You will just have heard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliver his speech, which as you know you are partially responsible for having pressed him into making.
Hopefully you will have heard his heartfelt appeal to the Arab world to grasp the hand that Israel has long held out for peace.
You will have heard his appeal to world leaders like you to help make this happen.
You know that Netanyahu did not use the words “two state solution” that you pressed him so hard to utter.
You heard that he is not prepared to acquiesce to your demand for a total freeze on “settlement” activity.
The cries of “betrayal” and “sabotage” coming from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah will also have reached your ears.
You will likely already have gone into intense discussion with your advisors as to how best to respond to what your Israeli counterpart has said and laid out.
As you ponder what your comeback will be, I respectfully suggest, should you wish to regain even a small portion of the credibility you jettisoned so effectively in Cairo earlier this month (when you spoke to the Muslim world as a brother after describing yourself as a Christian), that it’s past time you made some quick and hard decisions.
Unlike your predecessor - who was sucked reluctantly into the Middle East quagmire by the 9-11 attacks - you have voluntarily chosen to engage THE issue of the ages right at the start of your presidency.
It would surely behoove you, then, to decide where you stand and position yourself accordingly. First and foremost I would say - given that the Arab-Israeli conflict is in reality a conflict between religions - it is imperative that you resolve which faith it is you adhere to - if you subscribe to any religion at all. And it wouldn’t hurt if you could settle on which scriptures you believe in and are going to quote from in your future speeches; which you should surely only do if you truly hold them to be sacred.
Since the days of the election campaign, you have insisted that - although you have Muslim roots, you are in fact a Christian. You had a conversion experience some years ago, and have been attending church more or less since then. After moving to the White House, one of the biggest human interest stories for awhile related to which new church home you and the First Lady would find. I believe you have yet to settle on a denomination and locale, and that you have only attended two services in the capital since your relocation.
Well, you say you believe in God. Which one? Who is he?
Were you a Muslim, you could answer: Allah - the ancient Moon God of the Middle East that was elevated to a position of pre-eminence by Muhammad and so became the one god of monotheistic Islam.
Were you a Jew, you could answer: Yahoveh (or Jehovah), Creator of Heaven and Earth, the LORD God of Hosts, the God of Israel (2 Chronicles 30:5), the God of Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 32:19; Ezra 7:19).
As a Christian, you must surely answer similarly to the Jew, adding that you believe Jesus to be the Son of that God, the King of the Jews, whose past and future home is Jerusalem, to which He will return as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and from where He will rule over the nations of the world - including the United States - with a rod of iron.
This is not a fudgeable issue. The god of Islam and the God of Jews and Christians are not the same being - neither by character nor by history, nor by the very descriptions of these beings in the books their followers call holy.
Which brings us to the Koran, the Tanach (Hebrew Scriptures) and the combined Tanach and New Testament (the “Christian Bible”).
The Koran - Islam’s ‘bible’ - in very specific language, describes Jews as enemies and instructs pious and faithful Muslims to use violence to destroy them. Islam also teaches that the Jews corrupted the Tanach and Christians corrupted the New Testament. The Holy Scriptures of Jews and Christians are therefore illegitimate and what they say - including regarding the ownership of the Land of Israel, the ownership of Jerusalem, and the calling to the Jews to be God’s Chosen People - cannot and does not stand.
This is what good Muslims are taught to believe, and if you wish to return to the faith of your fathers then you will be happily able to embrace these convictions and with full confidence pursue your effort to wrest the Land of Israel - specifically Samaria and Judea (which you call the occupied territories or West Bank) from Jewish rule.
Where you have a serious credibility problem, however, is when you make your foreign policy line up with this Islamic point of view even as you loudly profess to be a follower of the Christ - who according to the New Testament was born a Jew in the line of the great Israeli King David, and whose place of birth was in the Land of Israel (according to the Gospels), specifically Bethlehem - which is in the aforementioned “West Bank” and which has already, due to American pressure, been surrendered to Arab control.
Of course, the New Testament springs out of the “Old” Testament. Jesus’ Father, as we Christians believe, is the God of that Old Testament who called out Abraham, designated his children (through Isaac and Jacob; not Ishmael and Esau), to be His “Special Treasure” and gave them, exclusively and in perpetuity, the Land of Israel, first and foremost that very same “West Bank.”
Now you cannot expect us to accept your claim to be a Christian and a Bible-believer (I don’t know; have you ever claimed the latter?) when you pursue policies that fly in the face of what the One you call Your God has so emphatically and unequivocally laid down.
I mean, He is either the God you serve, or He is your useful servant. And the Bible is either your Bible, or it’s your stage prop. You can’t have it both ways.
Please stop just a second and consider.
If Allah is god, then you need to profess this and set your course to completely serve him. As you must know, he is notoriously unforgiving towards those who convert AWAY from Islam. And it is his best and most FAITHFUL followers — not the “extremists” or “fundamentalists” or “jihadists,” and not the nominal or lazy Muslims — that want to see and perpetrate his will on the Jews and the Christians in order to win their place in the hereafter.
If you believe that the LORD is God; that He is the One who created you, who holds your heart and your life in His hands; that He is responsible for raising you up and bringing you to the White House, to the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world — then it follows very logically that you would seek to serve Him and walk accountably before Him, conforming your will and your policies to His expressed wish and purpose; for you are destined to stand before Him one day and give account of your presidency.
I am a Bible believing Christian. A gentile, not a Jew. My God says that this land, at least from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and including the Golan Heights, Samaria, Judea and the Gaza Strip, is Israel’s land.
My God says that the city of Jerusalem is the capital of the Land of Israel. He designates the Temple Mount as the place of His throne, upon which He will soon install His King, the Son of David.
No-one, not even you, Mr President, has the right to try and take this land and give it to another people. You have no right, before God, to pressure Israel into relinquishing its claim to any part of Jerusalem.
Israel did nothing wrong, nothing illegal, to extend its rule over these lands and over this city. Only under Jewish administration have adherents of all faiths been welcome to visit their holy sites and worship their gods protected by the Israeli government and security forces.
I doubt very much that I am the first non-Israeli and non-Jew to tell you, Mr. Obama, that this land belongs to the Jews, and only to the Jews.
Untold millions of Christians believe this, and want you, as a fellow Christian, to endorse and defend this view too.
Should you go with the Islamic flow, however (which is complemented by the secular-humanist - i.e. God-denying and rejecting - world) - then at least have the integrity and the courage to say as much.
Thereafter it will be expected of you that you turn ever harder against Israel and become more and more openly pro-Arab - as you revealed in Cairo is already your position.
As a president who publicly admits to having more of an affinity with the Muslim world than with the Christian one, you will be able to move a whole lot more quickly and successfully towards securing the kind of settlement you apparently hope (like so many before you have hoped) will become your most lasting and glorious legacy.
But until you make up your mind on this most fundamental of issues underlying the whole situation, you will never bring a real peace to us in the Middle East.
Please pass this on - it is well written and very true
