"TRUTH AND LIES AT THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD" by MELANIE PHILLIPS.

Here is another superb article from the pen of the ever-impressive and ever-reliable Melanie Phillips. She is a freelance writer and journalist who writes regularly for "The Daily Mail" and "The Spectator", as well as publishing her own material on her own personal website. This can be found at http://www.melaniephillips.com/. This latest article was published in the Daily Mail yesterday:

"1941 years ago, the Romans conquered the ancient Jewish kingdom of Judea by force and attempted to expunge all memory of the Jews' claim to the land by renaming the area Palestine. Two days ago, Mahmoud Abbas attempted to do the same thing by diplomatic force at the UN.

The whole thing was of course a grotesque charade, outdone in its surrealism only by the reaction of the western world. For the UK and US governments and others said that such a unilateral declaration of independence was a setback for peace and a Palestinian state, which could only be achieved through negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel.

Not so. Negotiations do not have to be re-started in order to achieve this. If Abbas really wanted a state of Palestine to live in peace alongside Israel, he could have said a handful of words in New York which would have ended the conflict there and then and brought such a state into actual being.

For all that is needed is for Abbas to say, in Arabic as well as English, that he accepts the right of Israel to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people, and that his own people will no longer wage war against it. If he were to say that, and to match those words by deeds to show he meant them - for example, by ending the incitement in the educational materials and media under his command to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis - there would be peace and a state of Palestine.

But this will never happen. For the dominant assumption in the west, the assumption that underpins virtually every political utterance on the subject and every interview on the BBC and the reporting even in notionally pro-Israel papers such as the Times or Telegraph that a state of Palestine would end the Middle East conflict, is not only wholly mistaken but is to mis-state that conflict.

For peace to be achieved, the belligerent has to stop making war. The Arabs have made war on the Jews in their ancient homeland since Israel became a state and indeed for three decades before that. For a solution to be arrived at, it's necessary correctly to state the problem. The problem is not the absence of a state of Palestine. The problem is that the Arabs want to get rid of Israel.

For anyone paying attention to the actual words used, the evidence was there in Abbas's own speech. His people, he declared, had been suffering for 63 years. What happened 63 years ago? The state of Israel came into being. So what Abbas was saying was not that the absence of a state of Palestine was the problem. The problem for him was the very existence of the state of Israel.

He also said:

'...we agreed to establish the State of Palestine on only 22 per cent of the territory of historical Palestine - on all the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel in 1967.'

But the West Bank and Gaza were not 22 per cent of historical; Palestine; they were far, far less. It was Israel that was established on a fraction of 'historical Palestine', having settled for that fraction as better than nothing at all. And if the Palestinians truly had accepted a state merely in the West Bank and Gaza, why then did they refuse the offer of precisely such a state on more than 90 per cent of that territory which was made to them in 2000 and 2008? Why does the very Palestinian logo on their flags and insignia show a map of this state of Palestine to which they aspire as having swallowed up Israel altogether?

In Ramallah on September 16, Abbas made his position even plainer. 'The Palestinian people', he stated, 'have been abused for 63 years, generation after generation, under occupation'. No, it is the existence of Israel itself that is the problem which Abbas believes UN recognition of a state of Palestine would help resolve. It is Israel itself that Abbas wants to subsume into Palestine. In other words, as he himself has previously said, declaring UDI at the UN was a way of internationalising the conflict with Israel. UN recognition of a state of Palestine is therefore not a move towards peace but a signal for genocidal war.
The truly incredible bone-headedness (or worse) of the western response was encapsulated by a BBC Today programme interview on Friday morning with the UK's former ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. Sir Jeremy declared that a state of Palestine was 'not a threat to Israel', and that the Palestinians were 'desperate' to end the 'injustice' done to them and to restart negotiations.

Eh? What 'injustice'? The Palestinians are the ones waging war on Israel, not the other way round. What desperation, when they have repeatedly turned down the offer of a state? What keenness to re-start negotiations, when Israel repeatedly offers them negotiations and they repeatedly refuse?

Even worse, Sir Jeremy also said that what was much more important for Israel than a state of Palestine was not to imperil any further its relationship with other countries in the region such as Egypt, Turkey or Iran.

