Read The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps Online
Authors: Mike Evans
The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (7 page)
Ronald Reagan’s speech impacted the world. Natan Sharansky told me in Jerusalem that he remembers fellow prisoners tapping on the prison walls to communicate the American president’s speech. Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland, said the speech inspired him and millions of others.
A painting entitled “A Charge to Keep” hangs in the Oval Office. It was inspired by a favorite song from Charles Wesley. There is a determined rider ahead of two other riders urging his horse up a steep, narrow path. The rider bears a superficial resemblance to George W. Bush.
A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify,
A never dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.
To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfill;
O may it all my powr’s engage
To do my Master’s will!
In November 1998, George W. Bush flew to Israel. The trip was sponsored by the National Coalition, a Republican-oriented, American lobby group that strongly supported the policies of then prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Bush had dinner with Mr. Netanyahu on November 30, as well as meetings with other Israeli leaders. One of the highlights of the trip was a helicopter tour conducted by the foreign minister at the time, Ariel Sharon. Bush said to Mr. Sharon, “If you believe the Bible as I do, you know that extraordinary things happen.”
When he and Ariel Sharon parted company, Mr. Bush shook his hand warmly and said, “You know, Ariel, it is possible that I might be president of the United States, and you the prime minister of Israel.”
Sharon laughed and said, “It is unlikely that I, such a controversial figure in Israeli politics, would become the prime minister.”
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But Sharon did, in fact, become prime minister in a special election in February 2001.
During the last U.S. presidential election, Sharon was the first prime minister to refuse to meet with a presidential candidate, John Kerry. He would not even meet with Kerry’s brother despite the fact that the majority of the Jewish community is Democratic. Sharon was willing to fall on his political sword for Bush. Had Bush lost, Sharon would have gone down with him.
George W. Bush has the opportunity to do to Islamofascism what Reagan did to Communism, but he needs our prayerful support. Now that the State Department is headed by Condoleezza Rice, it needs only to take the next step. As Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, so too can we win this war; however, we will never defeat Islamofascism without moral clarity! As Reagan said, “If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”
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The church rallied around the movie
The Passion of the Christ
as a story about good versus evil. They did the same for the reelection campaign of George W. Bush. Christians saw the attacks against him as good versus evil. It is incumbent on the church to focus now on the source of all evil, Satan himself, and to pray for Christ to deliver us from that evil. I believe that if the church will make a commitment to 2 Chronicles 7:14 and to intercessory prayer, this passion for prayer and repentance will foment a Great Awakening in America that will spread throughout the world.
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ITH
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ORAL
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LARITY
W
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P
EACE
In 1991, I was in the Royal Palace of Madrid for most of the sessions of the Middle East Peace Conference. I noticed that the Israel and Arab delegations were not making eye contact, and when they did, you could see their bitterness. There was a spirit of unforgiveness. During one of the breaks, I met the Syrian foreign minister and the Egyptian ambassador.
I turned to the Egyptian ambassador and said, “Why don’t you forgive your brothers, as your most famous secretary of state and prime minister did?”
He looked at me, smiled, and said, “It never happened. We’ve never had such a man.”
I opened my Bible to the Book of Genesis and read him part of the story of Joseph in Egypt who forgave his brothers.
Benjamin Netanyahu, whom I recommended for his first position in Prime Minister Begin’s government in 1982, was shunned by President Clinton on numerous occasions because of Netanyahu’s moral clarity and his great admiration for Ronald Reagan. As a member of the National Press Club, I had the occasion to hear Benjamin Netanyahu speak to that group. He mentioned Ronald Reagan, his policies, and his admiration for him. The members of the NPC laughed in derision.
I share these two stories with you to illustrate that far too few are guided by the moral truths of the Bible, or even understand them. This is where Christians need to stand up the most. We are in the current conundrum because of a lack of moral clarity and an inability to know who our friends are and who our enemies are.
We must know our enemies. We have two opponents, the irreconcilable wing of Islam and the evil power that inspires it. Once God’s people see this clearly, we will plunder hell to populate heaven.
The basis for defeating the bigotry and despotism of Islamofascism is rooted in the Christian faith and moral clarity of George W. Bush, just as defeating Communism was rooted in the faith and moral vision of Ronald Reagan. Totalitarian regimes must be opposed. We must establish a biblical basis and principles for the battle that President Bush and America are fighting. This war cannot be won without this foundation. If we turn inward, relaxing in our own comforts, and stop promoting all the Judeo-Christian principles on which this nation was built, we too easily let evil have its way.
In the minds of Europe’s leftist elite, Bush is a bloodthirsty, dimwitted cowboy. (Ronald Reagan was given a similar label, yet it was he who coined the term “Iron Triangle” to define the marriage between the liberal special interest groups, the politicians, and the media.) They mock Mr. Bush and impugn his Christian faith for seeing the world as black or white. They see his moral compass as a dangerous instrument. They have fallen in love with appeasement because they do not believe in evil and thus refuse to confront it.
