Posted on 05/11/2003 9:28:59 PM PDT by hope
''And THEN Shall the End Come''
Commentary on the News
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Jack Kinsella - Omega Letter Editor
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For the first two years of the Bush presidency, the liberal left has consistently attempted to highlight links between George Bush and the Money Trust. Since the fall of the Iraq regime, reams of documents have detailed Saddam's payoffs. But where is the media now?
Last week, the London Daily Telegraph began reporting that George Galloway, a Laborite Member of Parliament and an anti-war voice featured by several American media outlets, received millions of dollars in the past few years from Saddam Hussein.
It was reported by the mainstream press because it was all over the newspapers. It is a blockbuster of a story, including all the seamier elements; treason, payoffs, spies, lies and intrigue. What happened to the story?
In the May 5 Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes summarized the story and added that American politicians also received cash: Rep. Jim McDermott, so memorably featured from Baghdad attacking President Bush as a liar last fall on ABCs This Week, accepted $5,000 for his legal defense fund from Shakir al-Khafaji, a Saddam supporter (and contractor with the Baathist regime) who arranged his Baghdad trip. Shouldn't this be of some media interest?
But if you get your news from ABC, you didn't hear much about McDermott or Galloway. Or from CBS, NBC, as well as CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.
But the outlets most responsible to follow the money trail to Galloway and other anti-war voices are the outlets who promoted them on American airwaves.
Before Galloway's millions were uncovered, he was ABC's favorite British politician.
Good Morning America co-host Diane Sawyer highlighted a soundbite of Galloways House of Commons remarks as a wake-up call for me, listening about the view of Americans. Galloway denounced how this born again, right-wing, Bible-belting, fundamentalist, Republican administration in the United States wants war.
NBC News spotlighted several British leaders debating Iraq, which included Galloways take on Bush: The British people have seen the President, heard the President, and they think theyre estimating him just about right as not a man that we would want to be at the wheel of the car as we drive along the edge of a cliff with ourselves sitting in the back seat.
On February 26, 2003, Nightly News also used Galloways born-again, right-wing, Bible-belting comment.
It was much too good a line to resist, evidently.
It would be one thing if the media were simply presenting an opposing view. That is what journalists are supposed do.
But for months and months, Scott Ritter was on every television news program, denouncing the Bush administration and loudly protesting Saddam's innocence. Every network had employed Ritter, at one time or another, as a paid analyst on Iraq, since his high profile resignation from UNSCOM. Ritter offered his resignation in 1998 amid much fanfare, since he then alleged Saddam was hiding a massive weapons program.
But then the story broke that Ritter had been arrested twice for soliciting young girls on the internet. Ritter vanished from the American airwaves, both as a color commentator on the news programs, AND as the subject of major news story.
Ritter's mysterious about-face concerning Iraq became less mysterious after evidence surfaced that Ritter got lots of money and plenty o' percs from the Saddam regime.
But the mainstream media has kinda dropped the Ritter story altogether. Why?
Add to that the new bribery revelations that show Galloway was a tyrant-paid flack, like Ritter, and the fact that neither was a sincere anti-war spokesman.
Still, ABC all but endorsed Jim McDermott for re-election on the airwaves when McDermott denounced the Bush administration from Baghdad.
So, the media was taken in by Saddam and his liberal dispensation of US cash to unscrupulous public figures that used them to advance the enemy message. Why aren't they angry at being used by Saddam? Why is the media giving Saddam's clandestine spokesmen a pass now?
I've noted that the unpaid spokesmen, (the 'useful idiots'); anti-war spokespersons like Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and all the rest of the liberal left make the nightly news now ONLY in the context of their 'free speech' being violated.
No follow up stories on where the liberal left was wrong, or where the administration might have been right. Instead, when the media turns its attention to Iraq, it is in the context of how the US is refusing to submit to the UN's authority and why that is such a bad thing.
The US victory in Iraq made history and the Iraq battle plan will be a required course of study at every military academy in the world for generations, say analysts. But if you assessed the war through the eyes of the mainstream media, you could only conclude that we were losing the war (until it was won) and that the US is now losing the peace.
There's been little media coverage of what went right in the war. There were no hordes of Iraqi refugees streaming across borders into neighboring countries. The only economic damage the expected influx of refugees ultimately incurred on Jordan, Turkey or Kuwait was the cost of building refugee camps that were never needed.
There were no tens of thousands of body bags necessary for either American troops or civilian casualties. There were no reports of errant bombs missing military targets and hitting baby milk factories or civilian air-raid shelters.