What?? Doesn't Sir Jeremy realise that the Palestinians are despised by every country in the region? Hasn't Sir Jeremy noticed that Turkey is now pursuing an Islamist agenda, with appalling implications not just for Israel but for the interests of the UK and the west, and that Egypt may well fall to the Islamists too? And as for Israel not upsetting Iran by its attitude to the Palestinians, hasn't Sir Jeremy Greenstock understood that Iran is threatening Israel with nuclear extinction because it is a Jewish state? On what planet is Sir Jeremy Greenstock living?

To anyone with a scintilla of knowledge of the nine-decade Arab and Islamic war against the Jews in the Middle East, Abbas's speech at the UN consisted of lie after lie after lie. He claimed that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal and in breach of international law (untrue); he claimed that the settlements were in breach of the terms of negotiation (untrue; it is Abbas's own unilateral declaration which tears up successive bilateral treaties); he claimed that Israel was targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza (untrue; Israeli attacks, which carefully avoid hitting civilians wherever possible, are only in defence of its civilians against Hamas attacks --with which Abbas has now publicly lined himself up, not least by hailing as 'martyrs' those in Gaza who murder Israelis).

As for his claim that the settlements were the reason there was no peace, this was demonstrably ridiculous. As Netanyahu said in his own fine speech at the UN:

'President Abbas ... said that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the settlements. Well, that's odd. Our conflict has been raging for -- was raging for nearly half a century before there was a single Israeli settlement in the West Bank. So if what President Abbas is saying was true, then the -- I guess that the settlements he's talking about are Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa, Be'er Sheva. Maybe that's what he meant the other day when he said that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for 63 years. He didn't say from 1967; he said from 1948. I hope somebody will bother to ask him this question because it illustrates a simple truth: The core of the conflict is not the settlements. The settlements are a result of the conflict.'

History records that, from the 1930s onwards, the Jews have never stood in the way of a Palestinian state if that would end the war of annihilation the Arabs have continuously waged against them. A Palestine state has been on repeated offer. The Arab response has always been to refuse and instead to attempt to destroy the Jews' presence in their own ancient homeland. As certain Palestinian spokesmen themselves have acknowledged, Palestinian identity was itself constructed purely to destroy Israel. The reason for the objection to a state of Palestine is that it would be used to bring about the final destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, an aspiration which Abbas never ceases to proclaim.

As Netanyahu said in his speech:

'We believe that the Palestinians should be neither the citizens of Israel nor its subjects. They should live in a free state of their own. But they should be ready, like us, for compromise. And we will know that they're ready for compromise and for peace when they start taking Israel's security requirements seriously and when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland.

I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That's like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we're called "Jews"? Because we come from Judea."'

What Israel should be stating explicitly and repeatedly is that it is the Jews who are the indigenous people of what are now Israel and the West Bank - and indeed beyond. Commentators often refer to Judea and Samaria as 'Biblical' names as if they can therefore be disregarded today. Not so. Judea and Samara were the true historical names for Israel and the West Bank, used in international treaties and official documents of the Palestine Mandate period, and throughout which land the Jews were given the legal right to settle. Only now as the west mimics the Arab attempt to airbrush the Jews out of their own history have these names become synonymous with Jewish extremism.

What really illustrates the west's moral bankruptcy over Israel and the Palestinians is that the day before the Abbas charade, the very same UN gave the stage to Iran's Ahmadinejad from where he spouted his murderous lies and hatred of the west, including his implication that 9/11 was a US conspiracy. This is the leader of a regime which executes teenagers for homosexuality and which is developing nuclear weapons to commit genocide against Israel and hold the western world hostage.

Yet far from expressing outrage at this use of the UN by such a man, far from drawing attention indeed to the utter suicidal madness of having the UN as a global policeman when its own Security Council is now chaired by Lebanon, a country in thrall to Iran through Hezbollah, the appearance of Ahmadinejad elicited barely a shrug by western media which instead worked themselves into a frenzy over Abbas and the 'plight' of the Palestinians.

Netanyahu again called it right. He said the world was menaced by a malignancy.

