probably saving millions and millions of lives.
ROSENBERG: So what’s Putin’s objective, in your assessment of him, personally, of where he’s taking Russia, in submarines, missiles, nuclear technology—
NETANYAHU: I think it’s very clear that there is a monetary gain [for Russia] in the contract with Iran. [But] I think it’s folly to take a perspective of short-term financial gain at the expense of your vital strategic interest, like the survival of your cities. That is not a good trade-off. And I think that it would be prudent for Russia to take a second look.
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