~ Thursday 21st January 2010 ~

Compiled by David Soakell Tel: 01323 410810
E-mail david@cfi.org.uk Website: www.cfi.org.uk

The Word: And it happened after this that Ben-Hadad king of Syria gathered all his army, and went up and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria; and indeed they besieged it until a donkey's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and one-fourth of a kab of dove droppings for five shekels of silver. Then, as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, "Help, my lord, O king!" And he said, "If the LORD does not help you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor or from the winepress?" Then the king said to her, "What is troubling you?" (2 Kings 6:24-28)

He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honour him. With long life I will satisfy him, and show him My salvation." (Psalm 91:15-16)

• Pointers for prayer: Please continue to hold the nation of Israel before the Lord in your prayers. Pray too for the IDF and the work of the field hospital in Haiti. Pray that many lives will be saved through the work that is being carried out there.

• Thank God for the better reporting recently on the national news regarding Israel's work in Haiti. However, much bias and poor coverage remains in other areas (one only needs to view the BBC's Panorama programme to witness this). Please pay for truth and accurate reporting. And pray for a passion for truth in the church, including where Israel is concerned, and a willingness to learn the facts without bias. “Buy the truth, and do not sell it, also wisdom and instruction and understanding.” (Proverbs 23:23)

• Please continue to pray against the infiltration of anti-Semitic propaganda into our nation and even in the church, and for the destruction of all spiritual roots of anti-Semitism. “Let slanderers not be established in the land...” (Psalm 140:11)

• Pray for protection: Once again, please pray for protection for Israel from all the attempts by the enemy to destroy the plan of God by destroying His people.

Israel at the forefront with Haiti's earthquake victims In the above reading of 2 Kings 6:24-33, we read of a siege which the king of Syria had laid against Samaria and the great distress which the city was reduced to thereby. Due to the harshness of the Syrians, the country was plundered and laid waste. Due to this, there was nothing in the storehouses, or the siege was so sudden that they had not had time to lay in provisions; so that, while the sword devoured without, the famine within was more grievous. So great was the scarcity of food that an ass's head, something that has but little flesh on it and that unsavoury, unwholesome, and ceremonially unclean, was sold for five pounds, and a small quantity of fitches, or lentils, or some such coarse corn, then called dove's dung was sold for five pieces of silver. From this desperate situation, a lone voice cries out to the king of Israel. Actually, if you read on, this Scripture gets worse, and I struggled with trying to comprehend what the scene portrayed. 2 Kings was probably written around 560 BC. More than two thousands of years later, and what has man learned? When I watched the scenes of Haiti, I wondered why it is, that even in suffering, man is still willing to kill, rob and take advantage of the destitute. I heard in one report that the Haiti police would not respond to a situation without the people who were suffering, actually having to pay them.

As the days since the earthquake in Haiti go by, we constantly see pictures in the newspapers, on TV, and on the Internet. But I believe that it’s impossible to fully comprehend the depth of the devastation in Haiti. Unless you know what it’s like to lose your entire home, your entire family, and your entire livelihood, it’s pretty hard to imagine what the unfortunate Haitians are experiencing. And things could become even worse. Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, and they were dealing with huge problems before the earthquake even happened. The country lacks a stable government and a strong infrastructure, which will make it hard to prevent crime and chaos from erupting in the streets... indeed, we have already seen this happen. Haiti will require massive amounts of aid from countries around the world for months to come.

Yet, as I reported last week, following the massive earthquake which measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, the tiny nation of Israel was one of the first countries to respond and fly out much needed help and medical staff. The earthquake was the worst to hit the area of Haiti in more than 200 years and the biggest quake ever to strike the impoverished island nation. Instantly, Israel were at hand as an Israeli army medical and rescue team set up field hospitals and began treating the earthquake-stricken Haitians.

At the start of last Sunday's (17th January) regular Israeli Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Israeli team had already treated hundreds of patients. "I think that this is in the best tradition of the Jewish people; this is the true covenant of the State of Israel and the Jewish people," he said. "This follows operations we have carried out in Kenya and Turkey. Despite being a small country, we have responded with a big heart." Netanyahu went to say, "I hope that the team saves lives and that Haiti succeeds in recovering from this awful tragedy."
Israeli medical professionals and much aid was sent to the main Port-Au-Prince hospital over the weekend to start treating patients, joining local physicians at the site of the collapsed central hospital where thousands of wounded were seeking help. An Israeli search and rescue team from the ZAKA International Rescue Unit on Saturday 16th January pulled eight Haitian college students from a collapsed eight-story university building. Since then, ZAKA, (Zihui Korbanot Ason, the Hebrew for 'Identification of Disaster Victims') have been working none stop to bring crucial help and expertise in this awful situation.