The oil fields were not sabotaged, the environment wasn't damaged, chemical weapons were not deployed, and the Arab world has not risen up en masse. Despite media efforts to prove the contrary, most Iraqis were glad to see the fall of Saddam and DID embrace the coalition as liberators rather than occupiers.
This gets very little attention in the mainstream media, because it favors the current conservative administration.
Just like the negative stuff about liberal darlings France, Germany, Russia, the UN, -- or Saddam's paid liberal spokesmen -- is largely ignored or quickly dropped from the news cycle.
Sometimes, what ISN'T said can teach us as much about agendas as what is.
We are living in the last days. The Bible says that one of the first signs is that of deception. The first thing Jesus said when asked of the signs of His coming was "Take heed that no man deceive you."
The theme of endtimes' deception is further developed, with Paul warning of a 'great deception', the Apostle John outlining the systematic deception of the antichrist and false prophet as the Tribulation unfolds, until ultimately, "deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast" (Revelation 13:14).
It is by the power of Satan, the Deceiver, that the antichrist comes to power in the last days.
It was only a few decades ago that Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.
It was only a few years ago that Bernard Goldberg was blacklisted by the mainstream press after writing a book called "Bias" that exposed the liberal bias at CBS from the inside.
Emboldened by the weak reaction, the masks are coming off. The agenda-driven media grows more obvious, protests of innocence grow less apologetic and more defiant.
The Bible says that the deception of the last days will be global. And it will come at a time when the Gospel is simultaneously preached to the whole world. Neither was possible at any time in history until this generation.
Thanks to CNN, most of the world believes that the US is the bad guy in Iraq, Saddam is a victim, Iraqis hate America for invading them, and that it is the US who is really imposing suffering on the Iraqi people in order to control their oil.
At the same time, thanks to the internet, the Gospel is being preached in every corner of the earth.
The Omega Letter, for example, has subscribers in South Africa, Kenya, Bahrain, Australia, New Zealand -- just to name a few. And from there, who knows? Anywhere that anybody can get email, anyplace on earth.
It is our mission to document signs of the coming of the King for His Church. We find two undeniable signs here. The first is a global information system so powerful that it could deceive the whole world.
The second is the simultaneous ability to take the truth of the Gospel to the whole earth. Jesus outlined the signs of the times, point by point in the Olivet Discourse, but He paused at one point and said, "And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet" (Matthew 24:6).
He went on to describe the wars, ethnic unrest, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, saying they would be the 'beginnings of sorrows'. Jesus spoke of Christians being delivered up for execution, such as is happening in places like the Sudan and Ethiopia. He spoke of 'being hated by all nations for His Name's sake'.
America is at war with the Islamic fundamentalists because the Islamic fundamentalists declared a jihad against the 'Christian Crusaders' and the 'Zionists'. America and Israel.
Everybody else backs the Arabs, and by extrapolation, tacitly support the Islamists. Do you see the pattern?
Jesus spoke next of false prophets and deception, saying that, as the time approaches, sin will be so rampant, 'the love of many shall wax cold'.
Wars, rumors of wars, famines, persecution, earthquakes, sin, betrayal -- sound familiar?
But, after outlining all the signs of His coming (or, the headlines of this morning's newspapers, one could argue) but before He begins to describe the Tribulation Period, Jesus pauses again in Matthew 24:14, and says, "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and THEN shall the end come."
Excerpted from the Omega Letter Daily Intelligence Digest Vol: 20 Issue: 7
The Apostles believed that they were, those, who followed them...ditto. For the past 2000 years plus, every generation or so, makes this claim ERRONIOUSLY ! Heck, the Jews, 100s of years BEFORE the birth of the Christ said so and that is WHY they yearned for the coming of the Messiah !
Global cooling, during the " Dark Ages " ? End times.
The Black Death ? Same thing.
Islamonazis swarming towards/ over Europe ? You got it..." THE END TIMES ".
VD ? same old, same old.
Every single war, from the first Crusades onwards, and the tinfoilers of the day, were / are screaming THE END TIMES ARE COMING, THE END TIMES ARE COMING !
There was even a man, in Times Square, in Manhattan, who for something like 50 years, from right after WW I, walked around, every day, rain, shine, snow, heat, cold, blizzard...wearing a sandwichboard, which proclaimed : THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEIGH . He died before the world ended.
Jehovah's Witnesses have been naming a year and then peddling as fast as they could, when the world didn't end, since its inception.
The leading up to signs, are SO vague,that everyone and anyone can and has decided that their time, was it and the warning signs predate Christianity by millenia ! LOL
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