'That malignancy is militant Islam. It cloaks itself in the mantle of a great faith, yet it murders Jews, Christians and Muslims alike with unforgiving impartiality. On September 11th it killed thousands of Americans, and it left the twin towers in smouldering ruins. Last night I laid a wreath on the 9/11 memorial. It was deeply moving. But as I was going there, one thing echoed in my mind: the outrageous words of the president of Iran on this podium yesterday. He implied that 9/11 was an American conspiracy. Some of you left this hall. All of you should have.'

Netanyahu called the UN a 'theatre of the absurd' and the 'house of lies'. The western media mostly didn't bother to report that, just as they didn't bother to report much of his speech. What they are really waiting for is for the Palestinians to resume attacking Israelis as a sign of their 'desperation'. They won't report those attacks either. But they will report the Israelis' response and call that 'aggression'. That's the prospect over which the western media, sensing a final kill, are now slavering".
MELANIE PHILLIPS.

POLICE TELL CAFE OWNER TO STOP SHOWING BIBLE DVD'S OR FACE ARREST!!!

This was the headline on page nine of "The Mail On Sunday" this weekend, as this national newspaper did a full two page spread on the outrageous events happening in this so-called "Christian" country of ours!!

Jamie Murray runs the "Salt and Light" cafe in Blackpool and likes to display Christian and Bible texts on a DVD screen behind his counter, with the volume turned OFF. Despite this, one single complaint from one lesbian woman protesting against the well known anti-homosexual verses in Romans 1: 26-28, led Jamie to being threatened with arrest unless he turned his DVD off.

He did comply on this one particular day, but thanks to the assistance of the lawyers of The Christian Institute, Jamie has now started to display the texts once again, as it is perfectly legal to do so, and the police are taking no further action at present! Praise the Lord!

On the same page, "The Mail On Sunday" highlight the campaign led by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, which is pressing David Cameron and the government for greater legal protection for Christians who have been sacked for following their consciences, when a group of test cases are heard by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg next month.

The cases include those of Shirley Chaplin, a Devon nurse banned from working on the wards after she failed to hide a cross she had worn since she was 16. Secondly is the case of Gary MacFarlane who was sacked as a Relate counsellor after suggesting he would refuse to provide sexual therapy to gay couples. Thirdly, the judges will also examine the case of Nadia Eweida, a check-in clerk for British Airways, who was told to remove her small crucifx at work. And fourthly, the case of registrar Lilian Ladele, who lost her job at Islington Town Hall in North London, after refusing to officiate at civil partnerships.

Lord Carey is leading the campaign along with 150,000 other campaigners from the lobby group Christian Concern, and they have written to the Prime Minister calling on the government to back new safeguards for Christian believers.

The Mail on Sunday also devoted their front page story, and most of page eight to ridiculing the BBC (the Biased Broadcasting Company), for starting to promote all of their television programmes with the dedicated date bylines of BCE and CE instead of the traditional BC and AD.

These precious icons have stood the test of time for over seventy years, and are meant to represent the fact that in "Christian Britain" we date our calender by the Bible and time of Christ. However, the head of religious broadcasting at the BBC is now a muslim, and gradually Christianity is being sidelined, and even nullified by this very biased organisation.

Thank God for "The Mail on Sunday" and the stance they have taken this past weekend. They have stood out from the rest of the national press, and the other national media, and have boldly proclaimed their stance on the true values of Christianity over these very important issues. In an ever deteriorating and declining world, where Christian values and morals are being eroded more and more on a daily basis, we give thanks to the Lord for this newspaper for standing up for our rights as Christians in this sad, modern age in which we live.

Neville Stephens.

THE FEAST OF TRUMPETS IS ONLY A FEW DAYS AWAY NOW.

The Hebrew Feast of Trumpets, or Yom Teruah, starts very shortly on the 29th September.

There are then the "Ten Days Of Awe" leading to the major Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, and Yom Kippur, The Day Of Atonement.

If you have a spare five minutes look at the short video on the http://www.getreadyforjesus.com/ website. The video is available right at the top of the page, and it is titled "Revelation 12 - A Great Sign In Heaven".

This excellent website www.getreadyforjesus.com/ also gives you some more fascinating and challenging material about the Feast of Trumpets which will have you sitting on the edge of your seats for the next few weeks!

