From Joel Rosenberg:
For now we have new developments to process — namely that Israel’s Minister for Intelligence and Strategic Affairs is publicly saying that Iran is “very close” to crossing the red line, and is preparing to build 30 nuclear warheads a year. Such analysis undoubtedly reflects the view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Steinitz is a very close friend and confidante of the PM.
This development gives new credence to the view that Israel is waiting for the Iranian elections on Friday to be over, and may in fact be coming to the decision that a massive preemptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities is the Jewish State’s only option to prevent a second Holocaust.
“Iran is working round the clock to enlarge its nuclear infrastructure with the eventual aim of developing an industry capable of building up to 30 bombs a year, an Israeli minister charged on Monday,” reports Agence France Presse. “Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said Tehran was ‘very close’ to crossing the red line laid out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year. But he said it was biding its time and building uranium-enrichment facilities before making the final push for weapons-grade material.”
“The Iranians are getting very close now to the red line… They have close to 200 kilos — 190 kilos (418 pounds) — of 20 percent enriched uranium,” Steinitz said. “Once they have 250 kilos, this is enough to make the final rush to 90 percent,” the level of enrichment required for a nuclear warhead, he said in a presentation to the Foreign Press Association, AFP reported.
“It is a matter of weeks or maybe two months to jump from 20 percent to 90 percent with so many centrifuges,” he said. “What they are doing now — instead of crossing the red line, they are widening and enlarging their capacity by putting in more centrifuges, faster centrifuges.”
“Iran’s aim, he charged, was to build a nuclear arsenal, not just a single bomb,” noted AFP.
“Many people are saying it’s a question of the Iranian bomb — whether they will have it or not. No. We are speaking about an Iranian arsenal.”
Other key points made by Minister Steinitz:
- Steinitz also ruled out any change in policy that might result from the Iranian presidential elections which are to take place on Friday, saying the result was already known.
- “Nothing is going to change. There will be, unfortunately, no significant changes because of these so-called elections because (supreme leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei has already won,” he said.
- “He is the leader and he makes the decisions and he already made his decision to spend many billions of dollars on building this nuclear industry with only one aim,” he charged.
- “The decision was already made to get nuclear weapons — you don’t spent so much money and you don’t suffer $70 billion of losses (due to international sanctions) in one year only to show that you can spin some centrifuges,” he concluded.
U.S. Scandals: It's Really About Persecution
Have you noticed any commonalities about these scandals? One word: Persecution. Peel the onion a couple of layers and you can see the truth:
The Pentagon directed an Air Force Base to remove a video tribute to First Sergeants because it mentioned the word ‘God’ and might be offensive to atheists or Muslims, Fox News has learned.
The video was modeled after the Dodge Ram Super Bowl commercial titled, “God Created A Farmer.”
“On the eighth day, God looked down on His creation and said, ‘I need someone who will take care of the Airmen,’” the tribute read. “So God created a First Sergeant.”
Chaplain leadership at the base signed off on the project as well as other base officials and earlier this week the video was posted on YouTube. But it was soon taken down after other officers objected.
“Proliferation of religion is not allowed in the Air Force or military,” wrote the chief of the Air Force News Service Division in an email obtained by Fox News. “How would an Agnostic, Atheist or Muslim serving in the military take this video?”
“I would not recommend using this at all,” the chief wrote.
He also took issue with the wording of the video, according to the emails.
“The choice of ‘On the Eighth day’ verbiage to begin this video is highly suggestive from the book of Genesis in the Bible and has Christian overtones,” he wrote.
An Air Force spokesperson told Fox News the video was removed for a legal review.
A new tape recording has been released that reveals an Internal Revenue Service agent stumbling and hesitating her way through a telephone call with a non-profit organization with the basic message that its officials are not allowed to spread their pro-life message.
Officials with the Alliance Defending Freedom said the situation developed while an application for tax status was pending for a nonprofit organization that provides support to women in abusive pregnancy situations.
The recorded conversation reveals the IRS agent, Sherry Wan, telling Ania Joseph of Pro-Life Revolution, “You cannot, you know, use your religious belief to tell other people you don’t have a belief, so I don’t believe you need the right to do this, start confrontation, protesting, uh, prot, uh, protest. .. You don’t apply for tax exemption.”