Tens of thousands of Haitians are believed to be dead following the devastating earthquake of January 12th. Mati Goldstein, head of the ZAKA International Rescue Unit delegation, in an e-mail to the ZAKA headquarters in Jerusalem wrote of the “Shabbat from hell." Goldstein wrote, "Everywhere, the acrid smell of bodies hangs in the air. It’s just like the stories we are told of the Holocaust… thousands of bodies everywhere. You have to understand that the situation is true madness, and the more time passes, there are more and more bodies, in numbers that cannot be grasped. It is beyond comprehension.” The valiant work of Israel's rescue mission to Haiti has been widely covered in the Israeli press. However, I've really been surprised that other News outlets have also been showing what Israel are doing. On Monday & Tuesday, ITV News gave an excellent report of how Israel are leading the way in Haiti. Along with them USA media broadcasters were praising the assistance provided by Israel, and one reporter even sent a letter of thanks to Israeli representatives in New York. However, even if you've already seen the amazing Zaka in Haiti stories, this CNN clip reveals Israel doing exactly what God intended them to do, and being a light unto the nations. If the link doesn't work, copy and paste this in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suo6UzRb850 Do pray for them as they perform this much needed humanitarian work.

One Haitian woman, whose baby was the first to be born in an Israeli field hospital set up in the capital, has decided to name her son after her rescuers. Baby Israel was in good health and being cared for by the doctors and nurses at the mobile hospital, one report stated. The woman, in her mid-20s and eight months pregnant, arrived at the facility at around 3 am Sunday, a day after it opened. She gave birth naturally. A relative suggested the baby boy be named Israel, after the ZAKA team who delivered the baby. The woman's husband is said to be missing and her three other children being cared for by her parents. The 220-member delegation of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Medical Corps, which includes 40 doctors and 25 nurses, arrived in Haiti on Saturday 16th January.
The hospital, with a capacity to treat up to 500 patients a day, was set up on a football field in Port-au-Prince within eight hours on the same day. It consists of a radiology department, an intensive care unit, an emergency room, two operating rooms and a pharmacy. CNN reported that Israel is the only state so far to have sent a field hospital equipped with all that is required for surgical operations. Doctors from various missions send patients requiring surgery to Israel's makeshift hospital, particularly those whose condition is critical, the news network said. Israeli aid workers struggled through eight hours of aftershocks and falling debris to rescue a man trapped inside a collapsed tax office in Port-au-Prince. Without food or water for four days, the man was prised free just before dawn having suffered only fractures.

In another story, Rondlie Daniel mourned her baby's death for five days. She sat outside her flattened home where he was trapped and prayed and cried, until the grief and pain forced her to withdraw and take refuge elsewhere. "I could not accept the loss," she said. Then, on Monday, she received a call from neighbours. They'd seen people rescuing her 8-month-old boy on Sunday night. He was alive. He was with doctors. The mother and baby Matthew were reunited Monday. "It is a miracle," she said. "When I look at him I believe in God and I think things will be OK." The situation was touch and go when rescuers finally extricated Matthew from the ruins and rushed him to a sprawling field hospital that the Israeli army had established over the weekend. Israeli doctors who received him said his body was so shrunken by dehydration that they figured him to be half his actual age. He was near death. They had to resuscitate him, fill him with fluids, oxygen and glucose and hope for the best. But God's blessing was with this Israeli team, and even though the darkness is very dark in Haiti, every now and then, a shaft of light appears.

BBC’s inaccurate Panorama The BBC's Panorama programme this week once again proved just how biased the British Broadcasting Corporation have become. The documentary clearly distorted the Jewish history and rights to Jerusalem while promoting a one-sided and biased agenda. Many groups have been 'up-in-arms' this week over the Panorama programme, which focused on tensions in the area of eastern Jerusalem adjacent to the Old City. One report by HonestReporting (www.honestreporting.com) stated, "Any pretence at balance is thrown out of the window as reporter Jane Corbin makes it clear that, under the BBC's own interpretation of international law, anything that Israel does in that part of the city is illegal, setting the tone for the entire 30 minute program." Thus, Israelis are presented as usurpers of Palestinian rights and property in eastern Jerusalem in a one-sided piece of agitprop. As analyst Robin Shepherd writes: "Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world's most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold."

In the HonestReporting article, they state, "The BBC's institutional anti-Israel bias often manifests itself not in what is broadcast but what is left out. Panorama is no different. The BBC reports events as though Jewish history in Jerusalem begins in 1948, thus omitting thousands of years of Jewish attachment to the city, including those areas of eastern Jerusalem that are the subject of Panorama's investigation. The only time that the eastern part of Jerusalem was exclusively Arab was between 1949 and 1967, and that was because Jordan occupied the area and forcibly expelled all the Jews. As Mitchell Bard makes clear, before 1865, the entire population of Jerusalem lived behind the Old City walls (what today would be considered part of the eastern part of the city). Later, the city began to expand beyond the walls because of population growth, and both Jews and Arabs began to build in new areas of the city. By the time of partition, a thriving Jewish community was living in the eastern part of Jerusalem, an area that included the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. This area of the city also contains many sites of importance to the Jewish religion, including the City of David, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. In addition, major institutions like Hebrew University and the original Hadassah Hospital are on Mount Scopus — in eastern Jerusalem."