On September 11, 2001, evil surfaced in America in a way never before seen. The nation rallied to confront evil in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since that time, our wounds have healed, our senses have been deadened, and our memories dulled. I believe we are on the brink of the greatest opportunity in history to confront the source of all evil. If we fail, the results will be catastrophic.
Liberals have a difficult time seeing moral issues clearly because most of them are moral relativists. They reject absolute standards of good and evil or right and wrong. In their worldview, man is perfectible, human nature is on a path toward enlightenment, and the concept of original sin is primitive.
These humanists invented Arafat as a peacemaker and gave him the façade of a freedom fighter, not a terrorist. In their eyes, those who blow up Jews are driven to such acts because of injustices. The victims of these crimes are seen as the causers of the problem, and the perpetrators are seen as the innocent and exploited. Those same humanists believe the lie that bad acts must be blamed on society or on psychological or economic circumstances. Moral relativists despise those who grasp the nature of evil. Victims are demonized and murderers are glorified. We saw that in September 1993 when Yasser Arafat was invited to the Clinton White House. Instead of being apprehended as a thug and murderer (there was an outstanding call for his arrest for ordering the brutal murders of ambassador Cleo Noel and
chargé d’affaires
C. Curtis Moore in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1973), he was welcomed like an international statesman.
President Bush, in his State of the Union speech following 9/11, said, “Evil is real, and it must be opposed.”
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President Bush was called “simplistic” because he did not see tolerance as a reasonable alternative. They wanted Bush to apologize for looking to his God and the Bible for guidance.
Secular humanists make excuses for evil, or worse, deny evil’s existence and coddle it by refusing to confront it. Instead, they feed it. Jesus did not negotiate with evil; He did not sweet-talk it, nor did He compromise with it. Evil sees moral issues in shades of gray; moral clarity sees them in black and white. The reality of evil is rejected because the Bible is rejected as the gold standard of moral truth.
The Nazi Party referred to U.S. liberal ambassador Joseph Kennedy as Germany’s best friend in London because of his open anti-Semitism. In their twisted minds, the Jews had provoked the war because they intended to destroy the German State. “Every Jew,” wrote Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels, “is a sworn enemy of the German people.”
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He believed in the Jewish conspiracy myth called
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
To the very end, the Nazis maintained plausible deniability about their injustices to the Jews. Adolf Eichmann—whose continued pleas that he was “just following orders” at the Nuremburg trials made him the poster child for abdication of conscience—was a prime example.
If the devil does exist, as the Bible says he does, there is no better proof of it than that those following his agenda seek first to destroy Jews, and then Christians. It is a lesson we should have learned in World War II and face again with the Islamofascists.
At the Harvard graduation ceremony in 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked that august university and the nation with his speech, “A World Split Apart.” Solzhenitsyn saw the effects of moral decay in America in the attempts to divorce God from its public squares and build a wall of separation between church and state, replacing God with the government as the creator of liberties. Having undermined her moral vision, America had lost her courage to confront evil in the world.
Solzhenitsyn noted that while engaged in occasional outbursts in dealing with weak governments, U.S. politicians became paralyzed when dealing with foreign powers and international terrorists. He characterized the current conflict for our planet as a physical and spiritual war that had already begun, and he identified the Soviet aggressors as the forces of evil. Solzhenitsyn knew millions of people had been killed in the Gulag prison camp system where he himself had suffered firsthand:
How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him….
…This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs.
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With those few words, Alexander Solzhenitsyn suddenly found himself a pariah. Once lionized by the media, now this great man was treated as though he didn’t exist all because, within the rulebook of the intellectual elite, no one who believes in God is to be taken seriously. What’s more, the late 1970s were supposed to be an era of détente, a time of lessening tensions; to issue moral judgments about Communism was seen as destructive to all chances for world peace. But Solzhenitsyn was never interested in lessening tensions. He knew that standing for the truth meant confronting the lie—confronting evil.
In his treatise “The Reagan Doctrine,” Lee Edwards writes:
Many conservatives consider Reagan’s “evil empire” speech the most important of his presidency; a compelling example of what Czech President Vaclav Havel calls “the power of words to change history.” When Reagan visited Poland and East Berlin after the collapse of Soviet communism, many former dissidents told him that when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” it gave them enormous hope. Finally, they said to each other, America had a leader who “understood the nature of communism.”
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Ronald Reagan was a great admirer of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Reagan agreed with his belief that the conflict between the Communist ideology and that of the free world presented a moral conflict. Unlike the liberal Left, Reagan did not accept the idea that Western democracy and a godless Communism could peacefully coexist. He believed that at some point, confrontation between the two superpowers was a certainty.
Reagan felt that every time relations between the two countries eased, the Soviets took advantage of the opportunity to take three steps forward in their plan for Soviet domination. It was his belief that the entire objective of the Soviet Union was to root out the seeds of democracy wherever they were planted and replace them with the tares of Communism.