“The IRS is a tax collector; it shouldn’t be allowed to be the speech and belief police,” said Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley. “The current scandal isn’t new but has merely exposed the abuse of power that characterizes this agency and threatens our fundamental freedoms.”
While much of the coverage of the IRS’s attacks on conservative groups has focused on groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, WND also has reported several times on IRS attacks on Christian and prolife organizations as well as those groups that advocate for the future of Israel.
Yet, any Christian who believes in prophecy knows that the Bible predicts a world wide system of persecution against them. In at least 57 countries that is considered Muslim, Christians are easily killed at the whim of the populace, afraid to speak their minds or are paying the slave tax to be left alone. The question was how free countries could be driven to do the same to them. Well, the truth be told, when all those things mentioned above; cap and trade, socialized health, tax on activities and none activities, Agenda21 and the thousands of regulations included in them, you will be subject to being barred from the market place, if you don’t go along.
In order to get to that point, one more catastrophe needs to happen world wide to bring down the whole economic system. The new system could keep out the unwanted. By that time many Christians will be seen as the problem. There will be a number of things that many Christians will see as against God’s will. Many other professing Christians will go along with the secular push, just like the Boy Scouts did. They will accept a world wide so-called Christian coming together for the good and peac
Yeshua (Jesus) explains what sort of attitude we should have in Luke the 6th chapter: verses; 22 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.
23 Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.
24 But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation.
25 Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.
26 Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers to the false prophets.
23 Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.
24 But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation.
25 Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.
26 Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers to the false prophets.
Sommers’ troubles started last year when he was confronted about having pro-Republican and anti-Obama bumper stickers on his personal vehicle.
The stickers read: “Political Dissent is NOT Racism,” “NOBAMA,” NOPE2012” and “The Road to Bankruptcy is Paved with Ass-Fault.” That sticker included the image of a donkey.
His superior officer told the solider that the bumper stickers were creating “unnecessary workplace tension.”
“The types of stickers on your car were creating an atmosphere detrimental to morale and were creating unnecessary workplace tension,” the officer wrote in an Army document obtained by Fox News. “A Soldier must balance their personal feelings with the mission of the U.S. Army. Even the slightest inference of disrespect towards superiors can have a demoralizing effect on the unit.”
Sommers also came under fire for reading the works of Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and David Limbaugh. Last summer he was reading Limbaugh’s “The Great Destroyer” backstage at a concert when a superior officer told him that he was causing “unit disruption” and was offending other soldiers.
“I wasn’t read aloud,” Sommers told Fox News. “I was just reading privately to myself. I was told they were frowning on that and they warned me that I should not be reading literature like that backstage because it was offensive.”
Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity expressed dismay at the book censorship.
“What a sad day for American when an American hero can have his personal freedoms ripped away – when that very military he works for is on the frontlines defending those very freedoms for every United States citizen,” Hannity told Fox News. “What’s next – book burning? Government approved reading lists? State run media outlets? Can military members read Obama’s books?”
[This article is lengthy, but worth reading in full, because it cites so many examples of IRS engaged in persecution. Below are just a couple of these examples]
Susan Martinek founded Coalition for Life of Iowa because she wanted the pro-life movement to do bigger things in Cedar Rapids. Churches in the town of about 120,000 already held their own events, but Martinek thought coordinating resources would lead to greater outreach. The small-business owner sought tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service in October 2008. Like the head of most fledging nonprofits, she knew more donors would be inclined to give if they could claim tax deductions.
Martinek mailed the application and waited. In April 2009, the IRS asked for more information, including “advertisements, schedules, syllabuses, handouts, a summary of each person’s speech.” After complying with this exhaustive record request, Martinek called the IRS on June 6, 2009.
An agent told her to submit just one more item for approval: a letter with signatures from every member of the coalition’s board pledging, under the threat of perjury, that they would not organize groups to picket or protest outside of the local Planned Parenthood chapter.