We have been warned!

Neville Stephens.

ARE WE APPROACHING THE END OF THE WORLD?

Earthquakes, looming wars and the coming crash of cash. Is it the end of the world?

Well, not exactly, says author and journalist Alan Franklin. But a lot of other things are soon coming to an end, like individual nation states, the Islamic threat to Israel and the old world order.

Antichrist will soon be here, ruling from the heart of the European Union. A one world currency will replace paper money, which many fear will soon have little value. All this and much else is revealed in Bible prophecy, the greatest story seldom told. Now it will be. In our very own Newport and Caldicot area.

Alan, a former skeptic who wishes he had been told about Bible prophecy, brings the Bible verses to life and matches them with today’s headlines- the Bible in the news. It’s better than Nostradamus - because it’s true, provably so!

Alan is coming to this area on Friday September 30, starting at our Caldicot PWMI branch at 7pm (the venue is the Elim Pentecostal Church, Longcroft Road, Caldicot, NP26 4EX, phone Tom and Pearl Jones on 01291 421850). His subject will be "The Rise of Israel and Decline of Britain" .

Israel, one of the world’s smallest nations, is in the eye of the storm, the focus of the world’s fury. Why? There is no rational answer – but there is a supernatural one! Alan shows the fate of nations which dare come against God’s chosen people and His special place on earth – and they include Britain and America .

The Bible makes it clear what will happen as waves of attacks crash against Israel – and God steps in to defeat a confederacy of nations even now about to form up to attack His land, from which He will rule in the Millennium. This is Psalm 83 about to be fulfilled! That’s before the second major onslaught, led by Magog – Russia .

Alan traces the past, how Israel was reborn in a day, just as Isaiah predicted 2,500 years before, and the role of Britain in the build-up to the climax of world history. As our country falls apart, is there a spiritual cause?

Like all Alan’s presentations, this one is packed with illustrations, references, documentation and scriptural references. All drawn together by someone who was a newspaper editor for 21 years.

ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1ST, the action moves here to NEWPORT with a two session seminar, the first starting at 10.30 am. Alan is a regular speaker at PWMI venues right across Britain, but this will be his first engagement at Newport, and the meetings will be held at the Salvation Army Citadel, in Hill Street. He plans to start with a close examination of the false faiths, cults and isms currently deceiving the world. The talk title, from the latest book by Alan and his journalist wife Pat, is "Cults and Isms: True or False?"

As Alan and Pat travelled North America and Britain , with Alan speaking at major prophecy conferences, they became aware of the near total lack of knowledge about the lies behind the cults and isms. Working together, as they did on newspapers for many years, they spent months on research, delving into the source documents of the main cults and comparing them, line by line, with what the Bible teaches. Clearly, we do not “all pray to the same god,” as deluded politicians and churchmen would have you believe.

This presentation is packed with illustrations, quotes and astounding facts. No punches are pulled and there are some surprising conclusions. For example, is the Roman Catholic Church the world’s greatest cult? See what God’s word says….And are Seventh Day Adventists really evangelicals - or something more deceitful?

This talk also examines everything from The Big Green Lie Machine to Freemasonry, the Word of Faith movement, plus all the usual suspects like JWs and Mormons. Few preachers will tell you any of this today, when the Great Whore Church of the End Times is forming up before our eyes.

Lunch will be taken from from 12 noon to 1pm, after which Alan will be ministering on a fascinating subject entitled "The World on Red Alert". This was originally put together for a prophecy conference Alan recently spoke at in Virginia, USA . It's about the coming climax of world history, the birth pangs, the rise in earthquakes and calamities, the crash of cash and much, much more.

Why are nations being judged- even Israel ? How does the European Union fit into prophecy and why is the Woman on The Beast often used as its symbol? All will be revealed, with lots of Biblical references and pictures to back up everything said. The plan to launch a new world currency is revealed, plus what is happening in Israel and how politics, prophecy and religion are coming together in a giant train wreck of the world economy.

All you can say after all this is Maranatha - come, Lord Jesus.

For further details, please phone Neville Stephens on 01495 772323, on mobile at 07808 251502, or by email on propheticwitnessnewport@gmail.com.