JOEL ROSENBERG'S END OF YEAR ANALYSIS OF THE MIDDLE EAST.

Final Brief Year End Analysis of the Middle East situation by America's Renown Prophecy Expert Joel Rosenberg.  

1.      The geopolitical climate in the epicentre deteriorated significantly in 2011, as has religious freedom in most of the Arab and Persian world.

• All evidence indicates that Iran is closer than ever to building nuclear weapons, while also building up its missile forces and the missile forces of its allies such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
• The Iranian regime is signaling that the Arab revolutions point to the imminent arrival of the Twelfth Imam and the destruction of Israel.
• The Iranian regime is cracking down ferociously on the house church networks there.
• The Muslim Brotherhood’s cynically named “Freedom and Justice Party” dominated the first round of Egyptian parliamentary elections — together with the radical, Salafist “Al-Nour” party, the hardline Islamists have captured more than 60% of the vote….Israelis expect Egyptian relations with them to sour and Egyptian Christians expect persecution to intensify.
• Libya now appears to be in the hands of Radical Muslims imposing Sharia law – the situation could end up being worse there than under Gadhafi.
• Syria’s bloodthirsty regime has killed more than 3,500 of its own citizens this year and the openness that existed to spread the Gospel has evaporated — the regime deserves to be overthrown.
• Iraq is requiring all U.S. military forces to leave by the end of 2011.
• With Iraqi Christians are increasingly under attack – including a direct attack inside a church in Baghdad in October 2010, a deadly series of attacks on churches in April 2011 at Easter, and a car bombing directly in front of a church in Baghdad in August 2011 — thousands of born-again believers and nominal Christians have received visas to leave Iraq on the basis of religious persecution.
• The Palestinian leadership has made peace with Hamas rather than Israel, and is trying to build an international coalition at the U.N. to allow them to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state without directly negotiating with Israel.
• Russia will become an increasingly important factor in the epicenter in 2012 as Vladimir Putin runs for president again next March – if Putin wins, we should expect the Kremlin to aggressively deepen alliances with Israel’s enemies. [Update: Putin shaken by United Russia's poor election performance; party formed by Vladimir Putin sees support drop by 15% in result seen as test of prime minister's personal popularity; also: Mikhail Gorbachev calls for a new vote in Russia over allegations of voter fraud.]

 2.     As 2011 ends, the prospect of a major war in the epicenter in 2012 is significantly rising.

• Recently, I spoke with a Member of Congress who met personally with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli leaders just before Thanksgiving – he reported that the Israeli leaders weren’t asking for help; they all seem resigned to the prospect that Israel will have to take action on their own, and probably sooner than later.
• Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are clearly laying the political groundwork inside Israel to launch preemptive strikes if the world doesn’t take decisive action first.
• The leaks out of Jerusalem about the Netanyahu Cabinet actively discussing a preemptive strike don’t appear to be planned – but they appear to be accurate.
• In early November, the Israeli Air Force launched another major exercise to practice long range bombing runs – previously the exercise had taken IAF fighter jets to Greece; this time they flew to Italy.
• The former Mossad chief Meir Dagan is warning Israel not to launch a war that he says would be a “catastrophe.”
• Barak is reported to believe Israel has a window of no more than one year to stop Iran from getting the Bomb.
• The Obama administration is publicly pressuring Israel not to consider preemptive strikes, based on the notion that they fear Israel is preparing for such strikes.
• The French, British and Canadians recently imposed new economic sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank in attempt to force the Iranian regime to the negotiating table and to forestall an Israeli first strike; the Obama administration, however, refused to sanction Iran’s Central Bank.