On June 22, the group received an IRS letter with more requirements: “Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood are considered educational,” the letter read. “Please explain in detail the activities at these prayer meetings.” The IRS asked for the “percentage of time” the group spent in prayer and to explain how signs were educational.
Martinek didn’t know what to do, and the group didn’t have enough money for an attorney. “You don’t hear about people fighting the IRS and winning,” she said. “I didn’t want the IRS to be upset with me, and they are just so powerful you don’t expect them to back off.”
The IRS did not just pursue local groups advocating for life. Established national faith-based organizations promoting traditional marriage found themselves in the agency’s crosshairs.
Franklin Graham wrote a letter to President Obama on May 14 claiming the IRS last year targeted the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse. The groups bought ads in the spring of 2012 supporting a North Carolina amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage and ads before last November’s elections asking citizens to “vote for Biblical values.” Last fall, the IRS notified the ministries that the agency would review their tax records.
“This is morally wrong and unethical — indeed some would call it ‘un-American,’” Graham wrote. “Unfortunately, while these audits not only wasted taxpayer money, they wasted money contributed by donors for ministry purposes as we had to spend precious resources servicing IRS agents in our offices.”
The Biblical Recorder, a Baptist newspaper in North Carolina, received its first IRS audit in its 180-year history in March after publishing ads supporting the state’s marriage amendment.
Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS scandal, had a history of grossly inappropriate political and religious inquisitions in her previous job at the FEC. She ran a 6-1/2 year investigation/persecution of the Christian Coalition, that cost her target over hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs. She required 81 depositions, responses to nearly 2000 legal documents, and production of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, many of which had to be found, by hand, in uncatalogued government warehouses. All of her massive fishing expedition produced nothing; in the end the Christian Coalition was cleared of any wrongdoing. But, as they say, the process itself is the punishment.
Most striking about the investigation was its inquisition into private religious activities, even going so far as to demand to know the contents of individuals’ prayers, a repetition of which we have seen in the current scandal.
Most striking about the investigation was its inquisition into private religious activities, even going so far as to demand to know the contents of individuals’ prayers, a repetition of which we have seen in the current scandal.
"It's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody — even by a wrong call — and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision decision you've even made, ever friend you've discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."
Mikey Weinstein and his militant atheizers in MRFF (the so-called Military Religious Freedom Foundation) are boasting of their ability to crush any outbreak of Christian expression in the military. Mikey and MRFF proudly call CAIR their "allies." CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR, as the former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has noted, has close ties to Hamas. [The Grand Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy, p. 160.]
Today, MRFF boasts of striking fear into our military leaders. Mikey Weinstein thinks that open Christians are seditious, even traitors. He wants hundreds of them prosecuted in our military.
He has shown no similar concern about the murderous anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even now, the Obama administration is giving $250 million in foreign aid to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood has already driven Jews out of Egypt. Now, they persecute Christians in Egypt.
In October 1998-months after Osama bin Laden had issued his first declaration of war against the United States and had been named as the chief suspect in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa-CAIR demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard describing Osama bin Laden as "the sworn enemy," finding this depiction offensive to Muslims. CAIR also leapt to bin Laden's defense, denying his responsibility for the twin East African embassy bombings. CAIR's Hooper saw these explosions resulting from "misunderstandings of both sides."[57] Even after the September 11 atrocity, CAIR continued to protect bin Laden, stating only that "if [note the "if"] Osama bin Laden was behind it, we condemn him by name."[58] Not until December 2001, when bin Laden on videotape boasted of his involvement in the attack, did CAIR finally acknowledge his role.
Yet MRFF calls CAIR their "ally" and joins with them trying to enlist Secretary Hagel in their drive to suppress Christians. Mikey Weinstein has formed with CAIR a New Axis whose only real point of unity is their mutual hostility to Christians.
We need to speak up when religious freedom is crushed by a few noisy militants claiming to represent a broad swath of Americans.
Go to any military cemetery. There, you will find abundant evidence that Christians and Jews together have fought for this country from its beginnings. The attempts by the New Axis, by Mikey Weinstein, MRFF and CAIR to suppress the truth to which those gravestones bear witness must not prevail.
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