We see on a daily basis how the Palestinian Authority [PA] continues to revise the history of Jerusalem. For example, Dr. Al-Tamimi, Chief Justice of the PA's religious court, said, Jerusalem is the religious, political and spiritual capital of Palestine - Jews have no right to it. Statements like this, and programmes like the BBC's Panorama back up the Palestinians propaganda which attempts to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history, enabling them to present Jerusalem as an exclusively Muslim city. If the EU, UN, and UK, along with US President Obama insists on saying areas of Jerusalem are occupied territory, it will be disastrous for us all. God will not be mocked. It is written in Zechariah 1:14-15: "...Thus saith the LORD of hosts; I am jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with a great jealousy. And I am very sore displeased with the heathen that are at ease: for I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction." Jerusalem is Israel's sovereign capital, and as the Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat, declared, "Israeli law does not discriminate between Jews and Arabs and between east and west Jerusalem. The demand to specifically halt construction for Jews is not legal in the US or in any other enlightened country... The attempt to demand this of Jerusalem constitutes a double standard and is unacceptable."

Sick beyond belief According to a recent Sky News programme, British students, who use alcohol and sinister games, is on the increase. The student "drinking game", which mocks the Holocaust and encourages players to dress as Adolf Hitler, has been described as "sick beyond belief" by war veterans. Members who post pictures of themselves playing the game are promoted to 'officers'. Hitler – The Drinking Game, involves students drinking as much alcohol as they can on the turn of cards laid out in the shape of a Swastika. Players are required to make Nazi salutes and "interrogate" other players. There is also a section called The Holocaust where players have to "down in one" a pint glass filled with spirits.

The game has its own Facebook group created by Huddersfield University students Nicholas Rowley and Anthony Pike. According to reports, the Facebook group has 12,000 members. In the group they both describe themselves as "Fuhrers". Those who submit pictures of themselves playing the game are promoted to Nazi "officers". Students have also posted pictures of themselves with moustaches in the style of Adolf Hitler. One member suggested Bailey's liqueur should be mandatory, because: "The Holocaust concludes with necking a Jew's brain." This kind of disgusting behaviour needs to be outlawed here, however policing this behaviour could be difficult. RAF veteran Alistair Harris from Gloucestershire told Sky News, "It's a disgrace. There's no other way to describe it." Retired Wing Commander Mr Harris, 87, who served with the RAF from 1941 to 1976, added: "These people studying at universities are meant to be the future of our country, what hope do we have?

Hamas promoted in Birmingham As if the news from Huddersfield University students wasn't bad enough, the University of Birmingham has invited Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian-born academic and fervent Hamas supporter, to give a talk at the university, the Birmingham Post reported today. The University of Birmingham has been accused of allowing “a notorious Jew-hater and supporter of terrorist attacks” to speak to students at an event on campus. Member of Parliament Denis MacShane has written to the university’s Vice Chancellor urging him to cancel the planned talk by Azzam Tamimi, but the university has refused to intervene, saying the talk should go ahead in the name of freedom of speech. Dr. Tamimi was invited to speak by the university's Islamic Society, which organised a seminar to mark the one-year anniversary since the start of Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter. Tamimi has previously called terrorist actions against Israel "acts of legitimate struggle." The Islamic society said in response to the criticism that the fact that they had invited Dr. Tamimi to speak did not mean they agreed with all his views.

The question sources asked was, could not the university be seen as promoting Islamic terrorism? A university spokesman said in response that the institution "has a code of practice on freedom of speech on campus, and those seeking to invite outside speakers onto campus must fill in a freedom of speech request form at least 15 days before the proposed event." The spokesman went on to say, "We don't advocate Hamas or its views... Dr Tamimi represents an important part of the dialogue which has to take place."

And finally... the weather... According to Israel Broadcasting Authority, heavy rains and flooding hit southern Israel on Sunday and Monday, causing at least one death and many school and road closures. The main Route 90 between the Dead Sea and Ein Gedi was completely under water. Also, the Nitzana Bridge in the northern Negev collapsed. A 55-year-old woman drowned when her jeep overturned at Nahal Arava after being caught up in floodwaters. Her husband was rescued but a third person in the jeep is missing and frantic search efforts were called off after dark. The flash floods caused by torrential rains caused several streams to overflow in the normally arid Arava desert region, and stranded or swept away a number of other motorists. Army helicopters joined local emergency teams in making several dramatic rescues, including one that was shown live on IBA. On Tuesday, snow was expected on Mount Hermon as the temperature dropped in high areas and the heavy rain continued across the country. The snow was expected to continue falling over the next few days.

Torrential rain also wreaked havoc in northern Israel on Wednesday, flooding homes, bridges and railway lines, and causing walls to collapse. Although we do pray for the rain to continue in Israel, do pray for the protection of the people, especially those in areas where flash floods are known.

David Soakell

Sources: Unless otherwise stated: Personal sources throughout Israel along with The Jerusalem Post, BBC News, Arutz-7 News, Israeli Embassy London, Independent Media Review and Analysis & Israel National Radio